I’m going to come back to this because I think it’s important. I’ve also experienced people who strongly doubt that there is a large refrigerated long distance truck movement of animal protein into Calfornia.
California does produce red meat and chicken. I know I’m leaving out turkey and fish, but red meat and chicken are basically the protein mainstays of the American diet.
California has 37 million residents. That’s 12% of the US population. In 2009 they produced only 3.46% of the US red meat output and only 3.13% of the US chiicken output. If you do the back of the envelope math using the per capita “disappearance” of red meat and chicken, you can calculate that, on average, there are 150 truckloads of red meat and 115 truckloads of chicken moving into California every day, 365 days per year. (USDA production/use figures converted to truckloads at 44,000 pounds each.)
The red meat isn’t originating in Arizona or Nevada. They don’t produce a significant amount. Red meat production is concentrated in four states. Nebraska, Kansas, Iowa and Texas produce half the US red meat. Poultry production is concentrated in the southeast (including east Texas.) The closest significant beef production to California is in that SW Kansas/Texas Panhandle region, 1,000 miles away. There is also one major pork plant in that area. But one plant won’t service Calfornia and the state draws pork from Iowa and Nebraska.
It doesn’t take a marketing genius to understand that if the railroads could get a good portion of those 265 long haul truckloads of refrigerated meat/poultry per day into Calfornia they could get an equivalent number of long haul truckloads of refrigerated produce out of California per day. Largely using existing train service with little, if any, need to additional train miles or crew starts. (Got to make a buck doing it.)
Greyhounds alot of the times with Fresh meat your waiting for hours for the Load to be READY. I hauled it and it was nothing to wait 12 14 hoursto get LOADED. Are the Railroads going to haold a train for a load or push it to the next days train. That stuff is ordered for a 3 day supply at the DC max. You lose a day since the trailer was late missed teh train cut off. Lost one there. Then your going to lose another day on the other end since most trains arraive to late for Delivery to the DC’s for the reciving hours. See Most places Unload the Inbounds during the DAY relod the OUTBOUNDS at night. So your wainting a perfect Setup and that will not happen if there is Anydelay in the production at the Slautherhouse the meat is not being produced and ten your screwed.
No, the railroad won’t hold 12-14 hours for the load to get ready. They need to be reasonable about things, but not that long. If a driver calls and says “I’m 15 minutes away because of the bad weather”, and you can see it’s a snow storm outside, you can give him/her a break. You need to work with your customers. But you can’t let them take advantage of you.
Which is just what they did when they kept you sitting for 12-14 hours waiting to get loaded. You, your tractor, and your trailer were a free resource to them. Anytime a resource is free it will be used wastefully - and that’s just what they did with you. They took advantage of you. They wasted your time knowing that it was free to them. Is it any wonder many truck lines are perpetual financial basket cases.
There’s a fine line in there between working with your customers and letting them take advantage of you…
In any event, one of the inherint advantages truckload freight has over rail freight is its flexibility. Truckload is load and go. With rai
Since I used to do this for a living as well, guess I’d better weigh in. First, I would concur with pretty much everything Railway Man has said. I would also add that any time you wonder why we ‘can’t’ do what other countries do with their railways, keep in mind that North America is one of the few places in the world where railways are run as profit-making enterprises. Europe and Japan are probably the most extreme examples of comparing apples to our oranges. Most European railways are government-owned and designed to haul passengers quickly over relatively short distances. Few if any are profitable in their own right; they are essentially inter-city versions of our local transit systems.
Greyhound’s post is fascinating; essentially he suggests railways should do what truckers do, which is to ‘triangulate’ or achieve balance over multiple legs, rather than simply running back and forth between points A and B. This ought to work in theory but in practice it is very, very hard to do. Believe me, I know what I’m talking about because I’ve been part of organizations which have tried. Pretty much from the day they got their first ice reefer cars, Santa Fe and SP ran easbound loads out of growing areas such as the San Joaquin Valley, reloaded the cars back west with non-refrigerated freight going into the population centers in LA and the Bay area, then repositioned them empty back into the growing regions. And in the early '90’s they were still doing it with the reefer pig trailers.
Two things tend to kill you here. First is cycle time. Intermodal tends to be a once-a-day batch operation. In one of his posts here, Ed Benton quite correctly points out how this slows things down in practice. With a truck, the driver is there, waiting around until it’s time to go, and then he/she goes. In intermodal, every time you miss the cutoff by an hour, you’ve added a day to you
Looks like Greyhounds and I were writing our posts at the same time. I hope I didn’t sound too negative - he’s right that his meat scenario could be done. But as he says, it would absolutely need to be a top priority of the “Commander” and it would require more focus, management resources, and willingness to assume risk than the rest of the business.
I’ve always hoped that eventually the industry will become smart and sophisticated enough to pull these sort of things off. But I’m speaking as an ex-marketing guy, from an industry where the best brains are usually found in the operating department. Until you’ve worked in the industry, it’s hard to appreciate just how hard it is to do what they’re already doing.
Most of the big trucking companies in the U.S. and Canada were my customers at one time or another, and it was always fascinating to see how their operations differed from the railways. The good truckers excel at managing the big picture, putting together complex balanced cycles like Greyhound’s example, and keeping them balanced day in and day out. But it seems to be much harder to manage such things in the railway environment - and not because the truckers had better people or systems working for them. For example, if you do what’s best for the southwest Kansas meat network, you inevitably wind up messing up a terminal or another important train, which causes a ripple effect all through the system. The network/local tradeoffs just seem to be a lot more complex in the intermodal environment, which I guess is why the network flows and balances wind up being more simplistic.
In trucking, on driver(team) can affect at most 3 trailers that are dispersed into the ‘operating network’ of hundreds of thousands of miles of roadways inhabited by millions of other vehicles. When those 3 or less trailers get to a trucking terminal their arrival an placement doesn’t have the ability to totally disrupt the operation of that terminal.
With a intermodal train the performance of one crew(driver) can affect upwards of 280 containers, the operation of that train is dispersed into a network of a few thousand miles of track that are inhabited by hundreds of other trains that may be of similar or different size and have speed potentials that vary greatly on the shared route. The arrival of 280 containers at a terminal at other than the scheduled window will have the tendency to throw that terminal into chaos for some period of time…if there are more arrivals that are out of their scheduled windows the terminal experiences that much more chaos.
The operation of a single truck on the road network has the ripple effect of a fly dipping it’s toe in the ocean. The operation of a maxed out intermodal train has the ripple effect of a tsunami.
[quote user=“CNSF”]
Most of the big trucking companies in the U.S. and Canada were my customers at one time or another, and it was always fascinating to see how their operations differed from the railways. The good truckers excel at managing the big picture, putting together complex balanced cycles like Greyhound’s example, and keeping them balanced day in and day out. But it seems to be much harder to manage such things in the railway environment - and not because the truckers had better people or systems working for them. For example, if you do what’s best for the southwest Kansas meat network, you inevitably wind up messing up a terminal or another important train, which causes a ripple
I was on a Dedicated haul for 5 months in 99 were this was my run. West Chicago to about 120 Miles out of Memphis drop my load of Hamburgers for Mc donalds at their DC haul tail to West Memphis Washout then back to Memphis pick up Coors Beer for West Chicago for a Distributor there. Deliver that adn Start all over again. Every 2 days I was at that same Mc Donalds DC. I was turing about 3500 miles a week Week in Week OUT. When I went home for a couple days they would have to get some one to cover it and they never could and when I would get there the DC would be screaming we need your stuff.
As I read greyhound’s idea, I kept thinking to myself that this sounds like a hard way to make a dollar- not impossible, but perhaps harder than some other ways for a railroad to make a dollar. CNSF’s sentence above clarifed my thought for me.
BaltACD said: “…The operation of a single truck on the road network has the ripple effect of a fly dipping it’s toe in the ocean. The operation of a maxed out intermodal train has the ripple effect of a tsunami…”
CNSF:
… But the southwest Kansas meat scenario would be really tricky to manage, and as long as traffic growth in the easier lanes keeps eating up capacity as fast as the railroads can add it, who’s going to take such a risk?..
Murphy Siding said: “… As I read greyhound’s idea, I kept thinking to myself that this sounds like a hard way to make a dollar- not impossible, but perhaps harder than some other ways for a railroadto make a dollar. CNSF’s sentence above clarifed my thought for me…”
My thought is that the key to this situation is constant management and monitoring by carrier personnel. &nb
Okay say they do come outwith this train. Most Meat Plants produce at most in an 8 hour shift is 40-50 Trailers of Producct. Your going to lose aDay getting the Reloads for the Train if your running 100 trailer Blocks. Here is your Projected Capital Cost. 600 Reefer Traiers at 75,000 Each. That is what a 2011 CARB Compliant Reefer trailer will set you back. You have a capital outley Requirement before you have PULLED LOAD ONE OF OVER 45,000,000 Dollars. YYou are going to need 6 complete sets of the 100 trailers to run this service. Since your going to have stuff in Transit in each Direction that takes 2 sets Stuff getting Loaded that is 2 more Sets and then the Stuff getting UNLOADED 2 more. This does not include any Breakdowns or Maintance which Reefer trailers and the FMCSA REQUIRE to be done on trailers so maybe another 100 as spares would be nice to have so add another 7,500,000 to what you need to allow for Equipment. Then you need to figure in wheter your looking at Company Drivers or O/O running Cabotige at the rail ends. Your Cost for hundred weight is going to be more than what it costs to ship it with your own Truck and Trailer. Plus with this system your losing one thing the power of a driver to do Multiple Stops all over an area. Small mom and Poop Butcher Shops do not buy a whole trailer load they might by 50 cases of a trailerload the rest will be broken up off at other stops. My normal meat load would be 5-8 stops all either Northern CA or Southern CA depending on were the Produce was coming out of.
Being someone who has not only followed the industry since his youth but also has now been in the industry for a while and (and an aspiring marketing guy), I tend to side with Greyhounds on this whole deal. That said, I can also understand some of the arguments that Ed Benton and CNSF offer as well. I think it CAN be done; you’ve gotta have a lot of things go right for you but it can be done if everyone is on the same page. That said, because of the arguments made on equipment utilization, isn’t it about time some railroad takes a crack with some of the new technology recently introduced? For instance, what about the new Railmate Intermodal equipment that was introduced a couple of years ago? Also, couldn’t some sort of hybrid version of Norfolk Southern’s Triple Crown service work for something like this?
90% of the Trucking companies that haul Refrigarated Freight are smaller less than 15 trucks. Most of them are 1-2 truck Operations. With Meat your getting into a whole new set of Problems and otherissues. Is one place Kosher the next placenot stuff like that if so YOUR SCREWED if you mix that load up.
Nothing in transportation is as simple as it appears from the outside looking in!
Coal may be coal…but there are numerous characteristics that can contanimate a cargo of it if the wrong types get mixed together. Same things applies to most all bulk cargos that are transported.
I’ve seen triangulation in the RR intermodal business, but it wasn’t the RR that was doing it! Conrail clipped it’s Harrisburg -Toledo lane in 1994 as part of of an effort to streamline service and get the trains running on time again (it worked!). The unintended consequence was they lost the rather profitable Indy-Harrisburg lane traffic. They didn’t know it, but an IMC was making a living triangulating the two RR legs with an OTR Toledo-Indy lane. When they clipped the lane, the whole thing fell apart.
First, I’d like to thank everyone who resonded. People who knew what they were talking about stated thier thoughts honestly and openly. Can’t ask for more than that.
I was surprised by the push back on triangulation. We did it regularly at the ICG without a lot of problems. A prime example was our service between Chicago and Jackson, MS. We had a good volume of intermodal freight southbound, including a good bit of UPS, but return loads from Jackson to Chicago were few and far between. After deregulation and rebuilding of the line between Jackson and Mobile, AL we’d throw empties at Jackson up on a flatcar and a manifest train would move them to Mobile. At Mobile we could load them back north with paper products from shippers such as Scott Paper. They came back to Jackson on a manifest train where they were put on an intermodal train north.
We did the same with other locations, such as New Orleans, where we could get a northbound load. Move the Jackson empties in and load 'em back north. I don’t recall any problems with this system. It helped tremendously. The business to Jackson had been a 1,428 mile circuit with half the miles empty. It became a 1,800 mile circuit with only 186 empty miles. Since empty miles are basically unsold production, where you have the expense but no revenue, this helped the bottom line a great deal.
But it’s good to know that knowledgeable people consider this a real problem. I’ll have to put more emphasis on how to deal with the need for triangulation.
As to “why would you do this?”. There’s only one reason. You’ll only do this if it increases the profitablity of the railroad commensurate with the risk. The goal is not to just fill up the capacity, but to fill up the capacity in the most profitable manner possible.
The real prize in the five legged circuit I proposed wo
If Triumph Foods ever builds its long-planned (2006?) slaughterhouse at Barstow, IL (Quad Cities Area), perhaps trailers can be loaded for the west coast at Logistics Park Center. No empties to Kansas City, just more pickups
UPS had (has?) a sort in Sioux Falls. They’d use their Martrac reefers, with the refrigeration system shut down, to move packages in from Chicago over our Sioux City intermodal facility. Then they’d bring meat eastbound with the reefer units running. Both ways on a flatcar.
The railroads can handle meat traffic. I’ve done it.
