“The Greenbrier Cos. has landed its most lucrative sale of Auto-Max™ cars: a $100 million order from American Honda Motor Co. Inc. The number of cars ordered wasn’t disclosed…”
It is telling how both Greenbrier and Trinity came out with an articulated auto carrier a few years ago, and now Greenbrier’s Auto-Max is getting new orders while Trinity has discontinued offering their design.
With the Auto-Max, the drop deck centerbeam, and a few other brilliant designs [:D] Greenbrier is clearly the market leader in useful railcar innovations.
Auto rack cars have customarily had split ownership, TTX owned the flatcar while the individual railroads owned the rack. Honda is probably ordering the racks since they may have specialized gear suitable for Honda products only.
While autorack cars do allow back haul capabilities the auto manufacturere are pretty much dead set against it. They will pay a higher freight rate to have the cars dedicated to their product than if the railroads shipped domestic cars westward and broought imports eastward. The Japanese feel the same way so the autoracks suffer abysmal utilization moving mty about 50% ot the time.
The BNSF vehicle train that transits the Cheroke Sub in NE Oklahoma is loaded west and empty east. It is not all automax, but a good majority of it is. Many of the cars have BNSF reporting marks on them, AOK is popular as well. I think the plant is in Tenn, or Kent. The Westbounds are pretty high on the priority list as I have heard the dispatcher hold someone in the hole for over an hour to meet it and 7600’ avg. siding lengths are every 10 miles on the sub. Only the Z and Q trains seem to get better handling than the V trains. Those poor Manifests!
I believe than most of the “foreign” cars & trucks are now assembled in the good ole U S of A. Who knows, now there maybe more foreign cars made here than domestic ones. Just to let you know, I have owned two US manufacturer cars and both were made in Canada.
If the auto companies are paying an empty return rate ( either built in to their loaded move or separate for the return), consider the cars utilized. The move is being payed for and the railroad will not care whether it is loaded or not so long as they are getting paid.
Auto racks would have to have some specialized tiedown gear which probably varies with the particular customer. If a backhaul is involved, it would involve autos from the same manufacturer in each direction. The 50% empty move rate for specialized cars is hardly unusual; consider unit train coal hoppers, which never have a backhaul.
The current Auto-Max cars out there are divided among several railroads, and bear the reporting marks, numbers, and paint jobs of these individual railroads. If they’re all in Honda Service, we’ll probably just see more of these carriers going to the same railroads, probably in the same ratio as before.
With all due respect to the original poster, it may be true that Trinity no longer offers an articulated auto carrier. I think the design referred to is the two-unit bilevels built by Thrall (which was sold to Trinity Industries). They’re somewhat different, in that they load and unload well with existing TTX bilevels (which is why TTX operates some of those, and no Auto-Max cars), and they fit better over most rail lines, instead of requiring the same height clearance as double-stack cars.
I think one of the flaws of the Thrall/Trinity design was that there was no inherent advantage to articulation for bilevels on the 85’ base. It’s just as efficient to offer them as stand alone cars, and the articulation in this case may be more of a maintenance hassle than it was worth. I still think the base of the articulated auto rack has merit in other car designs, but I won’t go into that right now…
The AutoMax on the other hand probably needs the articulation because the well base is shorter than the flat car base, and as a stand alone car would be to short for an auto rack.
And, I still think the AutoMax makes a great template for an articulated passenger car, perhaps a lounge car!
I’ll have to dig through my files to find the spec sheet on the Thrall design, but I think they have the same length between truck centers as the 85 foot stand alone cars, about 60 feet. I think the AutoMax is based on the Greenbrier UPS “four box” well car, which has a 56 foot well.
Not sure about the shackle car, I didn’t really follow that thread. But I was thinking more of a hip-hop party car, with chandeliers handing over each platform, a piano bar at one end and a rear view window/indoor patio on the other!
Paul – I agree, but the point I was driving at is that from the RR’s point of view, so long as they are being paid a compensatory rate for moving the car, they care less whether or not the car is loaded or empty.