NS restructering Triple Crown - to autoparts between Detroit & KC - 40 jobs eliminated.
You don’t need to read too deeply between the lines to see Triple Crown service will be phased out in due time in favor of regular intermodal:
Guess this more or less answers a question posted awhile ago about what will happen when the existing TC Roadrailer trailer fleet wears out.
BTW, it’s not 40 jobs eliminated, it’s 40 jobs remaining:
My mistake.
It was only a matter of time. I’ve been surprised that RoadRailer lasted this long.
Why do you say that?
We’ll see how this copy comes through on the forum.
I wrote this well over 10 years ago. It’s certainly dated, but it’s basic premis is still true.
The Problem with RoadRailers
The BNSF just recently suspended operation of its “Ice Cold Express” RoadRailer trains. The elimination of these trains, which operated between Los Angeles and Chicago, is disturbing for two reasons.
First, they were targeted on the California produce transportation market. This market is huge, long haul, and predominately moves via motor freight. California produces about one half the fresh fruits and vegetables consumed in North America. This equates to around 500,000 refrigerated tractor-trailers leaving California each year. Most of these trucks are on long haul runs to eastern population centers. These truckers don’t return to California empty, they maximize their revenue by getting “backhaul loads” from those eastern cities to California. That makes the total market, including backhauls, 1,000,000 long haul loads per year.
The railroads successfully handled this business for years, but were driven out in large part by Federal rate regulation.
I have thought this for a while, that the whole problem is that they don’t run Roadrailers WITH other intermodal equipment.
Why, could you not, build the train with regular TOFC/COFC/Well cars, THEN the fancy couplermate adapter car, with the Roadrailers last? Amtrak can do it, why don’t the freight carriers catch on?
But, if the upper level guys and girls at Roadrailer dislike the idea… That would explain things.
Someone who has the guts to pull off the disliked “mixed train” with Roadrailers in the mix could stand to make lots of money, and set the standard for all of the others to try to reach.
Greyhounds:
Re. produce: If rail rates were held below market in the summertime, shouldn’t this have worked to the rails’ advantage? (The opposite of the winter situation.)
And didn’t service problems on the Penn Central play a role in loss of this time-sensitive traffic? I don’t remember from my reading when the erosion started, except I believe it was also coincident with the filling in of the Interstate highway system.
(Don’t get me wrong. I’m not defending the ICC for a minute.)
The demise of RoadRailer mirrors the demise of its primary customer: auto assembly outside of the one day drive from Detroit market. As the Big Three have retrenched their operations to around Detroit (with a few exceptions), RoadRailer has seen its customer base shrinking.
At the same time “conventional” intermodal, COFC and double stacks have grown steadily between all the same points RoadRailer serves. And the demise of the produce express RoadRailer service also parallels the growth of new refrigerated container service.
Coupled with the aging of current RoadRailer equipment and the fact that a regular container can be loaded heavier than a RoadRailer trailer, shippers are being enticed to switch service to containerized intermodal. The railroads don’t have to buy new RoadRailer equipment and shippers get to ship heavier loads at the same or lower prices.
It’s the same logic that is seeing major trucking companies like JB Hunt, Schneider and Swift switching to containers and letting railroads perform the long haul instead of investing in new trailers and over the road tractors.
The trucking company division I drove for lost a major contract to our own intermodal division because the costs for one truckload of laundry detergent to be driven from Ohio to the west coast would pay for ten containers to be shipped from North Baltimore to the west coast.
Both long-haul trucking and RoadRailer are at cost disadvantages to conventional intermodal and as the railroads and shippers work to squeeze even more costs out of the equation it will become impossible to compete against containerized freight.
Well, no.
If the railroads could sell a load for $5,000 and the government only let them charge $4,000 they weren’t being “helped”. They were being hurt.
The Union Pacific Historical Society’s publication “The Streamliner” had a good two part series on UP’s last efforts to retain the California perishables in their Spring and Summer issues of 2012. The writer was Rob Leachman who was with UP management when this happened. He’s now a PhD on the faculty at UC Berkley.
I’m going from memory here, but Leachman doesn’t put the blame on PC service problems. He cites the holding down of rates by the ICC as causing the originating carrier, the SP, to loose interest in providing the required service levels. The SP’s reasoning was that they weren’t allowed to make any money on this business so why bust their butt to provide the service.
The Interstate System certainly made long haul trucking more competitive will all rail movement. But at the distances involved, 2,000 to 3,000 miles, the rails should have retained a significant cost advantage for this business. They could provide the service needed. It’s just that the freaking ICC removed much, if not all, incentive for them to provide that service.
Why have the Roadrailer people been so adamant about keeping their equipment in dedicated trains? The only reason I can think of is that the slack action at the end of a train might be too violent for their trailers.
Thanks for the above, Greyhounds. I forgot about the vital S.P. component.
I worked for U.P. in Cheyenne, 1966-72, and will never forget the warm-weather parade of solid perishable trains, the “Green Fruits.” I was properly impressed with the volume of business … but had no baseline to compare it with. (Never considered it might have been even more at one time.)
Anyone have an idea what will happen to the Minneapolis Triple Crown freight? Will there be a conventional intermodal terminal built or will the containers be trucked to Chicago?
Jeff
Wow…lots of good stuff to chew on here. Thanks Greyhound for that discussion on ICG, Roadrailers, and the economics of intermodal transporation. Reebie sounds like a job I would have enjoyed back in the day, as I was trying to fil LTL trailers in the 1980s before I moved on to a much more enjoyable and lucrative career.
Today, I fill my “traffic” needs by watching the NS run it’s intermodal (and general freights) thru Chesterton, In on the webcam and webscanner. My evolution has been from simply watching an NS train to identifying the NS trains and monitoring their performance (timing) to now trying to understand WHY NS is running these trains (both intermodal and general freight).
The intermodal puzzle is interesting and can be pieced together with a little work. By integrating the trains I see (and hear) passing Chesterton with NS’s intermodal schedule one can piece together pretty good understanding of their operations.
For instance…Harrisburg, Pa and Columbus, Oh feature big intermodal trains in the late afternoon, often running within a few minutes of each other (3-4pm)…26N and 26T. These are heavy domestic (and some international) double stacks that come off the BNSF in Chicago and feature heavy JBHunt trailers…often over 100 cans per train are JBH. These trains often exceed 250 containers total. HUGE movements of product to Columbus and Harrisburg.
Why to these two cities? I can only guess these are major distribution centers for the New York - Washington and the Ohio regions. JBH has established these two locations as core terminals (obviously).
Surprizingly, the Chicago - Detroit pass thru intermodal train handles no JBH nor have I ever seen a domestic can on the 20N (noon -2pm). It is extremely short, usually 70 cans with 1 motor. Nor are the EMP or Hub cans on this train.
So, BNSF (and possibly UP) can solicit thru the intermodal retailers domestic business for Harrisburg a
Not sure if I agree with the premise that service is completely separated from technology.
One of the features of the Chicago commuter trains is that their entry into the Loop parallels major freeways. The commuter train riders are just “flying” during those last miles into the city because their trains have their own right-of-ways, and furthermore, they make only limited stops within Chicago city limits as that traffic is for the CTA El and subway trains. The Expressway traffic, on the other hand, is just clogged.
I was on such a train with a passenger train advocate offering, “Look at those poor souls in their cars!” The idea that you are a train zipping along, looking out among motorists on a road turned parking lot is not an original concept either. But on the way inbound (we came from Wisconsin, got on at Harvard, Il., and made every stop along the way), my associate was pointing out how the boarding passengers had been “trained” (excuse the pun) to form queues on the platform for where the boarding doors were expected to line up at that stop.
So the motorists were in a queue on the JFK Expressway to gain access to the Ohio Street off ramp, but the Metra riders formed queues where they had to wait for the train to arrive and for them to board it. The queues were just in different times and places in the journey to the Loop.
Back to RoadRailer. Intermodal is a form of freight aggregation, but every form of railroad freight is some form of aggregation, and each offers various pros and cons.
What RoadRailer is supposed to do is greatly reduce the tare weight and aerodynamic drag of and hence fuel and capital costs of truck trailers aggregated into trains. There is some tare weight penalty in the road mode, but maybe not as much in Gen II RoadRailers that ride on 2-axle trucks supplied during their assembly into a train as opposed to Gen I that had single guided rail axles on the tru
Paul,
Do you know that Triple Crown operates a yard in Fort Wayne where trailers are switched from one train to another? Triple Crown routes are like an *. So, unlike your Autotrain comparison, Roadrailers can and do pick/up and drop-off enroute. (as a sidenote: autotrain could make enroute stops by loading rack cars at each stop and just adding them to the end of the train.)
With the latest generation of trailers, it could be done just about anywhere a forklift can get beside the tracks, so individual shippers along the route could have loaded and “lifted” their trailers on their siding. However, no one ever operated them like this to my knowledge. It would have required too much coordination between the customer’s forklift operator and the train crew to make the lawyers comfortable.
The whole point of intermodal, and I suppose Autotrain by extension, is that you don’t send a cut of express autoracks loaded with Grandpa Henry’s GMC Yukon careening down a hump yard.
So Triple Crown can “switch” trailers in a RoadRailer consist using “lifts”? You need something a little bit more robust, by the way, than a generic factory forklift. The Piggypacker was inspired by log loaders, but it is a fairly heavy, expensive machine that limits its use to high-volume terminals.
So you lift a trailer out of a RoadRailer consist – how to do couple it back together into a train without damaging stuff? When you assemble a RoadRailer consist, you are using a truck tractor to gently back each trailer, one at a time, into a train, and that process akin to “circus style” piggyback contributes to its inflexibility. What do you do when you have a whole string of trailers that you need to couple to another string?
Besides the intermodal aspect, that you don’t need to unload deliveries from trucks and then load boxcars, the intermodal concept at least is supposed to eliminated both flat switching and hump yards as a way of shipments making connections between trains on the railroad network. Lifting, I am told, is much more gentle on cargo than switching.
The Stedman side transfer system (hydraulically dragging a container between a truck trailer and a spine car with container guides) was claimed to be as gentle as lifting. Dumpster is a similar dragging transfer system, but Stedman didn’t require tipping the container as done in the Dumpster system.
Low capital cost, random access, OK, OK, alright already, didn’t support stacking, but double stacks introduce a whole lot of other problems of container tare weight and train fuel consumption for what is probably marginal overall benefit of a few more boxes per siding-length constrained train. So the Stedman system, wha
This story confuses me a bit as NS/Triple Crown have just completed a huge new Roadrailer yard in Harrisburg, PA. Seems illogical to plan and build this yard just to get rid of it. I just saw my first Roadrailer train ever in person about a month ago. I didn’t know they still existed. Shortly after I saw the new yard in Harrisburg. Poor planning or the story doesn’t cover everything. I guess we will see.
[quote user=“Paul Milenkovic”]
The whole point of intermodal, and I suppose Autotrain by extension, is that you don’t send a cut of express autoracks loaded with Grandpa Henry’s GMC Yukon careening down a hump yard.
So Triple Crown can “switch” trailers in a RoadRailer consist using “lifts”? You need something a little bit more robust, by the way, than a generic factory forklift. The Piggypacker was inspired by log loaders, but it is a fairly heavy, expensive machine that limits its use to high-volume terminals.
So you lift a trailer out of a RoadRailer consist – how to do couple it back together into a train without damaging stuff? When you assemble a RoadRailer consist, you are using a truck tractor to gently back each trailer, one at a time, into a train, and that process akin to “circus style” piggyback contributes to its inflexibility. What do you do when you have a whole string of trailers that you need to couple to another string?
Besides the intermodal aspect, that you don’t need to unload deliveries from trucks and then load boxcars, the intermodal concept at least is supposed to eliminated both flat switching and hump yards as a way of shipments making connections between trains on the railroad network. Lifting, I am told, is much more gentle on cargo than switching.
The Stedman side transfer system (hydraulically dragging a container between a truck trailer and a spine car with container guides) was claimed to be as gentle as lifting. Dumpster is a similar dragging transfer system, but Stedman didn’t require tipping the container as done in the Dumpster system.
Low capital cost, random access, OK, OK, alright already, didn’t support stacking, but double stacks introduce a whole lot of other problems of container tare weight and train fuel consumption for what is probably marginal overall benefit of a few more boxes per siding-length co
Double stack offers two significant advantages as compared to the 89’ flat car which was the standard when SP introduced double stack technology. Reduced fuel cost is one, greater capacity per train, given a length limit, is the other.
My personal opinion is that the latter is probably what drove SP. SP served the Port of Los Angeles and traffic to and from the port moved predominately over the Sunset Route and the SSW. Both of these routes were single track with passing tracks of about 8,000 feet. Net of power and caboose that left 7, 500 feet and it was desirable to enter the siding at 20-30 MPH, which means there has to be running room at the end to avoid having to creep up to the far end of the siding. Lets assume our target train length is 6,000 feet of cars. At 95 feet over the pulling faces, that is 63 cars or 126 containers for the default equipment of the day. In comparison, double stacks in five pack configuration for 40’ containers were about 250 feet long. 24 cars with a capacity of 240 containers will fit in that same 6,000 feet.
Holding revenue per container constant, revenue per train mile is doubled. The railroad can handle a given traffic with half as many train starts, or has doubled its capacity per unit of time at a stroke.
Train delay for meets and passes is said by those who know to increase as the square of the number of trains per day. That means 20 TPD will experience 400 units of delay, whicle 25 will experience 625 units, both per crew district. Those units of delay cost money. These capacity improvements were a big deal to the