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NS starts 2-day Charleston-Charlotte intermodal service
Two day service? Charleston to Charlotte is 215 road miles.
Not really impressive unless his one day up and one day back. You can run 222 miles up to CS from Chattanooga to Danville Kentucky in 8 hours.
I love trains but this is very unimpressive. Charleston to Charlotte is about four hous max.i don’t understand how this service will get anyone off I-26 and I-77.
Is there a reason why they would go all the way to Spartenburg, rather then the more direct line from Colunbia to Charlotte?
I agree, 2 day service is not impressive. What is the actual time on the rails end-to-end?
If you understood intermodal and especially when it comes to ocean containers, this service could work out quite well. For starters it allows 20’ equivalent containers to be loaded at max Ocean capacity, which exceeds legal highway weights unless on a special chassis or flatbed(which require extra costs to use). They could also create a FTZ(Foreign Trade Zone) at Charlotte, which changes a lot things. Finally, cost, imagine the price difference between moving a 50 unit block of containers via the rail vs OTR, even for 200 odd miles?
To piggyback (no pun intended ;-)) on what Gerald McFarlane said, the only way this makes sense is as a volume play. If the customer can accept the timeframe, the cost to move a LOT of container by rail will be lower than by truck. If the market is large enough it can work.
A fifty car block is 200 TEUs. Realistically, with a mix of 20’ and 40’ containers, probably 150 road movements, shifted to rails. Every day.
I should qualify that as 50, double stack well cars, TOFC will reduce the number of TEUs.
Since the service uses existing trains, the only thing “new” seems to be NS’s willingness to switch cars from one train to another in Spartanburg (or Greer).
Mr. Newsome’s description of the “high speed intermodal network” between Charleston and Greer might make one wonder what he’s comparing the speed with. Horse-drawn wagons? Certainly not trucking. The speed limit on the railroad between Columbia and Spartanburg used to be 45 mph.