Was. Dedicated reefer service between the west coast and Schenectady, NY. Unit trains ran from CA and PNW to the east. UP bought them out. You still see the reefers, but not in solid blocks.
By dedicated do you mean that the empties were sent directly back on the route used eastbound? (Well, I guess you’d try to get loads for any that you could. I have no idea how much perishable food travels from the NE to the west coast.)
AFAIK, they’re sent back empty. I’ll gladly stand corrected.
Not reefers, but the “Coke Express” cars through Deshler go west loaded and east empty. The same principle is true for all of the coal and coke trains, not to mention the potash trains out of Florida.
Thanks, Larry.
You could assume “None” and you wouldn’t be very far off. Maybe some frozen shellfish?
But don’t limit the possible westbound loads to perishables. Grab anything you can get. (OK, toxic waste in a reefer is a bad idea.) A reefer can well handle dry freight. The refrigeration is needed for the eastbound load. It may, or may not, be needed for the westbound load.
For example, Campbell’s has its largest production facility in Napoleon, OH. Some of that V8 Juice and soup goes out west. Get it. Tell your sales/marketing people that they better have a damn good excuse if one truckload of that plant’s output goes over the road to the west coast. Tell your operating people that they best not loose business by failing to make a switch, or any other such failure that wasn’t caused by an Act of God or a safety concern. And, with great importance, tell your cost accounting people that it’s the marginal costs that count. If they show up with average costs have them escorted off the property.
Get every damn case of Jameson Irish Whiskey, every case of Heineken beer, every case of French wine, and everything else coming in from Europe and going “Out West.”
Do not loose to a trucker on price on a long haul move!
Are there enough reefers to be sidetracking them to load them up and use them to deliver non-reefer needed items without screwing the people that need reefers?
Plus some of those reefers are huge. May not fit in some places.
To get to the morbid side…if reefers are surplus
Use them to store Covid bodies pending mortuaries being able to provide the proper rights of burial or cremation in cities where their infrastructure for such is being overtaxed.
There will be enough refrigerated rail equipment (trailers/containers/rail cars) to meet the demand. Unless the government gets involved and screws things up. The supply of reefer equipment is not fixed. We’re talking about growing railroad reefer traffic so more equipment will be needed. It can be acquired.
Supply and demand will balance and clear the market absent government interferance.
Some folks may chime in and say this won’t work with health care. OK, I don’t know enough about health care to comment on that. What I do know is that we’re not talking about health care.
Transportation is an economic activity and the market will allocate resources as needed just fine. There will be occasional problems with capacity mismatch. But these will be temporary and be worked out.
Something like that did happen about 25 years ago in Chicago. We can go though tough winter weather here and loose around 3-4 people to weather realted deaths.
25 or so years ago it got real hot, over 100, for days on end. People died like flies. The mayor reached out to a buddy of his who ran a local trucking company with reefers. 10 reefer trailers were sent to hold bodies that could not be accomodated in the morgue.
The public reaction was strong. People didn’t want to eat food carried in a trailer that had been used to store human remains. The trucking company wound up donating the trailers to the city.
What’s the cost to build a reefer vs. a regular boxcar?
Sounds like we are going to end up building a fleet of reefers that are never used for reefer purposes.
I’ll add that New York State is the 3rd largest wine producer in the nation. New England has dairy, and seafood production. Maine still has sizeable potato producti
I don’t know and it doesn’t control the desirability of having two loads on the round trip for one railcar. It’s a very false comparison. We’re talking about moving two loads here. One load is perishable product moving east. The other is a non-perishable product moving west. If you don’t use the reefer to move the non-perishables west, you’ll need two railcars. So, we’d need to compare the total cost of a reefer and a boxcar with just one reefer if it is loaded both ways.
I prefer using intermodal for perishables. One reason is its greater flexibility for getting two-way revenue moves. But if you want to talk railcar reefers I’ll oblige.
Not at all!
The railroad must produce a round trip. That reefer railcar, or a similar railcar, must be returned to the origin to get another load. The railroad must produce the transportation to return the car to origin. I
Makes sense. But even better would be a relatively few empty miles to the Port of Providence, a load of frozen fish to the Seattle market, and then the empty miles to Caldwell. Takes the marketing efforts of both BNSF and CSX, however. But also in your case as well.
The bigger question - how much Atlantic seafood exists that doesn’t already exist on the Pacific coast?
If either coast is shipping seafood, it is going to the interior of the country most frequently.
Much of it is wildly different. Take Atlantic vs. sockeye salmon for example, or different regional oysters, or mussels. Gulf shrimp. i could list blue mussels as a potential large-traffic item … if a few bugs in marketing and marine biology could be successfully addressed in the way ‘George Washington crabs’ as a delicacy were… [:O]
I don’t think the aggregate steady traffic would ever get to block scale, but as one target of opportunity for what is very cheap high-priority reefer handling, it’s certainly attractive…
Living in Maine, I’ve eaten some Maine shrimp. Being from Louisiana and Mississippi, I’ve eaten lots of Gulf shrimp. The only kind of shrimp I’ve ever bought in a supermarket here is Gulf shrimp. Even frozen, Gulf shrimp beats Maine’s version seven days a week. I think you’d be surprised how much seafood travels coast to coast. We sometimes can get Alaskan king crab in our local grocery. Maine lobster goes everywhere, but usually, I think, by Fedex airplanes; they are shipped alive.
I would opine that the railroads have little interest in those fairly small markets. Is a railroad willing to move one of those reefers per week to an east coast location so it can go west loaded? Or deal with having to drop a reefer in Chicago for unloading on its way west?
Just playing the devil’s advocate…
You’re probably right, Larry. I have no idea.
But, as for the reefer for Chicago, wouldn’t you drop it at an intermediate yard from which hundreds of cars go to Chicago every day?
The travel of freight cars is a massive mystery I don’t expect to comprehend in this lifetime.
I think I could almost become a pescatarian. I really like fish and seafood. Almost! We’ve got this nice bone in half ham sitting in the refrigerator and I can’t wait to see it on a plate.
My favorite has to be channel catfish. None of this farm raised stuff. Skin it, gut it, cut the head off. Leave the tail on. The tail is good to eat.
Roll it in cornmeal and boil it in lard. Fry some potatoes and onions in lard to go along with the catfish. Boy, that’s good eating. You won’t live too long if you eat that a lot. But it tastes good.
I don’t know how much fish/seafood moves west from New England. In 2018 the US per capita “Availability” of fish/seafood was 16.1 pounds. (They call it “Availability” because they don’t know what happens after it hits the grocery store. It could be thrown out by the grocer, thrown out by the buyer, or fed to the dog. Who knows?)
What I do know is that I don’t want that expensive refrigerated railcar moving through the yards and locals up to Providence. T
Any of the three will work for Temperature Controlled Cargoes. Please note I say Temp Controlled not reefer.
There are many cargoes out there that need temperature control, as opposed to refrigeration. Best example chocolate candy. Needs to be kept cool, usually 45f - 55f depending on time of year. Also needs good air circulation within the box to prevent hot or cold spots from developing within. Another medical supplies such as IV bags. These need to be protected from excessive heat(+80f) and freezing. The main complaint I heard about rail transport was rough handling and refusal of the carrier to pay claims(these cargoes easily went into the million dollar range in value). JB Hunt is getting some of the business in dry boxes during certain times of the year, but could do better, IMHO.
Perishables, one major shipper of quantity car load produce are the package salad companies. I know one that at one point had an operation that was moving 20 containers of lettuce everyday from California to Illinois, Texas and Georgia. One of the railroads involved had an early cutoff time and what was happening was 20 boxes would show up 20-30 minutes before cutoff. Not all the boxes would make the train forcing the truck company to deploy driver teams to make up the difference.
This was back in the mid 1990’s. It left a bitter taste in a lot of peoples mouths. And memories are long.
If I had a choice I would develop a refrigeration unit that would fit in a lower well of a 53’ well car. Also be in a position to offer shore power for units on board the train. Have a generator mounted to provide power for four or more containers. This would be an excellent way to go after some of the banana shipments.
Most of my experience is driving OTR pulling a reefer, ahem a Temperature Controlled trailer.
One thing you ha