I just read an old (1982) Article about Road Railer in a Trains Magazine by David P. Morgan that made it sound like this was on the brink of a revolution. What happened?
Possibly because the weight of RoadRailer trailers limit their payload for highway mode. Even moving the rail wheels to separate bogies hasn’t helped enough.
All that crap hanging off the trailer cuts seriously into what you can put into a box. In fact, that weight cuts down on how much money you can load into that trailer literally.
A second problem is one of maintaince. Trailers get thrown around and abused until something breaks. When it does break, they try to get the load delivered first and then set it aside to be fixed, if ever. That road rail stuff just increases more stuff to break.
Training. Not too many companies are going to take the time to train drivers on how to rail them things or unrail it.
And finally…
The paperwork mushrooms into a frankenstien whenever you change modes of transport. Road, Rail, Water trainsport inside the USA. Any one of the three modes or any combination of those modes will affect who gets what money for the haul and how the paper work is done.
Triple Crown does it on the Horseshoe and they make it work. But a average trucking company? NAH. We can beat a train most of the time except the Tropicana Juice.
Carl: The weight problem was a real issue with the earlier versions that had the railwheel set attached permanently to the trailer…the earliest version had the rail wheels behind a fixed tandem and one version had a spread axle arrangement with the rail wheels located in the center of the spead-axle road wheels.
Now with the railwheels detached for highway use, the issue is probably keeping this specialized equipment [ the trailer] in a captured position between the origins and destinations, specifically points where there is a certain volume of freight to keep the equipment moving between those two points…the automotive business with Triple Crown does this. for every so many loads there is a return of empty racks back to the origin, or anoter back haul that will get the unit back to the origin. Normal trailers can be made to be piggybacks with very rudimentary modifications, -pads for the pick up equipment- which can be either purpose build additions or simply a wooden board affixed to the trailer bottom to prevent damage to the trailer’s lower rail.
Interesting. Where I work ( a lumber yard ), most vans cube out long before they weigh out. Although, I imagine that’s not true of a lot of freight. The article says that detatchable rail wheels is not the answer either, as it would be hard to balance equipment needs verses equipment stocks.
Triple Crown says the weight penalty on a current-model 53’ RoadRailer trailer is about 800 lbs.
It’s difficult to make the economics work unless the lane has consistent load factors and loads both ways. Otherwise there’s a lot of equipment sitting around as well as an investment in terminals that is being spread over not enough loads. Conventional domestic container or trailerload is much more flexible, the equipment is cheaper, and the terminals have more loads in more lanes to spread their costs over.
Specialized equipment is often squeezed between two rocks – one rock is that it takes a lot of loads, consistently, to make the purchase of the equipment economically viable; the other rock is that when you have that many loads, boxcars become economically viable. So you work really hard to build up the traffic and then you lose it to carload!
Triple Crown has found much of its success in autoparts lanes, where the parts originate at a fairly dispersed grid which makes it hard to get the costs low for carload, the load factors are very steady, and backhauls are available.
It’s really hard to take a network business (trailerload, domestic container) and carve out speciality lanes. All of the economies of the network are denied to you.
S. Hadid
With autoparts traffic in declining mode, it doesn’t sound like Triple Crown has a very bright future.
You haven’t convinced me that autoparts are a declining business. Who says they are?
Now that’s a very good point. Since I live far away from anything related to auto parts, or their movement, I am forced to form opinions based on what I read in the never-too-accurate media.[V] If, the sky is falling, and the big 3 are closing billions and billions of auto plants, (I’m exagerating, and being sarcastic, in case anyone reading this had doubts), it would seem like auto parts traffic would be on the decline. Am I wrong?
It gets very complicated. Many builders such as Toyota, Honda, and BMW are clearly building a substantial manufacturing base in the U.S., but that may or may not be good for railroads. It might lose for the railroad the long-haul assembled vehicle business from a port – or it might actually enhance the railroad’s traffic as the plant seeks to distribute by rail throughout North America rather than a lot of import short-hauls by truck to dealer from seaports around the margin of the continent. It might build an autoparts traffic from U.S. parts manufacturers, or a nice container business from a seaport to the plant, and which is more profitable, anyway?
Often the “foreign” manufacturers have started out in North America only as assembly plants with very low U.S. content but later the North American content rises substantially. Many “foreign” autos such as Toyota actually have a higher domestic parts content, up in the 80% range (counting domestic as both U.S. and Canadian) than many “U.S.” products such as Chrysler (the U.S. manufacturers have substantial content from Canada and Mexico). From an automaker’s point-of-view empty backhauls of multilevels, steamship containers, and RoRo ships all come under the category “things to avoid,” as does the risk of having all of the assembly and parts sourcing in one country and the market in another, due to currency volatility penalties and the risk of tariffs, labor unrest, political unrest, transportation cost volatility, etc. The automakers that intend to compete in the long term are really not “domestic” or “foreign” but multinational in outlook and dispersal of assembly and sourcing.
From a railroad’s point of view it might make more money to long-haul foreign-made parts from Long Beach to Kentucky, than from northern Indiana to Atlanta. On the other hand railroads understand that manufacturers, especially big ones like automakers, are in th
That one still gets me-the fact that we import coal! What’s the phrase-sending coal to Newcastle?[;)]
No apology required-it’s all good.[8D] The way I see it, any day I learn something new, is a good day. On the issue of autos, it seems that as long as Americans buy autos, rail traffic will benefit, whether from shipping whole cars, or the parts.
On the issue of roadrailers,somewhere I picture a mad-scientist type guy working on an ethanol haulling roadrailer![:O]
Yes but only a dribble – about 3% of our 2006 output of 1.16 billion tons.
By the numbers in 2006, 36.2 million tons import (25 of that from Colombia), vs. 49.6 million tons exports (19.4 to Europe, 18.4 to Canada). Basically all that is being imported is Colombian and Venezuelan coal to tidewater or near-tidewater power plants on the Gulf Coast and Atlantic seaboard, and some coking coal. The former is simply a reflection of the fact that water transportation is significantly cheaper than rail transportation (and the Colombian coalfields are near-tidewater), and the latter that we’ve exhausted most of our low-cost-of-extraction coking coal seams. By the way the Colombian coal mines are owned predominately by U.S. and Canadian coal mining companies (or companies whose stocks are largely held in the U.S.) and most of the mining equipment is sourced in the U.S.
S. Hadid
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S. Hadid
Murph – here’s a nice article on the Cerrejon coal mine in Colombia, which is the largest one. Note the nice photo of the GE locomotives on their rail line …
…Triple Crown runs long trains thru here on a daily basis. If that would go by truck via Highway, umpteen drivers would also be needed…Train, 2 men. That must make up for some of that extra weight being discussed.
OK, this is an article I tried to sell to “Trains”. It’s dated now, but it does tell the story.
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] For the DECADES since, the railroads have
generally conceded this long haul business to the truckers.[ii]
The now defunct Ice Cold Express was a strong attempt by the BNSF to get more
of this business back on the rails where it belongs. It’s sad to see such a false start in such a
worthy, important effort.
Secondly, this is yet another setback for RoadRailer. For a while, it looked as if the
Ice Cold Express might be RoadRailer’s big break through. A major railroad had made a
major investment in refri
We have 4 TC’s a day on the local NS line to and from Chicago/Ft Wayne. In fact a fourth train was just added recently, train 242 between Chicago and Bethlehem, Pa. I went down and watched it roll thru Friday night, 1 locomotive and 90 trailers. Pretty impresssive. Even the lovely and talented girlfriend was impressed “that sure is a lot of trucks that arent on the Hoosier highways tonight.” Smart.
It would be very interesting to know the economics of TC, but it is doubtful if that info is available. I do know we got an order for 1500 sets for new TC trailers coming up, so I know the capital is there for investment. What NS has done is stick with their plan, where others have failed. Of course it had to have helped to had all of that Ford business on line, but they still had to execute. Was it a recent Trains issue that indicated that around 40% of TC’s business is auto parts?
The new auto plants seem to have parts being built very, very close to the assembly plant. Even some of the older plants (Torrence Avenue in Chicago) has a nearby parts “campus”.
Does anyone know what the door - door quoted rates are (how they compare) to the truck business? How much of a discount is there on normal lanes?
ed
greyhounds-article? [:O] Throw in a few charts, some maps, and some warm/fussy color photos, and I think you’d have a book.[;)]
A roadrailer car can’t ride along in a train with other freight cars?