I would like to see a comparsion of roadrailers revenue ton miles vs single stackes and double stacks. The tare (non revenue) weight comparsion has not been published to my knowledge. One difficulty would be on heavy grade ROWs dynamic bracking or regenerative braking might be severely limited unless a loco was on the rear to provide this braking. This may be a way to save fuel. Another problem is on capacity limited routes as roadrailer trains are limited at least on some routes to 150 trailers. double stacks do carry up to 300? trailers.
You set up several variables that must be observed. I wonder if a smooth pike aids in the economy of operating RoadRailers? Most of the ones I’ve observed have gone though the “Folkston Funnel” but I believe began with auto parts in the industrialized Midwest. - a.s.
…The long ones I’ve observed running thru here…{south}, from the Ft. Wayne area, have about 125 or 150 trailers with 2 six axle engines for power…I understand they run down towards {or to}, Atlanta.
…As for double stacks and 300 {trailers}…?? Are you referring to containers…? Of course the train that travels thru here is the Triple Crown.
I have a tendancy to count cars or containers, whichever the case may be when watching a train pass. It gives me a good idea of the traffic pattern on a train’s terminals.
Most container trains thru my town average about 125 - 200 boxes per train. The counts seem to be down somewhat now. CN runs a daily Montreal to Chicago train that is usually pretty big, but it is their only such train on the old GTW line.
Cant say that I have seen too many container trains with more than 200 boxes, perhaps on the lines from the West Coast.
ed
Maximum gross weight of a 40-foot international container is 67,200 lbs. A RoadRailer’s maximum gross weight is 46,500 lbs. Gross ton-miles of RoadRailer moves in the U.S. last year were less than 1% of double-stack moves. Single-stack is a niche product used only in a few lanes where clearances are insufficient for double-stacks, and customers are willing to pay the higher rates to get a shorter, faster route than the double-stack product.
Most of the fuel consumption of a train is related to overcoming gravity on adverse grades. A savings in tare weight enables the train to carry more paying freight per trailing ton. Reducing tare weight is not a simple matter. Not all commodities and methods of loading and unloading are tolerant of low-tare weight cars, and if the low tare weight costs more money, the cycle times on the car have to be high enough to justify the extra expense. Aluminum has found favor for coal cars as they have captive or near-captive turns and rapid cycles, and coal doesn’t damage the cars, whereas aluminum won’t tolerate iron ore, rock, or other dense, abrasive, or electrochemically active minerals.
RoadRailers are a specialized, expensive, piece of equipment that have found good economics in lanes that can generate highly regular, low-density lading, off-rail docks, medium-distance routes, with shippers that are familiar with them, e.g., a
I think the gross weight numbers are incorrect. If a RoadRailer was limited to only 46,500 lbs. gross it could only carry about 31,500 pounds of freight. (Assuming the RoadRailer itself weighed 15,000) That ain’t right. I think the net, not gross, for a RoadRailer would be around 46,000. In fact, today I saw some bimodal trailers loaded with 46,000 lbs. (payload) of taconite.
In any event, a container grossing 67,200 wouldn’t make it under the highway weight limit, which is generally, but not universally, 80,000 lbs. Add 8,000 for the chassis and 15,000 for the tractor and you’re way over street legal.
Bimodal equipment, maybe not RoadRailers, has a good market potential. But it’s never going to be competitive with double stacks on long haul, high volume lanes. Shorter, overnight runs, where it makes no sense to station a chassis on each end are one good bimodal niche. As fuel get more expensive the break even distance for rail vis a vis truck gets shorter. Chicago - Twin Cities could be an example.
Bimodal can also serve as a feeder/distributor for stack trains. They can’t relocate the paper mills away from the Green Bay area. And they can’t originate a stack train there going to one destination. They can use bimodal to feed the stack trains in Chicago instead of burning $0.80/mile in truck fuel for each load.
All this is dependant on bimodal equipment t
There is an interesting note in today’s news wire reporting that CP is testing rail mate boogies to haul aggregate in bulk trailers. If I understand the system correctly, it is something of a spin-off of the RoadRailer concept. Although the equipment costs are probably greater than the requirements for a straight truck haul, it seems that with fuel prices pushing upward and a possible lower labor cost, there might be many situations where this method of intermodal movement of rock, sand and gravel would have an economic advantage over a straight truck haul.
There might also be cases where this method could even beat the cost of the movement where rail service with hopper cars move the product from quarry or pit to a material yard for storage and reload to truck for final delivery. With the elimination cost for the fixed storage/transfer facility and the possibility of the rail haul getting closer to the end use point, I could see it working.
You’re right, I pulled the wrong number down.
Per the latest circular from Thoroughbred, maximum gross weight of trailer and lading is 65,000 lbs. and maximum gross weight of lading is 46,500 lbs. See http://www.modal-x.com/MODAL-X_BUILD/pdf/TDIS_Rates_Rules_Circular.pdf
40’ standard container maximum gross weight of lading and box is 67,200 lbs., and maximum gross weight of lading is 59,417 lbs.
You’re correct that the highway laws in many states do not allow a container, chassis, and tractor to exceed 80,000 lbs. Washington, Idaho, Utah, and Michigan, among others, do allow heavier trucks. But it doesn’t always matter unless the container sees a public street. Many of my clients are transloading grain, scrap metal, lumber, and other dense commodities into containers at ports or intermodal ramps so that street limits don’t apply.
RWM
Thanks RWM would like to see total tare weight comparsions of roadrailers, well cars + containers and conventional TOFC. That would give us an idea of where the fuel savings are the most.
RoadRailers have far and away the lowest tare on the rail – 18,500 per 53’ trailer vs. 12,600 lbs. for a 53’ high-cube stackable container plus about 20,000 lbs. of well car per container (for a 5-well double-stack car) or 32,000 lbs. per box vs. about 40,000 lbs. per 53’ TOFC van loaded on a spine car.
The lower tare weight saves something on fuel but it’s just one piece of the cost equation. The RoadRailer’s lower weight capacity, specialized nature of the equipment, higher purchase and maintenance cost, greater vulnerabilty to damage by shippers, special handling requirements at terminals and in trains are all obstacles to higher use. The biggest problem is lack of volume; RoadRailers are such an all-or-nothing technology that it’s difficult to build the initial volume in a lane to get it started without substantial operating losses while the railroad waits for the volume to build.
RWM
What about wind resisatance ? Roadrailers are coupled close, but double stacks the containers are some distance appart, l would think perhaps Roadrailers would have less wind resistance wich would save fuel at the higher speeds like 50 - 70mph.
BINGO! Almost!
It’s not just the initial build in volume, and the financial loss during the build, it’s the fact that there are very few lanes that can, in and of themselves, support dedicated RoadRailer trains. And many of the lanes that could support such trains already are served by double stack trains, i.e. Chicago-Los Angeles. Establishing two competing incompatible intermodal systems on these lanes would be a waste of money.
As RWM correctly pointed out, this is the real barrier to RoadRailer expansion.
What’s needed is a bimodal system that is compatible with existing railroad operations, one that doesn’t require seperate trains. The RailMate bimodal system does that. Last week they tested their equipment behind a CP train from St. Paul to Superior, WI. It was not an intermodal train. Everything worked fine. RailMate is the first bimodal design that is compatible with existing rail operations. I predic
I am not having a good day. I forgot the @#*@ bogies.
So in rough numbers …
53’ RoadRailer 26,000 lbs.
53’ high-cube double-stack 33,000 lbs.
53’ TOFC on spine car 40,000 lbs.
RWM
The low tare weight, and low total weight of the Roadrailers work against it two ways…the tare weight of the vehcile is so low that moving them empty would be problamatical. I understand that the carriers make the money on loads, however thare is rarely an equally loaded flow between origin/destination pairs…somewhere along the line there will be an imbalance and empty Roadrailers will have to be redistributed.
Second I recall the NS had a derailment several years ago where a Roadrailer train was blown into Sandusky Bay by the winds from a summer thunderstorm.
…Moving Triple Crown empty being problamatical…I wonder how they are returned north back from Atlanta area empty…or do they actually have a product they haul north to Ft. Wayne, Detroit, etc…
I understand they haul south, loaded, thru here daily…
RoadRailer’s have to have a nearly 100% load ratio each way to make the economics work.
RWM
next fuel saver is going to be hooking up a yoke to the cars and haveing the crews be the pulling power…that or big hampster wheels or tread mills in the long hood where the prime mover use to be with a bounse check dangling in front of the conductors to make them run
csx engineer
It’s a design issue dealt with by the engineers who wrote the specifications for RoadRailer. Worst case scenario is an empty RoadRailer as the last unit in a consist. There’s an empty trailer weighing about 15,000 pounds, and half that weight is on each bogie. So that’s 7,500 pounds empty trailer weight on the last bogie in the consist. Throw in the weight of that last two axle bogie itself and you’ve got around 18,500 on two axles, or only around 9,250/axle. Not very much.
But it’s accounted for in the design. It’s been a while since I was with RoadRailer, but the designing engineers calculate “Lateral Over Vertical” forces to determine if the unit would present a derailment hazard. When I was with RoadRailer the calculation was that it doesn’t.
As to a strong wind blowing RoadRailers off the track, that can happen with about any type of equipment. Maybe not empty flatcars, but certainly double stacks have been blown off the rails.
There’s nothing wrong with RoadRailer technology. It’s the damn perception that bimodal equipment has to be operated in trains exclusive of other equipment that has limited its use.
OK, so why are RoadRailers different than any other intermodal system in this regard?
If it’s profitable to operate a container based system with a 25% empty return ratio, why wouldn’t it be profitable to operate a similar RoadRailer system with a 25% empty return ratio?
I fully agree that empty equipment miles are wasted money. And marketing efforts need to concentrate on reducing empty equipment miles. The unit of production is always a round trip and the railroad needs to sell as much of what it produces as possible unless it can cover the round trip costs with a one way rate.
But what makes any bimodal technology different from other services in this regard?
[8D] The success of Triple Crown Services, Roadrailer, was brought to fruition by “thinking out of the box.”
All of the replies to this topic, for example, use “railroad thinking,” in deciding what made the effort successful, when actually, that’s why CSX failed in their efforts.
Norfolk Southern Corporation, bought controlling interest, in North American Van Lines, and took the management of the trucking ops into the initial planning and design of the Triple Crown fleet.
Of course, North American Van Lines had customers to use, but it was the aggressive work done by the traffic managers and dispatchers of the trucking ops, that brought not only steady revenue load contracts, ie auto-parts, etc, but the backhaul loads needed to help eliminate all empty miles…the CSX only provided transportation, to a few shippers, at there request…something railroads do.
NS had to find a new way of thinking, so why not start with something already working, and improve on this?
North Georgia, has lots of carpet mills, however most of the carpet is made for industrial use, so the trucking fleets adapted to this…eventually the Dalton Terminal for TC, was closed, for this reason.
However, it was found that paperboard was being bundled for recycling, and already brought into the Atlanta Area, so contracts for Northbound shipment were secured, and TC had a backhaul!
It’s notable, that