The Roanoke Valley Resource Authority is transitioning it trash transport to road. Being low value and non-time sensitive, trash is a perfect commodity for rail, yet here we see trucking taking over. Bottom line is, all commodities are eligible for truck conversion.
Also cited in the article are electric and autonomous trucks which are anticipated to pose a significant, or even existential threat to rail freight.
Toronto has shipped its trash to Michigan (240 miles) via truck for years… Sitting in gridlocked traffic behind one of these trash trucks on a simmering hot summer day is less fun than it sounds…
The county I live in owns a massive landfill. The biggest customer for it is the city of Chicago. Years ago when the county was getting ready to start construction of this landfill project they approached the then Southern Pacific about having a rail service from Chicago to the landfill. Close to 1000 tons a day for years in business. The county even offered to buy the cars and containers needed for this service. SP said no to the proposal. So 40 trucks a day run down to the landfill to dump the trash.
The landfill has a estimated date of filling even with Chicago using it in about 30 more years. The county is looking now into tapping the methane produced and putting in a power plant on site.
They haul NYC trash to multiple points in the South and West. The movements are normally in 30 car cuts with each car containing 4 trash container bins.
There is a 6 days a week movement of trash from Fort Meade Jct, MD to Sealston, VA - which I believe ends up in a Co-gen plant. There is another 6 days a week movement between Gaithersburg, MD and Dickerson, MD - also to a Co-gen plant. Each of the Co-gen moves are between 20 and 30 cars per day.
There was a proposal to ship Toronto’s garbage north by rail to an abandoned open pit mine in Kirkland Lake that was lined with granite. It would have provided jobs and work for the ONR but political correctness put a stop to it so it all goes to Michigan by truck. Funny how a country as big as Canada can’t find a place on it’s own soil to dump it’s trash.
Canada has to keep up its international reputation for being “clean” (seriously). Michigan tried to stop it but ran afoul of the Federal government and the whole “restricting interstate/international commerce” thing. If you ever fly into DTW and look to the southwest at the big landfill, that’s all Canadian garbage.
Having driven across the “402” from London to Sarnia a number of times, I know those big trucks are a part of the “scenery.” Never mind eighteen wheelers - it’s more like twenty-four.
Jack Layton was the main guy fighting the idea of sending the trash to Kirkland Lake. He threatened to lie down on the ONR tracks. I liked the guy, met him once but I thought he was wrong about this. And the trucks keep rolling on.
Information as to why the garbage was switched to truck seems murky. Reading between the lines, I conclude that there was a technical problem with dumping with the rotary dumper. Also was a comment about the trash being containerized for hauling by rail. I conclude that the trucking will be more costly, and so there may be a rate increase needed. Apparently the rotary dumper had been used without any problems. Maybe someone else can explain why the change was made. To me, that is the most obvious question raised by the story.
Remember Kneiling’s piece on trash by rail? Less need for technologically expensive garbage trucks. Keeping it simple. Supplant rather than supplement.
Here is the full explanation which sounds like the original poster here was right. The trash train had been operated for 25 years, using a rotary dumper to unload the gondolas. But eventually the dumper broke down, and repair has not been made. I assume the dumper repair is very expensive, but also very time consuming. It may be that the dumper simply has an operating (maintenance) cost that exceeds its benefit for such light usage as it sees with the trash trains.
The trash cannot wait for the repair, so a temporary solution was found as trucking the trash in on Bradshaw Road which had previously been quiet and residential. This brought many complaints from those residents.
A solution was explored to containerize the trash to eliminate the need for the rotary dumper. However, even without the rotary dumper, Norfolk Southern announced the trash train “no longer meets its business model.” Norfolk Southern told the authority that it could haul a much larger freight train with the same crew as compared to “shuttling” 10 to 15 cars to the landfill daily.
I am curious about the rotary dumper, which the article refers to as being “one of a kind.” Was this a custom built machine? Also, it mentions that the dumper was a inadequately maintained. I suspect the dumper was custom built at an enormous cost, and then suffered a lack of maintenance. Now, once it fails in the time sensitive service of trash hauling, the repair is time consuming and eye popping expensive. Purchasing a custom built rotary dumper in the first place may not have been the best option. The inside story on t
Many years ago, the city of Englewood decided to build a ‘trash transfer station’ as part of an ‘urban renewal effort’ – this was intended as an open site where ~24 surrounding communities could dump their municipal trash trucks after comparatively short drives, and the result would be compacted and then consolidated into appropriate larger semitrailers built to handle compaction and discharge compacted waste at a distant landfill in a closed shuttle operation, using contracted crews and tractors much as many intermodal providers currently do.
I noted in some of the town meetings that the old Erie Northern Branch ran directly adjacent to the proposed facility, and with little more than a 90-degree orientation change to access would permit rail sidings to access both the closed-ended compactor and an extension of the lifting conveyor that charged it. Instead of a potentially increasing traffic of specialized heavily-built compactor trailers on local streets and highways, this would allow relatively silent arrival and departure on nearly-unused trackage with minimal grade crossings to the south and good connections to a variety of local and mainline trackage at the south end (note that part of this route is now rebuilt into a key link in the current “Lehigh Line” replacement for freight over the NEC and then north on the ex-West Shore to Selkirk). To the extent this service could be extended to more communities in the region, many more than the initial 24 communities could likely be serviced, the initial ‘proposals’ to conduct recyclables sorting and segregation could reach critical volume more quickly, and the practical choices for where to send the transferred trash perhaps greatly expanded in scope. I might add that this was comparably shortly after the full construction of the connection between 80/95 and the George Washington Bridge, which among other things made it easy for taxi drivers to pay