Over three decades ago the elevator brought me up to the patent attorney’s floor. In his office, it took only a few seconds to draw him a new type of yard. At seeing it for only two or three seconds more, he exclaimed, ‘There is money in this!’ What he didn’t know was that what I drew him already exists in another rail form, so can’t be patented!
Retirement is blissful and I no longer try to get people’s attention. A fast sorting facility is only presented herein to get railroaders and railfans to think! Can you imagine a whole train sorted in just a few hours and then the cars being on their way instead of cars being in a hump yard for 24 hours or more?
We all follow a dying industry! In 30 years, I don’t think there will be boxcar traffic. Nor petroleum tank cars. So, the miracle sorting facility is eternally dead. Intermodal is the next to die as ‘time value of money’ conscious shippers start zeroing in on time.
Have fun kicking all this around! (Nothing more will be said, no answering questions, no nothing!)
I don’t even know what we would kick around. What are we atalking about?
Meanwhile I just got done working in a yard jammed pack with cars for industries (with many more in the pipeline) that have no space - and that includes a fairly healthy number of boxcars.
Funny, “TVM-conscious” people have been going away from services providing faster service at higher cost to ‘just-in-time’ for decades. And a distressing amount of domestic intermodal has apparently fallen into a ‘race-to-the-bottom’ commodity-rate trap.
Now yes, the place where the gains would be made is in faster ‘interfacing’ between moving modes. I had a system in 1978 that would load and unload a 60-car rake of skeleton flats with ISO series 1 containers in under seven minutes. (You could do stacks with it, too, but only in India…) I had a similar system in the 1990s that would allow gang unloading and then gang-loading of trailers on kangaroo flats in not much longer time – something immensely facilitated by autonomous low-profile yard dogs.
Your undiscussed yard system would have to be very competent indeed to beat what can be practically done with reasonable intermodal equipment.
Like someone else said recently, COFC is no longer high value but just the new boxcar. The OP is getting really good with his vague “I know something that you don’t” hints that he thinks we really care about—we don’t.
We just adopted a cat from our local humane society, and so I was looking into some pet food companies to determine which food I want to feed him. Interestingly one company has as part of its mission to increase use of trains rather than trucks for the transportation it uses.
??? Dying industry? Last I checked carload handles mostly commodities that don’t require expedited transit or sorting… I mean we have SIT (Storage In Transit) for a reason…
You also say boxcar traffic is dying? Well considering the change in industrial production to smaller lightweight cube out widgets. What good is a boxcar? Boxcar’s have settled into a nice niche handling: forest products, appliances, beverages, and longshelf life perishables.
Concerning your remark on tankcars hauling petroleum… Not anytime soon. Nor ever… Petroleum outside of product, happens to be the building block comprising alot of your everday items…
As long as there’s someone that thinks “I’d rather get one huge delivery once a week instead of five small deliveries five times a week” or “I need 500 tons of this stuff and I need it all at once,” it isn’t a dying industry.
Simply put, that ‘sorting facility’ (NOT a yard, that implies idleness) is so, so stupidly simple. Unbelievably simple! As the attorney asked, ‘Why don’t the railroads do this?’ My guess is nobody dares to spend the money to prove it would work, let alone even their coming up with such a stupidly simple facility! (To cut costs to practically nothing relatively, a railroad could build an “HO model train sorting facility” to see if it really would work!)
To round out my perspectives, my vision involved (1) mainline operations, (2) labor peace methods, besides that (3) sorting facility. And, for the record, two man crews are a must, just like two pilots are a most for commercial airlines!
As exhibited by posts in this thread, railroaders (as in any industry) tend to be hostile towards change and economic reality discussions and prefer to be in a dream world. You, Euclid, seem to be more civilized, and are to be commended for that! Indelibly etched in my memory are photos of railroader’s disillusioned faces when all the famed passenger trains ended and Amtrak took over in 1971! That reality was a hard pill to take for many within railroading, but reality is reality.
I know - you could even put gravity to work. Push the cars up a small hill, and when they crest the hill, they can roll into tracks designated for specific destinations. When the track is full, or when a train is scheduled to head to said destinations, they can pull all those cars and take them there!
If they don’t want to make such a hill, then locomotives can push the cars into such designated tracks. In fact, if they get a little speed up, the cars will roll to their destined track.
So simple! It’s a wonder no one has thought of it.
Our yard can get full of “idle cars”. But that’s because the customers are full (or closed gate) and aren’t taking them. What are we going to do with them? There is literally nowhere else to go with them, unless we send them off the other direction for some kind of S.I.T. sort of thing.
And if our yard gets full, the next bigger yard further up the pipeline may have to hold some of our cars becuase we don’t have room, but they do.
Just because a yard is full of cars doesn’t mean the RR is doing something wrong. That’s a very narrow viewpoint.
Says the person that has never worked in the industry (I’m guessing) but has this “dream idea” of a new yard but it’s a secret that won’t be discussed?
Go sell your plan and be rich if it’s that great of an idea. Stop wasting time playing victim acting like the only impediment of your plan is that “people don’t understand”.
This thread got me thinking about the Electrification thread where many of us regular posters stated how old we were. Most here seem to be enjoying their retirement years, even with the physical challenges. A few though, are turning into bitter, grumpy old men who aren’t happy with their life and what they did/didn’t do.
I’ll reserve judgement as I don’t know what the idea is. But sometimes the best ideas come from out in left field, from people who aren’t familiar with the industry and thus aren’t encumbered with “how it’s always been done”.
Having said that, I wouldn’t waste time and money on a patent. Instead get a prototype if you can and market the heck out of it. Patents will make the patent lawyers happy at your expense and that’s about it. If your idea is any good it will be copied regardless of any patent…may as well forget about it, or maybe just state “patent pending” which costs nothing and may serve to discourage the laziest of the copycats.
Neither does anyone else. Just like his new photographic technique that’s also “the best”, he doesn’t share any details, if there are any. It’s a constant game of “I know something that you don’t know” while not realizing that we don’t really care that much.