Johnstown, PA, is located along the old, now 3-track Pennsy mainline, and I saw what seemed to be a different train consist today: The Norfolk Southern only had apx. 3 dozens flat cars with 1/3 intermodal double-stacks, and 2/3 with traditional TOFC truck trailers with 2 trailers per flat car. I am so used to seeing quite long train consists dedicated to the TOFC intermodal double-stacks. How common is it to see TOFC “traditional” trailers now?
If it is a route that handles high priority UPS traffic - You will see them! BNSF handles a lot of UPS traffic between LA and Chicago.
Jim
Depends on the marketing strategy of the railroad and entirely on the route. The UP is heavily double stack and BNSF is more into TOFC.
Generally you will see more COFC than TOFC because TOFC is almost entirely domestic and COFC is both international and domestic. UPS might have 20 trailers, a container ship might unload 200 containers. In the western US you would see more double stack COFC because that’s where the market is going. Probably 2 or 3 COFC trains to every TOFC train.
Saturday Nov 27, I enjoyed a long wait at the crossing at T&NO Junction Houston just out of the south end of former Houston Belt and Terminal New South Yard. Waited on a long long cut of empty TOFC flatcars and empty double stacks. So long it was necessary to “double the yard”. Train pulled enough cars to fill the longest available track, cut off remaining cars and pulled head-end cars into track, then cut off from headend and ran around to pick up end of cut and pull it in.
No, I didn’t count them. Sorry.
What you are asking is hard to quantify. The general answer would be “TOFC has declined while double-stacks have increased.” The rising volume of the latter has come partly, but by no means totally, at the expense of the former since the majority of containers are imports and exports that were never shipped in conventional semi-trailers in the first place.
The increased dependence on foreign imports of manufactured goods and auto parts for assembly in the U.S. accounts for much of the relative increase.
Around here (Arizona) we see far more stack trains than conventional TOFC because the UP Sunset is a major route for such traffic from the West Coast ports to the eastern U.S. (and beyond if it is land bridge traffic to Europe or the Middle East).
Nonetheless, we still see plenty of trailers–mostly UPS and those of freight forwarders who use trailers for their convenience in aggregating lower priority shipments from multiple sources.
John Timm
Looking at a spot in the midwest and a spot in the southwest for a 24 hour period, this past summer, there were 678 double stack cars (single, 3-pack and 5-pack cars) and 39 TOFCcars (conventional flats and spine cars) by the midwest location and 617 stack and 23 TOFC by the SW location. (Those are cars, not platforms. Multiply those numbers by 3 to get an idea of the number of platforms)
Clarified a few general things…
[1] TOFC = Trailer on Flat Car = domestic commerce.
[2] COFC = Container On Flat Car = global commerce.
[3] The consist I saw was indeed unusual.
[4] Traditional TOFC hasn’t gone away.
20’ and 40 ft container on flat car = global commerce (mostly)
48’ and 53’ container on flat car = domestic commerce (mostly)
The UP just bought 5000 containers for domestic service and the NS, UP, et al own thousands of EMP containers for domestic service.
As a follow-on to my previous comments, this morning I saw, by chance, an outbound Phoenix-Chicago BNSF intermodal that was 99% TOFC with just six platforms of COFC at the rear. That is due to the nature of Phoenix which is largely a consumer market with comparatively little heavy manufacturing.
Many of the trailers were J.B. Hunt (WalMart), UPS and forwarders. A lot were refrigerated. I suspect that most were empty.
John Timm