I believe there is one train per day going each direction between Minneapolis/St.Paul on the UP track east through Hudson Wisconsin. They are usually 48 to 55 trailers. Lately I have only seen them pulled by two NS engines. I haven’t gotten a close enough look to see what model engines they are. Are these NS engines leased or not yet painted or?
It’s a run through RoadRailer train with the symbol Z-CHEM/Z-EMCH (CHicago to East Minneapolis) and the power is simply kept on the train.
The Roadrailer facility in the Twin Cities is near MN Hwy 280 and Kasota. NS units are frequently seen at this location. It is on the Minneapolis St Paul border. You can see the NS engines from Kasota Avenue. Unfortunatly,parking is banned on Kasota which makes photography very difficult. This would also be an excellent train watching area if you could find a place to park.
It’s a Triple Crown extension into the Twin Cities. And its importance is not understood by most.
There is an artiificial barrier for US railroads between east and west. This artificial barrier diverts a lot of traffic to truck movement. Traffic from points such as the Twin Cities to eastern destinations has to change railroads at places like Chicago. Twin Cities to Chicago is only a 420 mile haul for the BNSF. They’ve got bigger fish to fry. They’re not going to take up terminal capacity in Chicago for 420 miles worth of revenue when they need it for business that has moved and produced revenue for 2,000 miles.
Same thing on the other side. NS isn’t interested in Chicago-Pittsburgh (400 miles) when such a load displaces a 900 mile haul to New York. But Twin Cities - Pittsburgh is over 800 miles and easily intermodal competitive.
Breaking down that artificial barrier would put a lot of freight on the rails. And not just from the Twin Cities. This Triple Crown extension is doing just that. May they expand and grow. (With RoadRailers mixed with conventional intermodal.) And may that barrier be forever broken.
I’ve often thought that Triple Crown entering the California fruit and lettuce market could solve a lot of problems for either the BNSF or the UP.
ZEMCH and ZCHEM run only three or four times per week. I’d see ZEMCH run into Proviso fairly regularly–it does a decent job of schedule-keeping. ZCHEM, of course, comes in from the east, and NS doesn’t always hand it over to UP at the same time.
Boyd,
I know of another place that has a bunch of folks “keeping an eye” on these trains. PM me if you’re interested in checking it out.
I was under the impression the NS’s business model for Triple Crown is that they only want to market it as a short to mid -distance corridor service between specific destination points (rather than hub-and spoke)…
What could Roadrailers do that the new (ish) Cold Express transcontinental reefer operation can’t?
Maybe work with it instead of against it. See greyhound’s post above:
If you can get that produce to CHI and then TripleCrown it to a distributor within that radius…maybe that would be feasible.
The main advantage offered by RoadRailers over other rail systems is that they would allow low cost, low volume intermodal terminals to be located near the shippers. This would avoid the high cost of trucking the produce long distances from diverse origins to a rail terminal. This trucking, or “drayage”, cost is often the largest single cost element in an intermodal movement.
Triple Crown is, in fact, based on a Hub system. Trains from various origins move to Ft. Wayne, IN. Ft. Wayne is Triple Crown’s hub. At Ft. Wane blocks of RoadRailers are switched to different trains. The Ft. Wayne Hub is what makes Triple Crown as viable as it is.
I think the closest RoadRailer ever came to real success beyond its current niche was in the 1990’s when BNSF went after the California produce business with a fleet of refrigerated RoadRailers. IIRC, they acquired a fleet of about 250 refrigerated RoadRailers. Two large BNSF intermodal 3rd party customers, Alliance Shippers and Clipper Exxpress, combined to acquire about 100 more.
BNSF established the “Ice Cold Express” using the now freight dormat Raton Pass route. Solid RoadRailer trains ran each way twice a week. To connect to eastern points CSX established RoadRailer service to the New York area and CN put on a RoadRailer train into Toronto/Montreal from Chicago. (Canada imports a