I was reading the post on rising grocery prices. It brought up something that I keep pondering about every so often, which is more economical or practical in shipping goods to port or warehouse - a truck or a train.
My thoughts are that trains are good in hauling bulk goods to port such as agriculture products, chemicals, coal, sulphur and so on. Trucks probably can get products to a destination much faster where there is a road handy.
What are other thoughts do those here have to say on this topic?
That is about all there is to say on the topic. Trains are much more economical, but they don’t do as well with meeting the customer’s desire to have things quickly. We, in the western world, make a lot of money, and we spend about all of it. Much of that is entirely discretionary, and when we spend on discretionary things, we don’t like to have our expectations dampened by delays, warranty returns, insufficiency, and the like. We want it now, and darned well our way. Trucks, as expensive as they are in comparison, feed our insistance on fresh, firm, handy, trendy, and the like. Trains move the grain and coal, but who ever sees that unless you are actually handling it? Who in your office buys grain for home use?
We have gotten used to highly polished, finished, and utile items and materials that tend to have to come by truck, and that is especially true of produce, flowers, and other perishables.
You can have a truck take it anywhere you want to. If it gets there safe depends on the driver you have in the cab.
A train must rely on a truck to get it and off-load it.
If all the trucks disappeared today and we only had trains to run the needed freight around the USA. The system will fail with Doomsday-like results by the end of the first week.
Today’s world is JIT. I want my Bling Bling right now, yesterday!
Way back when you had monster warehouses several stories high like the B&O one in Baltimore near Camden Yards with 4 or 6 tracks worth of boxcars stacked side by side and connected by metal plates.
Ships is where it’s at these days. 3 weeks across the Pacific is insufficient. They need it faster, sooner, right away… pronto!
Reminds me of the old Windjammers and Clipper Ships racing coffee and tea across the world in 3 month’s time agonizing over each day’s storm delay.
One other thing, I see people inside the store treating cash registers as a physical waste of time. They dont worry about the cost of the bling bling, only seek out the fastest way to pay it and get outside. Ergo! Credit card.
One wonders if wall street was to vanish and credit cards are no good where the real bottom dollar commerce REALLY is?
It takes them both to do the job of moving freight around this country. Trains do the long haul stuff (some trucks do to), and trucks take it from train to warehouse to train.
Trains are not necessarily more economical than trucks.
It comes down to the fact that the trucker’s unit of production, a truck load (and I’m talking truckload freight here, not LTL) is the same as the trucker’s unit of sale, which is also a truckload.
While there are some shippers who move freight in volumes that equal the railroads’ unit of production, a train load, most don’t. That means the railroads have to go through extra “steps” to assemble units of sale (a car load or a container load) into units of production. (a train) Then they have to break down their unit of production and individually deliver each sale unit to the receiver. That does get expensive. And these are expenses the truckers don’t have.
An over the raod truckload carrier just dispatches a driver to the shipper. The freight gets loaded and the driver goes directly to the receiver, where the freight is unloaded.
I am not Union, but I too resist one-person crews.
In fact recently on the History Channel the BNSF’s system of robotic assisted train control is a few lines of code away from total control inside that locomotive cab.
If robot trains become a reality, I will sell this home and get at least 20 miles away from any active mainline.
You could live in an area that has no rail line, like 89% of the people in North America. Most people do NOT have access to rail systems, it seems that people who do, assume everyone has a train track in their town. Now there are even less tracks as thousands of miles of track are being abandoned yearly.
trains made more sense when everyone lived in cities and towns. gas got cheaper and everyone moved far away. now gas is getting more expensive, will we eventualy see another shift? it’s also worth noting that when railroads dominated the country taxes were much lower and so capital investment was much easier. when was the last time a interstate or state paid taxes on toll revenue, gas tax revenue, or property? states and municipalities can issue tax free bonds.
SV, on another thread another driver was writing about picking up export logs for Japan at E. Dubuque, IL. He drove the logs east about 180 miles to a Chicago railhead. The container was then placed on a train and went back west, quite possibly right by where the logs had been loaded in the truck. That’s 360 miles of wasted transportation, burning up fuel and driver time to get back to where they started. I hate it when that happens.
What we need to consider is a small TOFC terminal at Dubuque. Now the logs out of E. Dubuque won’t support any kind of a train. But when you put 'em together with things like export pork from Waterloo (Tyson kills 18,000 hogs per day in Waterloo, Iowa) you can start to market a small train on an underutilized line (CN in Iowa). And the freight could move in the right direction from the get go.
I really believe one person could operate a small intermodal train over this line in a safe, efficient manner. I don’t see it as any more difficult than operating a tractor trailer with one person. It would be a great and good thing. The shippers would save money (else they wouldn’t use the train), less petroleum would be burned, the highway would be less crowded, unionized rail employment would increase, and the rail company would make money.
We’ve got to get past this emotional out of hand rejection of the one person crew. It will work just fine in certain places under the right conditions. Dubuque could be one of them.
Single person crews in the cabs of the OTR’s require rescue by our Teams many times because they get late. I have no reason to believe that a single person in anything larger than a 44 tonner and a few cars doing industrial switching will last a day at a time. You need two at a minimum.
Perhaps depending on the line and tonnage I might find common ground at one person; it will be a while.
Maybe one day they will run unmanned UP trains at 100+ cars totally under Remote Control through Arkansas from Cheyenne, but I will not want to be around to see that happen.
The mileage lost is all in a day’s work. The real money is in the outdated HHG miles. We should be using GPS to track Dock to Dock and have the loads paid properly, but that is another thread entirely. My Trip Record Ledger is full of backtracking. I think for every load saved we had to backtrack or go out of route 100-400 miles at a time. Dispatch didnt care. They only looked at the final distance to the reciever and our average ground speed to see if the load will actually make it there in time before the reciever decides enough is enough and has us send it back to the shipper on the other side of the USA.
Well, maybe the driver could clarify when he drove the logs, but my guess is long enough ago that Global III wasn’t built yet. If the logs were put on a UP train, then the closest they would come to E. Dub. would be 50 miles. Rochelle is only about 100 miles from E. Dub. It probably is cheaper to truck a lot of containers an extra 50 miles, than to build a facility every 50 miles along your track.
Besides, Waterloo to E. Dub to export over the pacific? You are suggesting what you are trying to combat: 90 miles east to go west.
Type in “trains vs. (or versus) trucks” on Youtube. you will probably get my opinion.
…But trains are not powerful only in collisions. think about it. how many trucks does it take to transport 200 containers? now try and get the number of trains (note; the train would be a one-hundred car double-stack train). having 200 trucks going down one highway for a delivery would equal a traffic jam. having one train use a single track doesn’t interfere with road traffic. which is more fuel efficent? train or truck? you do the math, mainly because my brain blew a fuse[swg]
All these History Channel programs about how trains will run by computers and no engineer will be in the cab are in the same category as 1950’s dream how we will be flying to distant stars in year 2000. Wishfull thinking. Yes, you can write software to control the train, start, avoid wheel slip, monitor signals, slow down, stop. You could even have it more reliable than human - it won’t miss a red signal, won’t go over speed limit, will sound horn. That’s realistic. What you (still) can’t accomplish with computer is non-standard situations. Kink in the track (see Amtrack derailment) car stuck in the track at a distance. Various other unusual (as in once-in-a-lifetime) situations that only engineers know. For that you’d still need human to see this stuff and make a decision.
I belive the future holds for us (maybe not in the USA, but in Europe, Asia) one person crew and highly computerised system. And the person will be there to only overwatch and act in non-standard or emergency situations.
Me I’m a trucker so you know where I’m coming from. Railroads are good at running trains for the most part. Customer service is something the railroads seem to lack. Can you tell me whom to call if you want a load hauled. Look in the phone book and try to find a number to call.
Truckers , I guess I better say this trucker , because not all are good at customer service. I know because I talk to the shipper in person. He can tell me what his needs are. Italk with the guy at the other end. Most of the time he is glad to see me. Grocery warehouses are another issue. Seems many poeple still want to know the first name of the poeple they ship thier frieght with.
I think both modes of transport have thier place. Railroads could not run or deliver many things they haul without truckers. If the railroads stopped running truckers could not deliver anything because of all the highway traffic.
I would like so see the day the engineer or conductor is asked to unload the box car that they just spoted at the grocery warehouse. Not sure if this has anything to do with customer service or exploitaion. We should not go there on this forum. Tom
From reading TRAINS, I gather that some shortline railroads do provide the same level of personal service that the best of the truckers do. And there is NS’s Triple Crown, which behaves like a truck company in dealing with customers. So railroads can learn. The fact is they do provide very personal service to the large shippers, the auto manufacturers, chemical companies, etc. Some of the larger regionals seem good at having operating crews provide that kinds of service, not to the extent of loading and unloading cars, but certainly to the extent of giving an extra switching move to move a car at the customers’ location.
But as I have said before, I think the real future is in intermodal. Except for bulk stuff in unit trains or semi-unit trains.
daveklepper I read the same thing. The auto industry is so big everyone bends over for them. Triple Crown has its limits. The railroads are learning and I would agree that intermodel is the future except for the how soon can get it here freight.
I would like to see more people and freight on the rails. The highways are overcrowded. The TOFC might give way to domestic containers. Trucking companys will not move in that direction very easy. Tom