I see a lot of trailers on the UP. A lot on some trains are reefers, but they aren’t meat out of Sioux City.
Some truckers may be going to containers, but I see from time to time containers on their chassis acting like TOFC.
There was a time (around 2009) during the worst of the economic slow down when I hardly ever saw a true trailer on a train.
Jeff
Ground, not so much, they would be marked as Ground units. The purple and grey boxes you see are FedEx Freight shipping non time-sensitive LTL freight. Example, LA loads a lot of eastbound rail boxes and instead of using company drivers and bogging down the system, they dray those containers from the local terminal to a West Coast ramp and ride the rails to an East Coast hub (Atlanta is a BIG one). UPS does the same thing, although you might not know it, a lot of their volume travels in EMHU boxes.
I mentioned this on another Thread, but I am really curious abot it. Recently, I have seen several containers that were, more or less identical to adjacent containers in the same trains (ie; FedEx Multimodal markings), they were that gray color with ribbed metal. Those ‘other cans’ wore a rectangular decal (maybe about 3’ by 1’ to 2’(?). They were white letters with that green shade that is on the FedEx ground trailer logos) lettered for COFC. Any ideas? I sort of thought that FedEx might be opening up some of their T/L business to Container loading for rail transport ? [:-^]
I feel that part of the reason why TOFC seems to be replaced by double stack containers is partly because two 53’ trailers will NOT FIT onto older 89’ piggyback flatcars. The 89’ TOFC cars were designed for transporting two 40’ or 45’ trailers NOT 53’ trailers.
Do BNSF and UP still use spine cars?
They still do in this neck of the woods…Looking at some right now…EB COFC/TOFC, mixed on the spine cars…53’ reefers and some YRC 28’ Pups and some FedEx cans…COFC stacks, in well cars (53’ Domestic JBH cans).
89’ TOFC cars were designed to carry one 45’ and one 40’ trailer. After the Twin 45 modification many were able to carry two 45’ trailers. Only three of those cars are left in the TTX fleet. But many were also modified to carry three 28’ trailers as well as the two 45s. Just over 100 of them are left. A number of 89’ flatcars were drawbar-connected and had their hitches repositioned to carry three 53’ trailers as a temporary stopgap until TTAX all-purpose spine cars could enter the fleet. Just over 100 of them are left. TOFC traffic is now carried almost entirely on TTAX and TTRX spine cars, of which there just under 7,000 cars. But there are over 44,000 DTTX stack cars, so the relative demand for intermodal cars is obvious. And as previously pointed out, many spine cars carry containers instead of trailers.
The ONR and HBR will run TOFC as well, but you are correct in saying CP’s Expressway service is the only regular TOFC on the mainlines in Canada.
CN runs their container trains up to 16000 feet. Many are in the 11-14000 foot range. Double stacks really make it beneficial.
Q025,Q026 and Q027 all carry TOFC through Nashville for CSX.
I frequently see trailers on trains into and out of Florida on CSX and FEC.
haven’t seen TOFC in years and I drive past the Frisco yards where Dad worked very often. BNSF has mostly intramodel trains coming and going out of the yards, so that’s the bulk of the business now. Sometimes there will be tankers or even a boxcar in the mix, but not much. Frisco had their own trucking company too-FTC, don’t know if any railroads have them today or not
I watch the Chesterton cam, and the Berea,OH and Fostoria, OH cams, and lots of TOFC /COFC trains. I also see them on the BNSF on the Coal City, IL. cam.
I don’t remember that I’ve ever seen them on the CN, Fond du Lac to Chicago line (former WC) I live close to.
Mike.
1987
Well, here’s one.
That’s a nice Volvo tractor all done up in CN colors. The tri-axle container chassis indicates the photo was taken in Canada. CNTL does have significant operations in the US as well.
Several US railroads did own trucklines. Those that quickly come to mind are Santa Fe Trail, Rock Island Motor Freight, your Frisco Transportation Co., and a rather large PMT. PMT was either Pacific Motor Transport or Pacific Motor Trucking, I don’t remember. It was an SP operation. Cotton Belt also had its own trucking operations.
When motor freight was first Federally regulated in 1935 the existing trucking operations were literally frozen in place. So if a railroad had a motor carrier up and running it got to keep what it had. It couldn’t expand, but it could stay in place. (Economic regulation of transport was, from start to finish, a fool’s errand.) The restrictions placed on rail-truck integration greatly harmed our economy and our people. Freezing economic development in place, as was done, and then subjecting it to a lot of dang fool rules is going to hurt. And it did hurt. Badly.
Today, there is no necessity for a railroad to have a seperate trucking entity. They can just hire a trucker, owner operator or otherwise, to do the work. No government by your leave is required.
CN has chosen to operate through CNTL. BNSF and NS have chosen to partner with truckers such as JB Hunt to do the same thing in a different way. It’s basically six of one and a half dozen of the other. It’s the same thing done differently with basically the same result.
CN, operating mainly in Canada at the time, was mostly never subject
CN has certainly done well for themselves on the trucking end, those things are everywhere up here, especially around intermodal yards (the “We Deliver!” slogan still emblazoned all over many containers comes to mind).
The complete integration of trucking into the rail network sometimes leads to unusual situations, for example CN seems to haul most if not all west coast intermodal traffic for the Saskatoon and Winnipeg terminals by truck from Vancouver to Calgary, then load them onto a train (Q114) there. I think the logic behind this is that it fills out a train that would otherwise run short, and it means that fewer intermodal trains have to work in the cramped Saskatoon yard.
Well, today at 12:00 noon, at Kayne Ave Yard, I saw a northbound intermodal train with 6 UPS 53 foot trailers and two of the smaller “pups” in the consists. I guess I have to take it all back. Thanks to all that replied. As the late great Gilda Radnor used to say on Saturday Night Live,“Never mind”.
There is a potential sort of half-way-house between TOFC and double-stack intermodal.
The swop-body is a demountable truck body, lighter than an ISO-standard shipping container but fitted on the bottom corners with ISO standard twistlocks. Swop bodies can be fitted with fold-down legs so that they can be left for loading/unloading whilst the truck goes off to do other work. This, plus the reduction in deadweight compared to ISO-standard containers and with the ability to be carried by rail as well as road is the reason swop-bodies are used in Europe (and probably elsewhere).
Swop-bodies cannot be stacked so cannot be transported by ship. On a double-stack container train it would be possible to carry a swop-body on top of a standard ISO container (but not of course vice-versa!). This would be more fuel-efficient than both ‘pure’ double-stack with ISO-only containers and TOFC, as the dead-weight per ton of load would be less than either.
I would assume that swap-bodies make a certain amount of sense in Europe for domestic traffic because clearance restrictions preclude the existence of double-stacks and you don’t really need twistlocks on the upper corners. In North America, where double-stacks are quite common, swap-bodies would almost require special handling at most terminals because the lack of upper-corner twistlocks would limit how they could be loaded and where they could be placed.