I plan on running intermodal trains on my layout. Can truck trailers haul a load of some sort when they are transported by rail or is it simply to move them from point A to point B? Also the large ports that ship contaiers I have no room for something that big on my layout. What other industry ship/recieves truck trailers/intermodal containers?
Boy, just about anything shipped in large quanties will use the containers. Toys, furniture, raw materails, toys. And my favorite… heard about a train rear ending another and the last car was a doublestack car that had lemons in it. Said the ground was covered in lemon juice. Whoops.
ify ou look around, you will see those conainters at construction sites, back of Wal-mart or autoparts place, etc. head down to a industrail/wharehouse district and you will see them everywhere. Good luck
Well you can do a small intermodal yard where trailers adn containers are put on trains. I mentioned in a post West Davenport Iowa has a small yard for this. Iowa Interstate has a small one in West Liberty Iowa. Easy to model for small layouts.
Now most tofc is loads sometimes mty’s to be moved to a loading point. IAIS moves new trailers for Werner trucking from Chicago to Omaha.
A company I worked for loaded containers and had them shipped to Chicago to be put on the rails. Small building ( relativly) so easy to put in a small layout)Good luck.
Most manufacturing companies use containers. During the late 50’s and early 60’s carloading companies used rail to transport goods all over the US.
When I left the Armed Forces in 04, my personal effects were loaded into a container on an 18-wheeler and then shipped by rail across Canada to Vancouver, loaded onto another flat-bed, and then ferried across to Vancouver Island.
thanks for your help everyone- i still don’t know what industry to have -maybe a very small intermodal yard- could i see pics of intermodal yards and whatever structures are there? Also since truck trailers can haul (just about) everything that intermodal contailers do, they seem more versitle because they can easily be transported by truck after they reach their destination by rail.
My son is a trucker and HE hauls those containers. He picks up empties from the railroads here in Kansas City and hauls them to the beef packing plants in western Kansas, Iowa and other places within a few hundred miles. He leaves the empty at the plant and picks up one loaded with hides (the skin of the cow which was turned itno steaks, hamburger, etc). He drops off the loaded container at the railroad’s intermodal facility, picks up an empty one and does it all over again. Meanwhile the railroad hauls those loaded containers to the west coast where they are loaded onto a ship, taken to Asia where the hide is turned into shoes, jackets, purses, etc. The finished products are then placed into a container which is placed on a ship which goes to the US. The containers are unloaded from the ship and placed on trains which haul them to their destination cities. Trucks then haul them from the railroad yard to Wal-Mart, Footlocker warehouses, etc.
As far as truck trailers on the railroad, the idea is a trucker is happier if he can be home every night or every other night and the railroad is more efficient at hauling big loads long distances (more than say 300 or 500 miles) than the trucks are. Thus a trucker pickes up a load from a factory in, for example, Des Moines, Iowa. He hauls it to Kansas City (the area’s rail center) where it goes on a train which takes it to New York City where it then gets hooked up behind a big rig and taken to Wal Mart or Foot Locker, or where ever. Though I have not done so, I think a busy intermodal operation would be fun to model.
I don’t want to eat up much space so my yard will be quite small. I don’t know how busy it will be. I plan on running both double stack and TOWC (trailer-on-well-car) (I made that one up) My freelanced railroad will primarily haul TOWC from somewhere and grain from a local elevator.
I’ve been searching google for intermodal yards and i have rough idea of what i want to do. I need something like this for “looks” http://www.walthers.com/exec/productinfo/933-3122 I also need a sizeable concrete area for stacking containers and setting the truck trailers out .
Well, as far as containers go, the 20 and 40 footers USUALLY go to and from overseas. The 45’ and larger, especially the 48 and 53 foot, 102" wide containers generally stay in North America (Canada, USA, and Mexico). This is due to size restrictions in other countries. Containers can and do haul nearly everything including produce and meat, crackers and cookies, general merchandise, scrap products (cardboard, metal, glass), military items, auto parts, tires, machinery, and who-knows-what else. In fact, I can’t think of anything they don’t haul, except maybe coal and gravel. I’ve been to the NS rail yard near Atlanta many times, and there isn’t much that DOESN’T move through that yard. About the only thing that may not move by rail is very high value loads or very fragile loads. A load of drinking glasses is NOT considered a fragile load for this purpose. I’m referring to something like 3 million dollar assembly line robots.
Brad
I know that Canadian Pacific ships Canadian Tire & Zellers ( large retailers) trailers by train inbetween Toronto & Montreal.
Gordon
Having worked in export shipping for a lot of years, the company I worked for (chemical manufacturing) shipped to our subsidiaries all over the world. We shipped finished goods, raw materials to make our finished goods. No sense paying to ship water in product, when the receiving country can add their own water to the raw materials. We also shipped special request items tables, chairs, desks, sprayers, pressure washers, warehouse pallet racking systems (as in Lowe’s, Home Depot, Sam’s Club) or whatever they requested. We used both 20ft and 40ft conatiners. We had a house cartage company that would pickup empty containers in Chicago and bring them to us. We loaded them while the driver waited and he took them back to the rail yard in Chicago for loading on a train. All containers were prescheduled (at the rail yard and at the departing port and the ship it was sailing on) prior to loading.
Thanks everyone, i have some good info but i’d like to see pics of YOUR intermodal yards (if you have one) -also where can i get a structure that is the “check-in” area where the trucks go into the yard and pick up trailers/containers. Go to this link and scroll down the page- 2 people have a pic of their yards- the “check-in” area is seen in RED ROCK’s post http://www.trainboard.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=9;t=007362;p=0
The place I worked for that did the shipping by container did work for Deer Cat Case etc etc. I know it takes three containers to transport a combine ( no they dont do it regular like cause its too much of a pain in the …) They ship out anything you can imagine in containers. We disassembled backhoes, mowers, tractors,trucks,log skidders, plus the bkes from Harely Davidosn and the Marlboro Man as well as a Captain America replica. Most loads go to Germany or Japan but we shipped world wide…
Gravel lots work for small container storage and the equipment is just one wheel loader roaming around. Check in areas can be a small shack or an elaborate concrete building that matches the facility. this is a kitbashers dream. The check in for the IMRL intermodal yard was an old service type building for large vehicles. They stored tons of stuff in there ( except for a live person to talk to)
Truckers still haul a lot of stuff sure but when i see 12 trailers on one Z train of a company that says we are not going to ship by rail ( thats one train now the other two Z’s had a total of 3 and 5 of these guys equipment) its kinda cool to be able to see rail making a big comeback. This is the beauty of what your doing you can do a small yard and have drayage drivers bringing in the trailers or road tractors dropping off loads and grabbing mty’s,never having to model the place they were.
Oh I dont have an intermodal yard.I am going to model 1910 era and back to the 1890’s. I deal with these daily so I would rather see something I never see.But whom knows I might change and get my Rock Island in the 80’s plan out and go from there . Stay safe.
An intermodal yard is just a modern interpretation of a very old concept, called a “team track,” where railroads could park boxcars or flatcars or gons for loading and unloading into trucks, or, earlier, carts pulled by horse teams (thus the term “team track.”) Intermodal railroading actually goes back to the 1920s–several midwestern interurban lines experimented with modular cargo boxes that could be lifted directly from the back of a special flatcar (or a special electric “box motor”) to the back of a truck.
I don’t see piggyback service (conventional truck trailers on the backs of flatcars) as often as I used to, but it is still around–modeling a piggyback facility would be as simple as a ramp at the end of a spur where trucks could back up onto flatcars and drop off their trailers.
One of the neat things about studying the prototype is that one realizes that many industries that received goods by rail didn’t have spurs–they’d send a truck to the team track! So, if you have some retail stores on your layout that don’t have rail service, but DO have a freight house or team track nearby, you can make up car cards indicating that shipment is to be made to the team track, but the final customer is the off-line retail store. It doesn’t make much difference in operation, but adds a little more flavor and variety to operation. Or, just as easily, you could make up cards for off-line industries that you didn’t model… for a modern layout, a container yard would serve the same purpose as the team track.
The Santa Fe pioneered the concept of Piggyback" trains in the 1960’s or 1970’s -aren’t intermodal containers and trailers basicly a replacemant for the boxcar?
Union Pacific’s (former SP) East Yard in San Antonio has a fairly small and simple facility. It has a loop track that travels around the entire intermodal terminal within the yard. I will try to find a good drawing of the yard, or at least some pics. This is something that could probably be scaled down fairly easily.
i’ve got a basic trackplan- 3 or 4 tracks , each one 3’ to 6’ long and cement between the rails, between the different tracks and a cement are for stacking contailers and setting out trailers. i will use styrene(i think that’s what i have) painted gray to simulate concrete
Back in the Mid 90’s I was at the then BN yard in Amarillo and they had a small TOFC operation going. It was what appeared to be a lead track off the main into the yard. It could hold about 5 89’ flat cars. They had a mobile loader, like a toploading forklift (can’t think of the proper name for it, walthers sells one). They would load the trailers as they pulled in. This track was under an overpass and there was not alot of room for the loader operator to manuver.
My point is, you don’t need much space. Because I have the room my intermodal yard is two tracks, long enough to hold two doublestacks (6’-8’ or so) and only 24" wide. It is located at the East end of my yard where the ladder tracks are. Uses this otherwise hard to use space well. Oh I also have an autorack unloading area there four tracks 4’ long and about 24" wide.
Mike in Tulsa
BNSF Cherokee Sub
Mike in
I don’t want to start a war and please understand that I AM A SANTA FE FAN, but Pennsy, Nickel Plate and others were experimenting with TOFC in the 1950s which means neither Santa Fe nor anyone else could have “pioneered the concept” in the 60s and 70s. I grew up in the 50s and the kid across the street with whom I shared a birthday was the son of a Missouri Pacific engineer. That whole family was excited that if this “piggyback thing” got approved the railroad would do “real good”. That was about 1955.
Cheers,
Ed