Make a phone call for a rate for originating railroad then another for line haul car lease from somebody like GE railcar then 2 calls for rail served warehouses on each end then 2 calls for drayage trucking on each end. This was not always the case as big railroads like the Pennsy owned huge warehouse terminals and had there own trucking companies and provided complete. Logistics packages. One call to your local freight agent and your load of peaches got to market. Pittsburgh and Cleveland and dozens of city’s had huge rail served fresh food terminals that were rail served by special high speed freight trains with names like the Expediter and Western Maryland Mountain Storm that could unload 50 boxcars in one day . We have lost that has recent attempts have failed like produce express to Scectady have closed after only 6 years operation
In answer to the thread’s title, probably because LCL service was discontinued years ago.
NS is currently experimenting with a very limited LCL service by adding a TBOX of LCL freight to intermodal trains 215/216 between Chicago and Atlanta.
CW
Job cuts per PSR
It depends on one’s definition of “door to door.”
Railroads do provide such service - in carloads.
But the truth is that not many customers still exist for that kind of service.
The lumberyard in Milford, MI (long since gone, destroyed by fire) got boxcars of lumber delivered to their siding. A jelly factory (also long gone) there got cars of supplies as well.
The last siding in Milford was straight-railed several years ago. The station is gone as well, replaced by condos.
Almost every town had a coal yard that received several grades of coal for their various customers. Both the coal yards and the customers are ancient history.
The closest you’ll get to door to door service these days is dedicated traffic, like auto parts.
Very few (if any) towns have any sort of facility to handle any other kind of traffic - team tracks are generally long gone. Fire trucks were often delivered by rail - now they just drive them to their destination.
I think that brokers are going to be the ones providing custom shipping - and likely in containers. If you want to ship your Rolls Kanardly from point A to point B by rail, that’s going to be your solution.&
No, we haven’t lost it. The customer just has to now work through a middleman. If you ship LTL by FedEx, Yellow, Estis, and others they can, and do, use rail. Peaches and other produce still move by rail. But they go through carriers such as KLLM, Marten, etc. who use rail. Absent government interference, a supply chain will configue to its most efficient form. These intermediate carriers make the supply chain more efficient. There is no real advantage to the railroad itself getting in to the retail part of things.
The market was headed this way a long time ago until the government screwed things up. They restricted railroad trucking operations and forced intermodal rates higher so that they became non-competitive. The government also attacked freight forwarders who integrated logistics functions and greatly limited their operations.
A single box car of LCL shipments between a designated O D pair is barely more than a feeble attempt.
Back in the day of true LCL on the railroads - they had large warehouses to facilitate the business as well as, in many cases, dedicated local delivery services in the major metropolitan areas to provide door to door services. In the first part of the 20th Century, Blue Line Transfer was the B&O subsidiary that facilitated the pick up and delivery of LCL in the Baltimore/Washington metro area. From a article on the Blue Line Transfer in the 2nd Quarter 2021 issue of B&ORHS’s The Sentinel - in 1929 37 Class 1 carriers operated 5861 trucks out of 399 terminals in support of their LCL businesses.
The recievers of these goods chose to enter into an agreement with the RR’s because they , Walmart, Target, Kroger, Amazon, etc wanted the flexibility to deliver, with their own trucks, to the multiple sites they have in any geografical area. They needed to control their enventorys with their own employees and trucks; or, as with smaller receivers, with the truckers they hired.
I’ll add the ignorant move of the ICC classifying freight forwarders as common carriers was the death blow to many…
Balt; I chose wording - “very limited” that wouldn’t convey criticism of the effort. One reads constantly on here and over on TO that railroads aren’t willing to try anything to get business back on the rails. I’ll credit a handful of sales and operating folks at NS for at least giving this a shot.
To your remaining point; I absolutely agree this is less than a shadow of what LCL business once was but, as Greyhounds noted, business that decades ago would have shipped LCL now moves via intermodal in LTL carriers equipment.
CW
It won’t replace Greyhound Package Express.
LOL! No; it sure won’t.
CW
A great example of this is in the New Haven’s 1941 promo film “A Great Railroad At Work.” They show you exactly how it used to operate. Easily found with a YouTube search.
Of course, 1941 might just as well be the Jurassic Period. But they had a system, and it worked.
Here in Canada the railroads still handle alot of the LTL albeit via freight forwarders on both ends. A couple of years ago CN bought TransX, one of Canada’s largest LTL carriers/freight forwarders, so technically CN does provide door to door LTL service in house.
You can buy drayage companies for fairly cheap that do business with the Class I intermodal ramps, several listings can be found via Google. So if some of you think you have a better idea…why not go for it? Buy a drayage company at two major city points, maybe 1 East Coast and 1 West Coast and go after the LTL traffic.
Now if you were to ask me. I suspect the railroads intermodal trains are way to slow and unreliable (schedule wise) to compete with OTR truckers already in the LTL sales segment. Maybe some day when the rails can once again adhere to fast service and tight schedules. I think those days disappeared with the privately run passenger train though and to me it doesn’t look like any railroad is in any hurry to bring those tight schedule management days back anytime soon.
As for past government intervention and rulings. Each Class I has a fairly sizeable lobbying budget for the Feds. If they really wanted the business they would be lobbying for it heavily. They aren’t. Again I think it goes back to the business being viewed as too much bother vs revenue by the Class I’s. Why get your railroad to high performance to capture LTL market share? Why stick your neck out?
Run like a pipeline…slow and steady.
There’s nothing to lobby for. The regulations have been gone for 40 years. But by the time they were eliminated the railroads’ business structure and expertise for directly handling LCL/LTL had been destroyed. The government had effectively allocated this freight to the truck companies. The New York Central, in particular, fought hard to keep this freight. The railroad lost. But not to the truck lines. They lost to the government economic regulators, who were outright fools.
So, now what?&n
Yeaaahhhh, I think you skipped over some railroad history here.
My Father’s firm used to use Burlington Northern Air Frieght which was started by BN Railroad in 1972. You need to Google BAX Cargo, which it is called now and read up on the history. So there is one Class One Railroad which tried LTL via same name brand as a subsidiary, until 1982…then sold it off. My Father’s manufacturing employer would use them as a quick fix for LTL when they screwed up or miscounted orders to get the odd lots shipped fast to the clients to complete the previously miscounted order ontime. So speed was a concern. They seemed to use the Fed Ex model…more or less. They also seemed to compete OK, no idea why BN sold it off.
The railroads that we the people built with land grants and over the years bailed them out via Conrail and before that with USRA in WW1 won’t serve the common man or small buisness and have evolved into niche boteuque carriers that only handle 15% of the nations freight and only if it is going over 300 miles in Contract lots of at least 1000 containers a year Plus if you are lucky to have a siding the railroads charge you 2,000.00 yearly for the privilege of being their customer vis a via Switch Mauntancs charges. One of the first things that Conrail did was “Demarket” customers and close down branch lines and pull up sidings to rationalize the nations rail network and fire local agents and only take calls from contract customers instead of the farmer that wanted to ship his tractor combine across to his new farm out west because his farm had been cut n half by the new freeway that replaced the commuter rail line in the east
Well, I can’t write a book on this site. BN Air Freight was a small, short-term blip. BN was allowed to try it because air transport was economically regulated by a different government bureaucracy, the Civil Aeronautics Board, than surface transportation was. The Interstate Commerce Commission exercised oppressive control over the railroads, and they greatly restricted rail-truck integration. Why have just one counter-productive bureaucracy when you can have two? Both the CAB and ICC are thankfully long gone.
BN Air Freight didn’t work out, so they got rid of it. But I’ll give them credit for trying.
I think you skipped over this was a time when the railroads were diversifying into: pipelines, air freight, insurance, telecom, etc… The general consensus among railroad management was an industry in decline. They were preparing for an exit. Not because using rail to move freight was the problem. As Greyhounds consistently points out. The ICC was strangling the railroad industry by not allowing them to set their own rates. Nor reduce cost in the network through plant rationalization…
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