Where I live there are many busnisses and a factory. Right beside the tracks
I want to know why They just don’t ship there products by rail. would it not be cheaper? Like we have filter factory, a very good size lumber mill and also a very good size wood pallet industery.
Any replys will be helpful to my understanding.
Thanks
I could that that rail is too slow, too unreliable (my just be a preception), or they do not ship enough stuff to one place.
I can’t, obviously, be authoritative about a specific situation… but, in general, smaller shippers – those with less than one or two full loads per week – and even medium sized ones, who might have a load or two a day, are not economical to serve directly by rail. There are a lot of factors involved in this, ranging from limited capacity on the rail lines (a local, switching industries, really gums things up) to maintenance on the siding and switch to the sheer cost of running the local vs. the cost of running a truck – but it all adds up to being cheaper, in these cases, to ship by truck. If the shipment is going nearby – up to a few hundred miles and sometimes more – it’s cheaper to send it the whole way by truck. For longer distances, it is quite possible that the truck will deliver the shipment to a consolidation point, and it will move from there either as a TOFC or COFC movement.
The economic balance is rather delicate, though, and if an industry can convince the local railroad that there will be a decent return on the investment, the railroad may start or restore service. It’s easier for the short lines and regionals to do this than the Class Is, and this is one reason why they can be astonishingly successful in capturing traffic.
The biggest problem (which most don’t seem to realize) is the train doesn’t go where the product needs to. This is why most stuff goes door-to-door by a truck. Also the railraods are notorious for misdirecting cars or loosing them. (Ya I know, computers and all that - but it still happens.)
Also, there are cases where the railroads can’t supply the cars. I know of at least 2 scrap shippers that are almost always short the number of cars they need.
I’ve got half a boxcar load to go to Seattle, and half a load for Baltimore. Then I’ve got half a carful for San Diego, and another half for Detroit.
[#dots]
And I’m your local railroad freight agent and I don’t even want to talk to you![:D]
Are you sure they arn’t useing intermodial after those trucks leave the plant?
Here’s an actual example.
Sand from South Jersey to North Jersey to make ceramic tile grout. As the crow flys, about 100 miles. Via major highways, about 130 miles.
Consignee has rail siding, but gets a truckload or two of sand a month.
Has silo that holds about 1-1/2 truckloads.
Truckdriver can make the round trip in a day.
Rail route is on WW to Millville, CR to Pavonia, NS to Allentown, NS to Oak Island, CR to consignee. Trip would look like this:
Dpt Dividing Creek WW Thurs AM
Arv Milleville WW Thurs PM
Dpt Millville CR Fri AM
Arv Pavonia CR Fri PM
Dpt Pavonia NS Sat AM
Arv Allentown NS Sat PM
Dpt Allentown NS Sun AM
Arv Oak Island NS Sun PM
Dpt Oak Island CR Mon AM
place consignee Tuesday
Then, the consignee would have to hold the car about a week because he couldn’t unload it all into his silo. (that is, after he purchased the unloading equipment - the truck “comes with”)
And, the consignee would be responsible for the track at his plant, too. What does a grout manufacturer know about track?
If you factor in the unreliability of the service with the many, many potential points of failure, it just even worth the consignee’s effort to even look into this.
waltersrails I’m assuming the the busnesses (spelling) and factories by your area are “small” in relation to a huge corperation like 3M or something. These companies most likely don’t have the time or the money to ship their products by rail. In terms of their their product production and customer demand it is most likely not economical to choose (spellin) rail transportation over “door to door” service. However, if the coperation was huge like 3M and their production output was about 2.5 million products a week, then it would be economical to use rail transportation. Most likely 3M (example) will be shipping their products to small busnesses or franchises across the country and out of it. To stores like Wal Mart, K-Mart, CVS, Rite Aid, Sheetz, Walgreens, Staples, Office Max, other supermarkets. In this case 3M would need to have their 2.5 million products a week shipped via intermodel, or mixed freight, or unit freight to a bulk transfer facility. In which the receiving or shipping company or companies’ trucks can pick them up and distribte them to their branches (stores).
Those half cars must look pretty funny going down the tracks! [:p]
I am your boss and your fired! Let me get our intermodal team on that tree68!
You can also get into the particulars of the actual production schedule too. Like how GE builds its prime movers in Grove City, PA (I think) and uses trucks to move them up to Erie. This allows GE to control every aspect of the delivery. They know the exact second it departed Grove City, so Erie can be alerted that they will have their hands on it in two and a half hours. It arrives in Erie precisely when they want it to and it goes right from the truck to the shop floor. They don’t need to construct and maintain storage facilities at either Grove City or Erie then because there’s nothing to store. A completed unit rolls out of the plant right to the truck and out the door and then right off the truck into the final product.
When I worked in a tool and die shop, something like every 58 minutes exactly a truck arrived at our facility from one of the off-site storage facilities that served the company’s three plants with a new load of silicon or tungsten or whatever material was needed for the orders currently being processed. Why 58 minutes? Because that was almost the rate at which the current on hand supply of materials would be consumed. They had about an hour’s worth of materials stored (they really tore through it too). There were a few minutes of wiggle room because they could start taking stuff right off the truck if they needed to. They ran things pretty close. If that truck got delayed 15 minutes, there was trouble. It worked the same way with outgoing finished products too.
But that’s how industry works these days. There’s a term for it, but I just can’t remember what its called. Everyone does it now. Railroads simply cannot do it. The flexibility just isn’t possible.
I can tell you another reason. In the '60s my father thought of renovating the siding next to the building he owned. Since the siding was right next to one of the C&NW’s mainlines and was only a couple of hundred feet long, he thought it wouldn’t be so expensive. Instead, they told him it would cost $250k to put it back into working order, a lot of money in those days. Nothing was done.
It’s called Just-in-time delivery. In effect, your inventory is on wheels.
Trucker can make the round trip in a day.Railroading can’t even come close to that.
QUESTION: Wal-Mart is the biggest retailer in the world. Has anyone ever seen a Wal-Mart warehouse equipped with a rail siding?
And if you have, was the siding there to handle carload traffic; or was it there as a threat, specifically to beat down trucker rates?
But, Wal-Mart does use rail intermodal.
Many large box retailers have regional distribution centers that are multi-modal. If their goods are coming in from overseas via container, it is likely that the container moved part of the way by rail, but to the distribution center by always by truck. If their goods are coming in from within North America, there is a chance some of that comes in via blocks of boxcars directly to the distribution center.
It is possible that ISO container loads could come directly to the distribution center by rail, but it would require some logistical foresight. You could put a 40’ container on a 60’ flat, which would allow the container to be off loaded at the distribution center’s boxcar docks, but such a move is very inefficient for railroads. Some of that inefficiency could be whittled down by using a proposed innovation in which a hypothetical 100’ articulated flat would be used to haul two 40+’ containers (containers located at coupler ends with doors toward center of car, using the 20’ space over the articulation to run the forklifts on and off). Even then you are running single stack COFC with 20’ dead spaces between containers, which limits the total number of containers per train, and you have more tare weight to boot, but if it is priced to overcome intermodal terminal transloading costs, it could work in some corridors. Bypassing congestion at intermodal terminals may result in some discernable benefits by using this system.
Thanks for all the replys it was very helpful.
[quote]
QUOTE: Originally posted by radivil
You can also get into the particulars of the actual production schedule too. Like how GE builds its prime movers in Grove City, PA (I think) and uses trucks to move them up to Erie. This allows GE to control every aspect of the delivery. They know the exact second it departed Grove City, so Erie can be alerted that they will have their hands on it in two and a half hours. It arrives in Erie precisely when they want it to and it goes right from the truck to the shop floor. They don’t need to construct and maintain storage facilities at either Grove City or Erie then because there’s nothing to store. A completed unit rolls out of the plant right to the truck and out the door and then right off the truck into the final product.
When I worked in a tool and die shop, something like every 58 minutes exactly a truck arrived at our facility from one of the off-site storage facilities that served the company’s three plants with a new load of silicon or tungsten or whatever material was needed for the orders currently being processed. Why 58 minutes? Because that was almost the rate at which the current on hand supply of materials would be consumed. They had about an hour’s worth of materials stored (they really tore through it too). There were a few minutes of wiggle room because they could start taking stuff right off the truck if they needed to. They ran things pretty close. If that truck got delayed 15 minutes, there was trouble. It worked the same way with outgoing finished products too.
But that’s how industry works these days. There’s a term for it, but I just can’t remember what its called. Everyone does it now. Railroads simply cannot do it. The flexibility
And there you’ve hit the nail on the head, because JIT is counterintuitive to the railroad philosophy of maximum load factor. JIT has huge potential pitfalls if any significant delays are encountered because on site warehousing has been minimized, so the potential for product/production shortfalls becomes apparent when shipments are delayed. Railroads are running at capacity right now, and they have little in the way of dispersed redundancy to compensate for the inevitable delays due to the long slow train concept and the occurances of derailments which take out one, two, sometimes three sets of tracks at once. If you are a shipper who has sold out to the JIT philosophy, you will always be wary of using rail vs truck. JIT works well with the trucking industry’s inherent flexibility, because the nation’s highway system (though congested in some areas) has dispersed redundancy built in, e.g. there is always a route B available for the most part if some event has blocked the main highway.