Two Class I railroads do not operates this way-CN and NS. They seem to be having a great deal of success.
The Old Dog once worked for a company that was thinking of shipping by rail. They were about to put in a siding. They even had the end of track bumper stored in the back ware house ready for installation.
What killed that deal was NOT slow service, but inconsistant service. They would order a car load of plastic out of Texas. One time, it might show up in two days. The next car might show up in two weeks. To say the least, that made managing the raw material inventory difficult.
Have fun
Wow that is a simple question.
If it costs more time and/or money to ship by rail then truck, would you use a train? Just to be cool?
Adrianspeeder
It depends on what your shipping and how rail fits into the total physical distribution system. If your bringing orchards from Oahu to Chicago you use United to O’Hare and a truck to the florist. If your bring styrene from Odessa, TX to N. GA you use rail. There are thousands of different possiblities that may use rail, truck, barge, pipeline, air or most typically intermodal comindations. In the plastic example about your would ship a covered hopper to a transload facility near the reciever and delivery locally in a bulk plastic truck.
Bob:
You do mean orchids, right? [:)] That’s a lot of trees by plane!
Most major railroad now don’t WANT the small shipper,…you farm that stuff out to the shortlines…the small scab Railroad paying $10 per hour to employees to switch out in Industrial parks and deliver trains to the big boys…The BNSF wants to do ONLY mainline transportation over long distances…thats where the money is…and they are doing it now …the Transcon Mainline from L.A. to Chicago with over 100 trains per day proves that,.
Most are intermodal “Stack” trains to HUB facilities for distribution via truck within a 300 mile radius…such as Logistics Park Chicago in Joliette,Ill. or Alliance ,near Ft.Worth,Texas…Kansas City and Memphis,all major intermodal facilities…The guy with a single load of scrap is better left to the shortlines…the cost of maintaining the spurs and associated headaches are best left to the little guys to fight over…
Just for the record,most containers you see that come from the coastal ports are going to the big box retailers such as Wal Mart, Home Depot,K-Mart,the list goes on…It’s a perfect system,we make the money on the LONG HAUL,the trucks deliver the short haul and are used for storage if the Big Box Retailers want to warehouse the product for a few days…I am a conductor for the BNSF and see the paperwork every trip for the shipments on my train…I must say, The big railroads have really created an efficent system of transportation…A double stack container train is nothing but one train on top of another…think about the genius in that…
The problem of course is that most of those “small shippers” are domestic, so they invaribly have a difficult time in getting their product out of the plant. In the meantime, all those efficient double stack trains are hauling in a record number of imports at the lowest possible rates. Double stack ain’t working so well when it comes to facilitating U.S. exports.
There is a positive correlation between current U.S. railroad operations and the U.S. trade deficit.
I live in the same area as waltersrails and one thing he forgot to mention is that the next town, Wayne City IL, is smaller than his town, Fairfield, and Wayne City does more shipping by rail than Fairfield and Wayne City does not have a factory. Also the factory in Fairfield is Airtex (http://www.airtexproducts.com/index.html) they make water and fuel pumps for NASCAR and others. They are also the largest independent maker of water and fuel pumps. I don’t see why they wouldn’t ship by rail.
ICMR
I don’t think so with 200,000 trucking companies in the U. S. and an average haul of 250 miles for inter-city shipments.
The small domestic shippers have a very difficult time arranging any kind of rail shipments, as teamdon pointed out, so as a last resort they shift to trucks. The trucks don’t win head to head, they win by forfeit. The shipper is hamstrung by the limitations of truckload vs carload, even if that truckload ends up on TOFC/COFC. The statement by teamdon remains irrefutable. The observation that double stack favors imports over exports is also irrefutable.
Yeah. It’s obvious. Just like the inverse corelation between NY Yankee World Series appearances and US rail passenger traffic…
Thanks for the replys everyone.