Absolutely.
Just pick up a Sydney newspaper and look in the classified section under “BACKLOADS WANTED”. It’s not uncommon to see a huge semi truck on “Sesame Street” (the Hume Hwy between Sydney and Melbourne) travelling the entire 600 miles with, say, one tiny pallet of cat food lashed to the deck of the huge container trailer. If that’s all they can get to offset the cost of returning to base, then they take it. Often, they run the entire trip empty.
A report just released, indicating rail is cheaper than road on major Australian interstate corridors.
Disclaimer: this is produced by the Australian Rail Track Corporation, so I make no guarantees as to its impartiality. If I see the inevitable response from the trucking industry, I’ll post that too.
Now, if we could just load up a train with all those prius owners… that would make for a good ad. We’ll call the destination concentrated fuel savings camp >=)
Another factor to consider when comparing the road and rail freight industries is cost recovery and subsidisation. Especially in the US, the railroads not only run the trains, they own the track (or pay to use someone else’s track). Either way, the railroads have to recover 100% of the cost of moving the freight, including the ongoing infrastructure costs, or they’ll go broke.
A truck operator, on the other hand, is using publicly own roads and highways. There’s a disconnect between their truck operating costs and the cost of building and repairing the highway. The governments that own the roads have to try to recover the cost of the damage that the trucks do from the truck operators through fees and taxes. The trucking lobby exists, in part, to prevent this from occurring. Do the government make the trucks pay their way or is joe public in his car, paying his taxes, subsidising the trucks? :dubious:
It happens more often than anyone would like, partly due to lack of loads, partly due to other issues (see below).
Back in the late '80’s, I did some software for a guy who was making money finding truckers loads so that they wouldn’t be ‘deadheading’ (traveling empty). That was the pre-internet era and he made it out to be a big problem, especially for independent truckers. Now with the internet, I’m sure it’s a lot less of a problem, but anyone who travels cross country has seen trucks going long-haul without trailers or with empty flatbeds. I know there are plenty of empty trailers too, because I worked a truck gate a couple of years ago and I know how often guys would drop a load and pick up an empty to take elsewhere, sometimes hundreds of miles elsewhere.
Then again, if you’ve seen a train or two, you’ve seen them hauling numbers of empty boxcars too.
Or in the case of coal trains, an entire train of 130 or so cars, all empty. Because there is nothing (effectively) than you can back-haul to the coal mine in the coal cars.
And all those container ships coming over here from China generally bring back nothing but empty shipping containers. 
Yeah, and hope, dreams, democracy, and freedom. Also treasury notes and pre-release DVDs.
Also, a certain percentage of accidents involving tractor trailers should be factored into the mix.
I have to say that I work for the railroad as a yardmaster and conductor. As a yardmaster I send empty cars, sometimes loads, for “a ride” just because it’s more convenient or efficient for me. (That means i send cars where they’re not supposed to go. If an empty car sits in a block of cars that are headed somewhere else, it might just go too.
Sometimes I send trains past that are supposed to set off in my yard. If their set-off is scattered throughout the train then trying to cherry pick them would tie everything up. …That’s how come cars get lost for days or weeks at a time. Well, among other reasons.
This subject is fascinating to me. It’s like you’re simply shuffling some cars around at random until it’s convenient to have them ‘set off’. Could you go into more detail about train cars being moved around, including how it should work in an ideal world? Is there a magazine article, or, better yet, a web resource?
And sometimes, we, you know, take one of the cars behind the shed and make it, you know, empty for, you know, efficiency and convenience. Whoops. Hey listen, we’re saving the environment here, people. Our trains are trains are incredibly efficient. So we don’t have to be 
To the last post, theft is one of the only ways to get fired from a railroad job. It’s easier to steal TIME than it is merchandise. Besides, all the good stuff is on Intermodal trains. They’re the priority of the railroad. Everything stops to let these guys by. They’re on crazy time deadlines and people pay when they’re late. They simply dont sit still long enough for theft to be a factor.
to Danalan, I don’t follow my own industry all that well so I don’t have any hard data here.
There’s a whole lot of factors in why things aren’t efficient. One thing is that rules change across divisions even in the same company, another factor is that foreign railroads build trains that belong to us but originate in their yards. They might be our trains and might set off in my yard but we have no say in how it’s made up. We send stuff out of here the way we’d like to see it come in but that 's just US. It comes down to how much workload one yard can handle. I send stuff west because I know they have a classification yard and I don’t.
It’s really like bulk mail. If it’s just a carload of scrap metal it may take a ride. But if it’s a carload of Hazmat or something that’ll shut your shop down, we’ll dig that car out.
I just should stress that rules, FRA rules and our company rules are much more strict than any rules that could affect the trucking industry.
I read about containers that are just dumped in Africa, the locals use them in places to make offices out of.
That really confirms what I was saying.
Railroads, who own the trains, the tracks, and the stations, are vertically-integrated monopolies who don’t face any real competition. They face “competition” from the trucking industry, but that just means the railroads take the 66% efficiency advantage of the trains and make sure they don’t waste more, than, say, 50% of that diddling around.
This getting-lost-for-weeks stuff is totally inexcusable, even for scrap metal. Why isn’t there extensive tracking? A 100-ton railcar doesn’t have its location tracked in an online database, while my pathetic $5 UPS package does? And why aren’t you guys using computers to schedule your yards? There’s a lot of stuff that’s difficult for machines, but figuring out the optimal strategy to load and recombine railcars seems like a problem that a computer will beat a human on hands-down.
The railroad companies have to get anti-trusted to pieces. (Not that that’ll ever happen.) Trains are a #$@# paradigm of efficiency that’s being squandered by an inept industry.
I don’t work for the railroad, and further up I listed drawbacks to shipping by rail, but I can respond a little bit to why they appear inefficient.
Just like UPS tracks your $5 package, the railroads track their railcars. I can go online and find out exactly where my car is, what time it will arrive at its next stop, and what day it is projected to arrive in my city.
If I order a car on the Union Pacific line from a supplier in Northern California to deliver to Phoenix, Arizona, it first has to go down the coast to Colton, California, and then east to Phoenix. Let’s say 100 cars in a train is an efficient number. What if there are only 30 cars going toward Phoenix when my car arrives in Colton. Then it sits there until they have another 70 cars to make up that train. That could be anywhere from 1 to 4 days.
It takes a lot of work and time to move cars around. If, as they build that train, the first car, the 17th car, and the 91st car are going to one city, is it worth stopping the train of 100 cars and holding it for 6 hours while they dig out those 3 cars, or is it better to let the train go through to another city where they are building a train to go back to the passed city? It might take two days longer to get there, but it will be much more efficient that way. That is why it takes 2 weeks to get a railcar. Also, the railroads only have so many locomotives (power, as they call them). Sometimes a train of cars is built, but they are waiting for power to move it. Again, a delay.
And, since humans are doing the actual work, and humans sometimes make mistakes, a car gets hooked up to the wrong train and goes off in the wrong direction. You can’t just stop the train and spend hours picking it out of the line of cars. When it gets to the next stop where it can be dropped, it might have to wait for a train to be built going toward its real destination.
These processes are measured in days, not minutes or hours. So, yes, when a train is moving, it is more efficient than a truck, fuel-wise. But if you include timeliness as part of your efficiency, they take a serious hit.
I would think that the proof is in the use.
Method 1:
Put cargo on a truck, drive truck to destination, unload.
Method 2:
Put cargo to a truck, take cargo to train, offload truck, load train, put it on the train, move the train to another location, load it onto a truck, etc.
If Method 1 was cheaper, trains wouldn’t exist anymore.
Alex , We DO use computers to build our trains and we can track cars. Sometimes computers are the cause of the problems.
When I said that I send cars for a ride, I mean cars that we have a surplus of. There’s one class of cars that we have waiting to be delivered to an interchange. We have almost 300 of their cars on hand. The most they can accept in a given day might be 70, if that. I’m not going to waste my time & a crews time shifting out a lone straggler when I have 300 more just like it.
Another reason cars get lost is that they’re shopped. They have to be taken to a place they can be repaired, then repaired & classed back into a train that it belongs to.
Trains are usually “blocked” by where they’re going. So, a train going from Conway to morrisville stops at my yard, sets off pavonias and our Abrams shift cars, picks up more morrisvilles…then leaves. The next train comes from allentown, picks up the pavonias and it leaves. Then we shift out the rest of the stuff, south philly’s, csx etc. Wen we send our trains out they’re “blocked”. Trains that terminate in our yard do not come blocked. Yard crews have to shift them out.
It wouldn’t surprise me in the least that you had extra cars that you shuffled around.
At the truck gate (this was for a major retailer’s Distribution Center), we frequently had empties for trucking companies sitting around for months at a time before someone would show up to claim them. The larger and more local companies would use us as a parking lot at times for storage purposes, or to play musical trailers. We didn’t mind much as long as we weren’t full up and they weren’t obnoxious about it. There were a couple of times where we did put a halt to that sort of thing, like when one company sent 6-8 trucks in one day to just drop off empty trailers and didn’t pick anything up. Then it was too obvious what they were doing and we said “no more”.
Some of the more distant or less frequent companies would occasionally lose track of what they’d left and a couple of times a year we’d call them up and ask them to come pick them up, especially if they were damaged.
I remember once when they called a trucking company to come pick up a trailer that had been parked on our lot for well over a year. The company said no. So they told the company that the trailer would be parked out on the nearby freeway and asked which direction the company would like it to be facing. They came and got it a couple of days later.
So the idea of attaching excess empty boxcars to a train just to get them off your lot? Sounds like a reasonable solution to me. You’ve only got so much room.
Railroad Fuel Efficiency Sets New Record
Links to a May 21, 2008 press release from the Association of American Railroads (AAR).
A guy at work told me that all of those empty containers are not returned to China. They are being used as alternative housing, or just sitting collecting dust. I don’t know how to sustantiate that statement…