I have never heard of a average person or company shipping something via railway.
Is it possible to do this? Who generally ships via rail? Just large manufacturers or producers?
You can ship yourself via railway pretty simply.
Anyone (with good credit) can ship by rail, but the cars are designed for things like commodities in large quantities, or large quantities of consumer products, or large equipment. So you can’t send a box of chocolates to your mother, for example, if that’s what your thinking. And of course, you can ship to only places where the rails go.
Got a couple tons of aggregates you want to send to St. Louis? (Who doesn’t?) Try the BSNF web page, for example, to arrange a shipment.
An acquaintance of mine considered buying a used car in another province and shipping it by train; I don’t know if he went through with his plan, though.
Most rail freight is in containers these days. There are shipping agents all over the place who will hire you a box, send it round for you to load it, and arrange for the same at the other end. Of course, as a one-off, it will be expensive.
I used to work for a company that consolidated loads to ship them all over Europe by road. Someone would call us with a few pallets, boxes, barrels etc for delivery from UK to, say, some farm in Spain. We would collect the goods, load them onto a Spanish truck that was homeward bound, along with any other Spanish Freight. He would take it to a Spanish warehouse where it might be transhipped a couple of times before it reached its destination. For the original customer, this was all one seamless operation. We did investigate rail, but schedules were too inflexible. You can’t ask a train to hang on for half-an-hour while you collect some more freight.
We did stuff containers too, but they were nearly always going by sea.
Not where you are located, but out of interest:
My local railway no longer has deposit and delivery offices at railway stations, but it did until it got rid of railway station staff.
Up until 6 years ago, the main city railway station still had pick up and delivery for blood products, which was the tail end of their parcel business, run as a community service. That closed down totally in 2010.
I think that there is still container shipping available from the port in melbourne.vic.aus. Off hand, I can’t say what other destinations would be available. They ship a lot of coal around, but not much of it in Victoria.
Do you own a coal mine in Australia? Guess what, your mine’s product is getting shipped by rail to the nearest port!
Not quite what you’re looking for, but if you send something a long distance by UPS ground in the US, there’s a good chance that it will go on a train.
Sure you can, at least in the USA.
Amtrak Express Parcels:
Small Package Shipments
[ul]
[li]Weight limit for each item: 50 lbs. (23 kg)[/li][li]Size limit for each item: 3 ft x 3 ft x 3 ft (90 cm by 90 cm by 90 cm)[/li][li]Weight limit for each shipment: 500 lbs. (227 kg)[/li][/ul]This service is available to and from 100 stations in the US (i.e. most of those with baggage-handing facilities). When I lived in the SF Bay Area, at various times I sent shipments via train from Emeryville, San Jose, or Martinez to New York, St Louis, and Portland OR.
It would have been overkill for a single box of chocolates, but they would have done it with no problem (while giving me a funny look). Usually I was shipping household goods for someone relocating: boxes of clothes, books, odds-and-ends (all boxed up securely, but not needing to be as well-packed as advised for shipping via UPS/FedEx), even a bicycle. Usually we would drive the stuff to the station, the Amtrak guy would load it on a pallet, then shrinkwrap the result and slap a label on. However on at least one occasion it was a single box.
I found it took typically about 4-5 days coast-to-coast; although the items went on the regular passenger trains (3 days SF-NYC), they might not go out on that day’s train depending on space available and staff scheduling. They usually quoted 7 days to cover all eventualities, but it was always faster than that. Once the shipment had arrived at the destination station, Amtrak would phone the recipient so they could go and pick it up.
There were also additional services that would offer pickup from the sender’s location and delivery to the recipient’s door, but I always found it cheaper to make the trip to the Amtrak station myself.
It was surprisingly affordable; I always researched various options and it was by far the most cost-effective way for the shipments involved. I remember paying a couple of hundred dollars to ship a large pallet of household goods (maybe 15 boxes of varying sizes, plus a bike and some small furniture) from the SF Bay Area to NYC. No doubt it is more expensive nowadays, but the service still exists.
It always felt very safe: I would last see the shipment as a securely-wrapped pallet sitting on a small forklift on the platform, waiting for the train. There seemed very little opportunity for rough handling, and I never had any breakage reported by recipients.
As others said, yes it’s possible to ship stuff by rail. However, generally when I’ve needed to ship stuff, I don’t care how it gets there. So I usually called my regular shipper and they arranged shipping by whatever means was appropriate. For my less-than-truckload shipments, this was usually on a truck with other stuff. But for some expensive, valuable stuff I needed to get to Houston from New York, I paid for a dedicated moving truck that would go straight there and not pick up other stuff along the way.
Addendum:
Using Amtrak to Ship Everything You Own is someone’s blog entry from 2012, describing shipping his household goods across the USA via Amtrak.
The blogger shows a screenshot of Amtrak’s 2014 shipping rates here. The current (2016) rates do not appear to be available online, but one can call 1-800-377-6914 (8am-8pm ET, M-F).
He also says:
I definitely shipped electronics such as a desktop PC and monitor, as well as well-wrapped mirrors, crockery, glassware, etc. I may have just lied on the form, knowing that they weren’t going to open the boxes (they never did on any of my several experiences). Of course if there had ever been any breakage of such prohibited items, I would not have been able to claim them on insurance.
There are several Amtrak Express shipping anecdotes in the blog’s comments section.
Without the backstory I, Joe Private Citizen at a time before I became superhero ASGuy, needed to move an 85 ft. passenger railcar from Washington State down to the Sacramento area in California. Once convinced I was serious the Union Pacific Railroad was more than happy to provide all services needed to perform the move. It cost $4,500, with 75% up front. (Refundable if catastrophe.)
This story is notable because this was not a partial load. Nope, couple the car onto a train, move it to Sacto, and uncouple onto a spur. It doens’t get much easier than that for a railroad. I’m pretty sure the price reflected the one-time nature of the move but I was still shocked.
Manufacturers might sell a railroad car’s amount of product for a discount. Then a large retailer might not need all that for just one store, BUT will order it sent to one of its regional distribution centers. And from there smaller quantities are sent to each retail store.
So the consumer never sees a railroad car’s worth of product arriving at the local store, yet it was shipped via rail.
This can also start out as a semi-truck “container” which picks up a truck load somewhere, then the container is transferred to a train. Then arrives near its destination, is transferred back to a semi-truck, then driven to its final destination.
With that said, you may ship something or even mail a letter. Then that could wind up going via rail along with a bunch of other shipments headed for the same destination. It also could go by truck. Or by airplane. Or by container ship if overseas.
Speaking of overseas… A container shipment from China headed to England may go by boat to Los Angeles, then transferred to rail and shipped to the east coast of the U.S., then loaded on another container ship and then goes to England from there. That can be faster than shipping via the Panama Canal!
Though I’m no expert, what’s being discussed is less than carload (LCL) freight. There was a time when you could take a crate or a couple barrels of merchandise to your local train station and do some paperwork to have it loaded onto an express car headed in the right direction. In the 20th century, Railway Express Agency became the main way this happened in the US, though I’m unclear if they completely supplanted dealing with the railroads directly. REA went away as the passenger trains did, and UPS and trucking companies became the main way LCL freight moves.
As recently as the 1990s, most railroads would pick up and deliver a single boxcar from your factory’s siding, or from a public team track, to a similar facility in another city. But the railroads have refocused on bulk movement of multiple carloads to the same destination. Service to small customers is no longer of much interest, and manifest freights aren’t a priority for crews or dispatchers. US railroads have been happy to cede “loose-car” railroading to truckers—some of whom put trailers or containers on trains for part of the trip cross country. But trucks are far superior for the last few miles, since they can easily move in three dimensions, while boxcars are clumsy to sort and send to disparate destinations.
Since OP’s question said railway rather than railroad, I should mention that the LCL freight situation may be very different in countries other than the US.
It’s nearly 4000 km from Sydney to Perth and some trucking companies will containerize their freight for the journey if you it’s not urgent.
Australia is a net importer of sea containers so there are plenty to go around.
Ah, yes – wasn’t considering Amtrak. I’ve been in one of their package cars, even, though I thought you had to travel with the goods.
I know it’s not relevant, but I was wondering if you can put your car on a train in the US. In Europe, it is possible to travel from, for example, from Dusseldorf to Verona, or Paris to Biarritz in a sleeper car with your own car tagging along behind, or (in France) on a separate train.
Amtrak does operate one car-carrier service between DC and Florida.
Okay, I’ll bite. Tell us the backstory!
It’s not that easy. Moving a railcar from one spur to another means a train has to stop at that spur and pick it up (which means the train is blocking that track during this operation), then sort the railcar and connect it to a train going to the Sacramento area, and then connect it to a local train that can stop at the destination spur. It’s a lot of logistics just to transport one railcar, especially in this age when this kind of operation is not very common.
Lots of businesses used to have rail spurs where they can take delivery of a railcar, so there used to be many local trains that delivered and picked up railcars. These days only major facilities have railroad spurs. If you had a 20 tanker cars to move from a refinery to a factory, the cost per car would be a lot less than $4500.