I’m not looking for the generic term, although that may help my googling, which has so far turned up nothing.
Freights go through a lot of towns without stopping. I want to know how many vs places where cargo is loaded and unloaded, the number of major cities, etc. It’s a pain in the ass for the rail lines and the towns.
I ask because I’m interested in the impediments to better passenger rail service. That they run on the same tracks and get lower priority is a big one, I understand. It seems like the rail lines would want to build newer and faster through less populated areas.
The last paragraph is an IMHO issue, so I ask for a GQ answer to the original question before the subject shifts and we move.
Where they load is first put on a train is usually either:
a) where the materials being shipped via train are being produced, or
b) where the materials arrive in the U.S. (particularly stuff that arrives on container ships)
So, in the former case, it can be:
At a manufacturing or processing plant, if it’s something that’s just been made at such a plant (such as chemicals and automobiles)
At a mine, for ores and coal
At a grain elevator, for grains like wheat and corn
In the latter case, it’s typically at a port of entry, where ships coming from overseas (like from China) are offloaded. The Port of Long Beach, in southern California, is a particularly large and noteworthy one.
You can consider that there are three general types of rail freight: 1) traditional carload freight, such as appliances, auto parts, paper and the like: 2) bulk commodities, such as oil, coal, iron ore. and other raw or refined materials; and 3) intermodal (containers and trailers).
Carload freight is the most labor-intensive and involves collection of loaded cars by a “local” freight train from spur tracks running to an originating plant or warehouse, or by interchange from a “short line” that specializes in local switching. Delivery reverses the process. Since much of this traffic is in less than trainload lots, a marshaling yards at various locations allow the carloads to be added to trains going to a destination yard near the final unloading point, where a local or short line again takes over.
Commodities, these days, tend to be moved in solid trainloads from some sort of mass loading facility operated by the customer to a mass unloading facility at the destination. For example, unit trains of coal move from mines in the Powder River basin travel to power plants in the Midwest, or perhaps dockside facilities at an ocean port for export.
Intermodal again moves mostly by trainload and generally runs from some sort of railroad -operated collection point (a dockside or land-bound transfer yard) to a similar unloading point. For example, containers of merchandise produced in Asia and offloaded from ships at a west coast port may travel cross-country by train to a transfer facility in east-central Pennsylvania convenient for truck distribution to final destinations all over the northeast.
The above leaves out numerous details, but those are the basics.
Just because a train often doesn’t stop in a small town doesn’t mean it never stops. For example one bulk product often transported by rail is grain. Farmers transport much of the grain to local grain elevators where much of it is re-shipped via rail or truck to processing plants or export terminals. And there are grain elevators in thousands of towns and cities. Farmers also need products like fertilizer, again much of it is shipped in via rail.
So it is mistake for you to think only big cities use rail.
Exactly. Here is a live railcam in Waupaca, WI with a view of a local foundry. Most trains on seen on the cam are through freights running on a main line track from one marshalling yard to another, but if one is willing to check in between 1:30 and 4:30 PM CDT on a weekday, you will see a local freight enter the foundry spur to deliver a few carloads of coke or raw iron for use at the plant.
I don’t think I can beat El Kabong’s answer as a short summary.
What most laymen don’t realize is how much “loose-car” railroading has been supplanted by door-to-door trucking, and how completely most railroads have become bulk haulers. It’s relatively rare for me to see an actual boxcar any more.
The evolution of rail freight is towards specialised low-value bulk - coal, aggregate, etc. and containers. Even in the US, I doubt that much freight is loaded loose into boxcars anymore.
Containers usually begin and end their journeys on trucks: the rail part takes them between specialised container yards. The idea of making up trains in goods yards is history now. It’s much more efficient to make up a train by selecting the right containers and loading them onto flats. This is no different between two places on the same continent than it is between two seaports, except one is by rail and the other by sea.
In the UK, where distances are relatively short, cross country general cargo is almost entirely done by road. Goods trains are either low-value bulk or containers going from or to seaports.
The generic term the OP is looking for is probably “rail freight terminals”.
St Louis has a vast area of disused and derelict box-car loading/unloading and warehousing buildings and rail sidings.
As I recall, a depot is a warehouse for handling goods: a station is any stop: but a siding doesn’t have to have a depot or a station.
Where I am, an “access point” is any place where you can get access to the rail line. It includes loading/unloading points, but also includes road crossings and pedestrian crossings. In our modern world, a list of access points, like a list of rail sidings, seems to be a kind of secret document, available on a need-to-know basis.
Anyway, I’ve never heard of a term like the one you want. Part of my Grandfathers skill set was /knowing/ where items could be delivered: I never heard my Dad use a technical term for the delivery points.
Post Script: a ‘terminal’ is where a line terminates.
Coal doesn’t complain if it takes a while to get from the Powder River basin to a power plant in the Midwest. If a passenger train takes a while passengers are going to complain to Amtrak, not BNSF and the kind of shipping where you need a bunch of engine parts at your plant the next morning is done almost exclusively by truck. If you call BSNF and say you want to ship a boxcar of engine parts to Peoria tommorrow it’s unlikely they’ll be interested. There’s generally little incentive to make things faster for freight, and if you want to make things faster or add capacity for passenger trains the railroads expect someone else to pay them.
Most of the investments the railroads do are for where lack of capacity is costing them money, such as lines across the upper Midwest used by Bakken oil trains.
There’s a freight line that runs near my mom’s house. All along the line, there’s a bunch of light industry, originally built there to take advantage of that line. It used to be that each one had a rail siding: Every so often, a tender engine would deliver a boxcar of whatever raw materials that plant used to that little spur, or pick up a boxcar of whatever product it was that that plant produced. The tenders would run back and forth between the sidings and a big railyard somewhere on the outskirts of town (close enough to be convenient, but far enough for land to be cheap), where the boxcars were assembled and disassembled into cross-country trains.
Nowadays, almost all of those sidings are rusted and overgrown, or removed for scrap, and the plants handle all of their shipping in and out via semi trucks. I do rather wonder what changed that caused that to happen.
Trucks are more flexible is 90%, if not 100%, of it. The local locomotives were probably on a set schedule which would have been hard to change, since they’re using the same track as the long distance trains. Many factories have moved to just-in-time manufacturing, which means they need deliveries and pickups at various times that do not correspond to the local’s schedule.
I just saw an estimate of $1M per Km for sidings - and that’s not including land costs. Nobody wants to build newer and faster, even through less populated areas.
The big problem with rail priority is that trains which are running late get lower priority. If a passenger train gets behind for any reason, then it gets later and later and later.
I worked for a freight railroad as a conductor and a yardmaster in Pennsylvania. To be honest it seemed like there was a complete lack of customer service on the railroads part. Customers would call and ask for specific cars that we were storing and I would do the best I could to expedite the move. Most people didn’t seem to care.
I have a job now where I visit more than one railroad and things seem to be getting worse, longer trains, layoffs and cost cutting. It’s spreading like a virus. Started with Hunter Harrison at CSX and now working its way through Norfolk Southern. They seem to only be interested in long haul trains and leave a lot of the local shifting to short lines when they can.
I think another reason could be cost of upkeep on whatever spur the industry owns to connect to the railroad.
Here Amtrak leases 100 miles of track to enhance passenger service.
I believe freights railroads are supposed to give passenger trains preference but tell them that.
I’m not sure if anyone has answered tis, but the generic term you’re looking for is probably “rail yard” or “freight yard”.
Also, boxcars filled with engine components or appliances or the like are rarely seen these days. About 40 years ago, most railways started shifting to TOFC – Trailer on Flat Car. Such goods are trucked to the rail yard or other designated location, and the entire trailer is loaded onto a flat car. At the end of the rail trip, a truck picks up the trailer to take it to its destination.
This Association of American Railroads paper says boxcars accounted for 11% of rail traffic in 1994 but only 3% ‘today’ (written in 2018).
Anyway I agree the generic answer is ‘rail freight terminals’ including loading/unloading sidings at mines, etc. The only common case I think of where rail cars are loaded/unloaded, as opposed to sorted, at rail yards is where trailer/container terminals are co-located with rail yards.
I have little trouble believing that boxcars are nearly an extinct part of the rail industry. I certainly see relatively few of them in my travels.
[anecdote]
About eight years ago, there was a large derailment alongside a highway I routinely traveled in central Kansas. A family friend owned farmland that was crossed by this track and thirty or more boxcars were strewn about his land. After the derailment, the rail company quickly sent out a crew to repair the track and offload the cargo from the boxcars. This process was complete in less than three days. A company representative then offered my farmer friend a choice. Option A was to wait until the rail company moved the boxcars with no promised timeline. It will happen when it happens and may well take months. The company would issue a check to my friend as compensation for the loss of the use of much of his land, an offer that my friend says was somewhere between a joke and an insult. Option B was to offer the empty boxcars as salvage. If my friend wanted to use his own time and equipment to drag the empty cars at least fifteen yards from the track, he owned them and could do with them as he wished. He ended up keeping at least five of them and an empty boxcar makes a pretty nice shed. I was also an excuse for him to buy a new plasma cutter that he suddenly needed all of a sudden.
Mo Pac has a yard in North Little Rock, and I see about an equal number of box cars and flats. We can hear the hump yard from our house.
Do rail roads make any money hauling people?
Probably not much, which is why (a) all of the US railroads got out of the passenger business in the early 1970s, when the Federal government formed Amtrak, and took over the railroad’s passenger operations, and (b) why the railroads don’t seem to always give passenger trains priority over their freight operations, even though their agreement with Amtrak says that they should be giving passenger traffic priority.
Until maybe the late 1970s, railroads would often have team tracks, where small businesses that didn’t have their own rail sidings could deliver less-than-carload freight shipments (and pick up same). Sometimes you’ll see the remnants beside the tracks in a small town: wooden platforms with a ramp at one end allowing things to be wheeled up to boxcar-floor or flatbed level. But from the 1930s, many railroads would also send their own trucks to pick up and deliver such shipments.
Now, as we’ve noted, not so much. The big cross-country railroads are only interested in using their limited capacity for big moves of lots of cars from one yard to another. A factory that ships 10 cars a week can probably get the railroad to send out a local “patrol” train to pick up their cars and deliver the empties. A factory shipping only 10 cars a month probably doesn’t get its phone calls returned, and long ago switched to trucks.
Though of course there are traffic congestion issues, and minor pollution/greenhouse gas issues with more trucking, it’s really an entirely logical development. Railroads are an inherently one-dimensional system, with lots of logistical problems getting individual railcars to the right place in a two-dimensional geography. Trucks can go door to door, with no transloading of goods ever needed. You don’t even see trailer-on-flatcar service much any more; now the basic unit is a container that usually started at an Asian seaport, then came from the West Coast as part of a double-stack train, and will be put on a trailer chassis and pulled by a truck for less than 200 miles to a factory or retail distribution center.