I contract a RR to take my cars to another down. Does the RR load my cars onto the flat cars, or do my employees?
I assume these days they mostly now use shipping containers (loaded onto semi-trailers, then the train, then likely a container ship). Which is basically the same idea as TOFC but the train (and ship) doesn’t have to haul the trailer wheels across the country/ocean.
How are the trailers removed from the flatcars?
At intermodal yards by large travelling gantry style cranes.
For those who haven’t seen what these look like, here’s a picture.
Of course, that’s a container terminal. Whole trucks are commonly carried by rail around Europe; notably through the Channel Tunnel. You just need a platform the same height as the deck.
Which also shows the semi-trailers for shipping containers; to the viewer’s right of the train are empty ones, and one over to the left there’s one with a container on it.
True! A missing piece that’s not shown in that photo is the “spotter truck” – a small semi truck which is used to move the loaded trailer from the crane to a ramp, where it’s mated with an over-the-road semi truck to be taken to its destination.
(I’d never heard of a “spotter truck” until a few years ago, when I discovered that one of my friends with whom I play an MMORPG drives a spotter truck at an intermodal yard.)
But the railroads can do door-to-door, at those locations sited next to the railroads, which many of them are. Or at least, they used to be able to, and only can’t now because they’ve chosen not to.
On the track that runs right next to my apartment (actually, the same line that goes near my mom’s house), the most common cargo nowadays seems to be coal, by a fair margin. But there are a fair number of automobiles, too, and some tank cars.
Where I live now, quasi-rural Indiana, there’s an interesting mix of train types for different jobs.
The main line running through the large town nearby carries autoracks (cars from the local Subaru plant), rolls of steel, wood, etc. Heavy stuff, and the line goes between Indy and Chicago, where factories abound. Big companies use these lines: NS, CSX
This same line also has Amtrak service, which is nice to know it’s there, but is just impractical timing-wise compared to driving. I’m surprised it still is in service. More than half my Amtrak experiences have been disappointing.
Meanwhile, there is a spur line running from the city out into the countryside, roughly parallel to the route I travel between work and home. This track was in really bad condition until about two years ago, when they did some maintenance work. There is, exactly, one train that runs up and down it, one round trip per day, maximum, run by a small railroad company. This line connects a series of grain elevators, and may actually be used for transporting dried corn from these silos to the city, where a corn syrup plant awaits. I say “may” because I haven’t actually seen corn being loaded on or off these trains. Also along this train line is a fairly substantial highway, and there are a LOT of trucks driving around here with grain trailers. My neighbor drives one of these for a living, apparently.
I’m not 100% sure what you are asking and I’m not really an expert on railroad operations. But I believe the generic term for what you are looking for is a “rail yard” or “industrial spur”.
Here is a Google Maps view of a rail yard in New Jersey operated by CSX:
It looks like it mostly services intermodal containers and tanker cars.
You can switch to Map view and follow the tracks around the Newark / Secaucus / Bayonne area and see where the various industrial spurs lead into specific factories, warehouses and distribution centers for loading and unloading.
Smaller sets of cars would be loaded and unloaded on the industrial spurs and then presumably assembled into trains in the rail yard for cross country transport. Or sent to one of the local ports and put on a ship.
As I understand it, trains are extremely efficient for long distances, but the problem is in delivering goods the “last mile”. Getting the goods from a centralized rail yard to various disparate locations. The benefit of intermodal containers (the ubiquitous 20 or 40 foot metal boxes you see everywhere) is that they can be picked up and put on a truck, special flat car or stacked on a ship or wherever you want to keep them. So basically the train or ship just pulls up to a spot, all the boxes are unloaded into a yard and then trucks come whenever to take them to their final destination.
Kind of neat actually.
Are there any maps of trains in Arkansas? There is a Mo-Pac yard here in North Little Rock. I often hear the hump yard, and trains traveling. I wonder were they came from, and where they are going.
OpenRailwayMap is pretty good, thanks to obsessive railfans, often even having the names of divisions and designations of tracks.
I think it’s interesting that Union Pacific in the 1990s ended up with two different railroad lines through Arkansas—the old Missouri Pacific via Little Rock and the old Cotton Belt via Pine Bluff. Neither was double-tracked, so they operated them as a one-way pair: northbound via Little Rock and southbound via Pine Bluff.
Interesting.
I’d be curious as to how the local network of spurs and sidings in and around the industrial areas work. Like does a factory sitting on an industrial spur call up the local rail yard and tell them to pick up their box cars? Basically what happens after they break apart the train into its component cars to send to their various destinations around the area.
Thanks.
I’m sure they can and do, but I believe it’s also common for most factories to know they’ll get visited by a local “patrol” on Mondays and Thursdays, or whatever. When, say, five cars of corn syrup show up at the railroad’s big regional yard consigned for delivery to the cookie factory, they don’t send a locomotive and crew out to deliver it immediately. Instead, they make the appropriate notes/computer entries to put those cars into the consist of the next patrol serving the factory.
I think this is the issue. For anything smaller than a containerful, trucks have supplanted the railroads. Thanks to union rules and management arrogance, the difficulties in dealing with smaller quantities of freight became less appealing and more flexible trucking companies were willing to jump in and solve the problems. Thus, anything other than bulk items and a large number of containers, it is simpler and more flexible for companies to ship coast-to-coast by truck. If time of the essence, then shipping even a container full is quicker by truck than arranging for a train to take it to a local yard. Add in the current “just in time inventory” management fad, and time is more important than carbon footprint.
I knew a fellow who worked for a company that made shipping software. One install job was for a major retailer with specialty stores all over the USA. The software would figure out optimal truck loads and routes, so one truck would be filled in the correct order and head out on the best route to efficiently deliver what was available in the warehouse to a sequence of stores in the continental USA.
The railroad companies couldn’t be bothered with this sort of customer service, they were and are making adequate amounts of money shipping bulk commodities and transhipping stuff from China to one or more local American distribution points taking their own sweet time, to where trucks take over.
It’s not simply, or even “quicker”; it’s flexible as opposed to having the rigid timetables of a rail network.
The haulage company I used to work for specialised in shipping pallet loads of perishables (like yoghurt) between manufacturer and wholesaler. Next day was the normal delivery time. They sent several trailers full to Scotland (>300 miles and seven hours drive) every night. They experimented with rail freight containers but it simply didn’t work.
The containers had to be loaded and then delivered by road to the rail depot, they were transhipped and hauled up to the depot in Glasgow and then by road to the company warehouse. In theory, it should have worked, but if there was a delay in loading, and this was frequent because they were still waiting for goods to arrive from elsewhere, the container would miss the train and have to go all the way by road anyway. The rail company still wanted payment for the unused space too.
With a trailer, an hour or so’s delay didn’t really matter. Time could be made up on the road with luck, or the receiving depot would just have to wait. The experiment was abandoned after six weeks.
That would seem to make sense to me from a cost standpoint. Trains are great at shipping large volumes long distances between two fixed points. Anything else, truck is probably going to be cheaper.
Are scheduled freight trains really that much of a thing? They seemed to be more common in the past, but even then they’d do special runs for big orders or to catch up if they were behind. Nowadays it seems like a lot of freight just goes whenever it goes. For small shippers that could be even worse than a schedule since they’d have no say on when their stuff gets picked up or delivered.
Either way, labor plays a big part in all this. It only takes a one or two man crew to haul a 100-car train across the country. It takes that same crew, if not more, to switch a single car into a customer’s siding, and that can easily take hours. Also consider that freight railroads still have to pay to maintain their own tracks, bridges, and right-of-way. They also pay property taxes on that land (this has been reduced in recent decades, but not eliminated), which creates the perverse incentive to remove extra tracks, buildings, and even electrification systems. Cars, trucks, airplanes, and even barges don’t have that same burden, they’re all subsidized in ways that freight rail isn’t.