As a Field Service Technician, I get a lot of wheel time. And I see a lot of truckers running down the road. Lots.
So that left me wondering: wouldn’t it be more cost effective to ship in bulk via rail? Especially cross-country? Is their some sort of cost overhead involved in rail transit I’m not seeing? Something that makes over-the-road more cost effective?
Truly, it seems that about the only thing I see go via rail now are lines of coal cars, chemical tankers, and maybe farm produce (esp. thing like grains).
When something is shipped via rail, it (most likely) still needs to go on two trucks. There have to be people at each dock to keep it running, and they don’t work for free. Also, said docks may or may not be conveniently located.
Several reasons, just in time (JIT) delivery allows many business to avoid building and maintaining warehousing space, especially in the retail food industry. Trucks can P/U and deliver point to point w/o any trans shipping. Those are probably the leading two. I certainly agree that there are too many rigs on the road. Deregulation allowed for a race to the bottom in trucking. It may have been a good thing from a ‘cost of shipping’ perspective, but there’s a price to pay, w/ highway safety being at the top of the list. There’s also a high cost in wear and tear on the infrastructure and every assessment I’ve seen says that the trucking industry doesn’t pay their fair share. Road use taxes, fuel permits (req. in most states) and fuel taxes are high for trucks, but apparently they need to be higher. I’ve been saying, for years, that we need to invest in a much better rail system in the U.S., and that’s heresy for a guy who was in the trucking business for 24 years.
As fuel costs rise, more and more products will be shipped by rail, which gets more economical. I just heard on the radio this morning that CSX can move a ton of freight some long distance – 100 miles? – on a gallon of fuel. And our local railroad - the Nashville & Eastern – has recently added another 90 or so miles of track to their mainline to service new customers. Also, a very large amount of the cargo you see on the highways did travel by rail at some point, probably from the west coast seaports to a central trucking distribution hub.
My company ships some very large items via truck. The logistics of getting it shipped at a particular time, and having people and equipment on hand to unload it when it arrives are a real hassle. If we added a rail link in the middle of the trip, I can see this multiplying by at least a factor of three, with 3X the opportunity for damage and delay. AND when it arrives damaged the trucking company is going to be pointing the finger at the railroad, the railroad at the trucking companies, etc.
Piggybacking semi trailers on flatbed railcars used to be quite popular, but I don’t see that so much these days.
Probably because they’ve figured out that they can just rail ship the container, without the wheels/suspension part of the trailer. And a shipping container on a railcar isn’t very noticeable/remarkable compared to a whole trailer. So I bet just as much is being shipped in containers, just that you’re not noticing because you don’t see any wheels.
I read somewhere that invention and adoption of standard shipping containers was considered the biggest transportation advance of the 20th century, comparable in impact to moving from sail to steam.
My husband works for one of the largest American railroads, and this is exactly right. They refer to it as COFC (Container On Flat Car) traffic, and they handle a LOT of it, even stacked two containers high on a car. The Alameda Corridor in Los Angeles was constructed specifically to handle railroad container traffic, for example. There are huge railyards that are dedicated to handling containers - taking them off trains and on to trucks for more local distribution.
American railroads are doing quite well right now. They have all the business they want and more. I have heard it said that there is the same amount of rail traffic now that there was at the peak of WWII, but on many fewer miles of track; I have no idea if it’s true or not.
I was never directly involved in this, but I know that it’s very hard on the trailers suspension. Most modern semi trailers have air bags as part of the suspension. These bags go flat w/o an air supply and subject the rest of the suspension to constant hammering on a rail car. Then there’s the problem of loading/unloading, something containers are designed for, but trailers are not. Trailers are also easier to break into and/or vandalize.
There are rail cars, built w/ a low slung frame, that can accomodate stacking containers and still meet height clearance requirements. Semi trailers take up much more space and don’t come near to the allowable weight of a rail car. There are other problems too, flat tires complicate handling and the trailers seems to attract pot shots from random sources as they roll through the countryside.
I work for a freight forwarder/NVOCC, and we handle lots of inland transport to the ocean ports. In many cases, the rigs you see on the road are taking the freight to the rail. Example: Suppose we have a shipper in Grand Forks or Fargo. The logical thing would be to take it to the rail in Minneapolis, a trip of about 320 miles. However, the steamship line we want to use does not have a rail connection in Minneapolis. The ones that do have no equipment available. So we have to take the cargo by truck all the way to Chicago, more than twice the distance. In other cases, speed is the issue. Often a distance that it would take you a day or two to drive takes a week by rail, because the railroad is not necessarily taking the most direct route, and because it’s stopping en route to take containers on or off.
I live just a mile or so from one of the main transcontinental rail lines. Several times a day I see 100+ car freight trains, and every car is a flat with either one or two piggybacks on it.
That and coal seem to be the bulk of what’s shipped. I see very few tank cars or box cars.