Re:(erielack) Loose Car Railroading

["Paul Brezicki" <doctorpb_@_bellsouth.net>]

Randy's points are correct: assigned cars return empty, some of the delays pertain to the consignee, and the products concerned here are not speed sensitive or subject to JIT delivery (you'd be hard-pressed to predict the week of arrival let alone the hour).(Clarification: the car routed through Chicago was destined to Valleyfield PQ, not Connecticut.) But all of this degrades car utilization. The Trains article predicts the possible extinction of the boxcar; several factors are at play, including the steep decline in boxcar traffic mainstays paper and auto parts, but a big reason is they don't make enough trips per year to justify the capital investment. This dates from the 1960's, when RR's compounded low ROI by ordering boxcars equipped with expensive cushioned underframes and load restraining devices; now they had a $20,000 car travelling 50 miles per day instead of a $13,000 car.

The big challenge in loose-car railroading is how to improve car utilization. Kneiling and co. had a simplistic solution: scrap the entire loose-car system since it was hopeless, put as much of the bulk as possible in unit trains and containerize everything else. Trends have tended to lend credence to his approach: most of the freight has been containerized and "unitized". Meanwhile, mergers, new hump yards etc have failed to significantly improve car utilization. There's a good reason: with the current system it can't be done. As an example, it's easy to see why dwell times in yards are commonly 30 hours or more. As a rule, there is a single schedule daily between major yards. Considering the time involved in humping and then assembling trains, if a train doesn't arrive at least 4-6 hours before its connection is scheduled to depart, connecting cars will depart on the following day's train (30 hours later).

Almost all rail traffic can be containerized; the question is, should it be? On one hand, intermodal platforms enjoy high utilization  because they run station-to-station with minimal if any switching, and because they're in effect, general service, they rarely "return empty". On the other hand, it would take an awful lot of bulktainers to haul the chemical traffic shipped from the Gulf in tank cars. 

I think the potential for carrying much remaining carload traffic in unit trains has not been fully explored. It's been done with coal and grain traffic, why not chemicals? They don't have to be 100 cars. I can envision a system where 5 to 10 car lots are taken by a single locomotive and crew to a gathering point, then consolidated into groups heading for a convenient distribution point, where they're in turn, seperated for delivery. This is similar to how NS handles its Roadrailers. Even if such trains run 2 or 3 times weekly, car utilization will still be way ahead of the current system, and without the capital investment and property tax liability of hump yards. If other traffic isn't showing up, tack the cut on the rear of a conventional unit train headed in the same direction. For pickup and delivery the RR behaves more like a trucker. Pass the savings on to the customer by giving them rate incentives to build storage facilities which can handle larger shipments. No more sitting in Danville yard for 5 days. Side benefit: the direct point-to-point approach opens up more short- and medium-haul traffic to the RR's. Anything that can't be handled in this manner should be containerized or handled at a bulk-transfer/distribution canter.

Again, to insert EL content here, I'd like to hear comments from ex-EL employees on their recollections of transit and delivery times. Did EL do significantly better than PC, LV etc?

Paul B

If the cars were assigned to the service, they were forced to return empty.

Delays at destination could be caused by the receiver not wanting the car right away.

Routing a car from Texas to Connecticut via Chicago and Toronto is ridiculous -- unless CN or CV assigned the car.

Most manufacturing processes of old, and many today, do not demand "Just In Time" delivery; the customer is happy simply to know where the car is and when it will arrive.

A young bull and an old bull stood on a hillside, viewing a herd of heifers.  The young bull said, "Let's run down there and do a couple of them."  The old bull replied, "Let's walk down there and do ALL of them!"

Speed isn't everything.

Randy Brown 


	The Erie Lackawanna Mailing List
	Sponsored by the ELH&TS
	http://www.elhts.org
	To Unsubscribe: http://lists.elhts.org/erielackunsub.html

------------------------------