Railroads should get back into moving household goods

With the new U-Paks the responsibility is transferred from the RR to the consumer..A couple of companys have these boxes like u-haul but non of them move by rail. I know NS owned Mayflower for a couple of years. RRs were forced out of the moving buisess by the old ICC and never got back in.
http://cb.tollefson.us/uploaded_images/ ... 732676.jpg

You'ld have to come up with a pretty substantial volume of business to justify particpation by an industry which has evolved into something more like a wholesale, than a retail operation. As demonstrated by the size of PODS containers, the average moving and/or storage customer requires only a fraction of the space in a typical boxcar (and the freight roads have pretty much given up on specialized boxcars for any purpose).

So any business generated would have to move in containers under the responsibility of a third party. Not an impossibility, but the freight roads would have to recapture a lot more of the MM&P (manufactures, miscellaneous and persihable) traffic previously lost to trucking before HHG would be back in their sights.

Depending on locale, you could ship it via Amtrak Express

I think the UPaks and PODS have dimensions that could allow it to slide into a container. If you could aggregate enough cross-country moves, you could put them into a container at a transload yard like Mechanicville. As a mover, you could make the case that railroad moves are subject to less accelleration in any of the three cardinal directions, resulting in less shifting inside the mini-container, and less damage to the household goods.

Are you familiar with slack action?

WIKIPEDIA describes slack action as...........

" In railroading, slack action is the amount of free movement of one car before it transmits its motion to an adjoining coupled car. This free movement results from the fact that in railroad practice cars are loosely coupled, and the coupling is often combined with a shock-absorbing device, a "draft gear," which, under stress, substantially increases the free movement as the train is started or stopped. Modern couplers are designed to reduce slack action over older technology, such as link and pin connections."

Some shipper could set up containerized POD service, or piggyback, or even own the special boxcars, and hire a RR to handle them. Maybe they already do something like that. That's how various package companies use rail, and maybe (still?) some mail contractors. The problem, of course, is that household goods are generally off-line at both ends of the trip and even shifting the pods from one mode to another costs money and takes time.

What about handling private autos on routes where a given road always has to move empty auto-racks (if such routes exist)? That would be using existing cars in existing trains. Amtrak's auto-train covers all it's costs, I believe, so you'd maybe either a RR, or more likely a clever company with RR and auto distributor connections could put together a web-advertised service to move cars between major metropolitan areas -- the ones that are big enough that so many people move between them every day that you could usually fill one or two auto racks with the cars of the ones who'd rather fly, or only drive one of their cars, or whatever. Or maybe not; the service I'm imagining would only run in one direction on most routes and would require a fair amount of organizational support, payment to the auto companies to use their facilities and to someone to drive the cars onto the train, etc., and so might very likely not make business sense.

I've never dealt sdirectly with a major (franchise-based) HHG mover, but according to friends who have, it's usually not like the scenario in the ads where a single van takes one family's efects door-to-door; it often operates more like an LTL/LCL 'breakbulk"-type operation. (However, one thing that did suprise me when I worked in a hub or a package shipper (DHL) was that I encountered very little movement of personal effects there as well).

With regard to the "slack action" issue, I think we should remember that the entire TOFC/COFC technology was reconfigured to deal with this back in the 1980's; loss and damage should be much less of a deterrent to HHG and other fragile, high-value shipments than it was back then, Nevertheless, I don't think that Mayflower, Bekins and the rest want their logo displayed on anything moving on a TTX car.

2nd trick op wrote:I've never dealt sdirectly with a major (franchise-based) HHG mover, but according to friends who have, it's usually not like the scenario in the ads where a single van takes one family's efects door-to-door; it often operates more like an LTL/LCL 'breakbulk"-type operation. (However, one thing that did suprise me when I worked in a hub or a package shipper (DHL) was that I encountered very little movement of personal effects there as well).

With regard to the "slack action" issue, I think we should remember that the entire TOFC/COFC technology was reconfigured to deal with this back in the 1980's; loss and damage should be much less of a deterrent to HHG and other fragile, high-value shipments than it was back then, Nevertheless, I don't think that Mayflower, Bekins and the rest want their logo displayed on anything moving on a TTX car.

The various 'pod' storage/moving containers are designed to be packed by homeowner, not professional movers; as such the non-professionals have virtually no idea of the stresses that will be placed upon their belongings inside the container - for over the road movement, let alone rail movement. Were these pods to be shipped via rail, in vary many instances, I could see the receiver opening the pod a destination and finding very little left except for piles of kindling that used to be their furniture.

I can't imagine that railroads didn't welcome ICC exemption from handling household goods...like the other claims-intensive markets they chose to (defacto) exit once deregulated, like cigarettes and furniture.

When NS owned Mayflower some intermodal moves resulted, though quite limited. The concept practiced was to send one driver into a market where two loads had to be handled. One load went via rail while the other over-the-road. Once the driver delivered the OTR load, they would bring the empty trailer to the intermodal terminal for movement home, pick up the load that went via rail, deliver it to the customer(s), then head back home over-the-road. Besides loss and damage issues, one can see the limitations imposed by market demand and logistics with this sort of concept.

When my brother got out of the Navy he had thought about moving his stuff by rail but in the end it was cheaper and faster to rent a truck and car dolly and drive from Washington State to New York even tho the NAVY would have payed to have everything shipped by train.

I belive Allied Van Lines has/had a bunch of "domestic 53 ft+ 48ft containers" for cross country runs.
There was a bunch of stored Allied containers at storage yard near Portland Or.
Smaller moving co's will use a long haul carrier between warehouses under the term of"Freight of All Kinds"(FAK) tag.