Trailer based intermodal freight - to fund HSR lines

David Benton wrote:Why restrict it to 70 mph ? . I would think something like 100 mph would be necessary to be really competitive . but it would be the average speed that would count . and , yes , it is the way to go for hsr in The USA

The French have parcels/mail trains which are conventional TGV fitted for freight instead of passengers. They rightly know that all trains should go at the same speeds. Of course TGV can go on ordinary lines when necessary.
The high speed line to the tunnel (High Speed 1) has been fitted with passing loops but no-one knows whether they will ever be used.

VPayne wrote: Consider the California HSR proposal. Right now it specifically excludes freight other than package freight that could be carried on passenger consist apparently at the direction of the authority's board on page 6 of CA HSR. But what if they were to propose a system of 125 mph lines and lightweight trailer based intermodal freight. The mix just might make any highway investment look foolish and hence shift the funds to HSR.

Compromise solution. It just doesn't really prove a strong enough benefit for either. I think step one is to get over how things are done now. Right now we move things by truck - because that is how we design the handling of it. Most of the stuff that gets picked up off the train only goes to warehouse where it is loaded onto smaller trucks for local delivery. The reason we carry road containers is because the shipping companies and railroads just want to deal with full container loads, and let the road companies deal with the freight handling.

I am sure that there is room to increase our speed of freight trains. But I don't think we should compromise passenger high-speed rail to accommodate it, when that type of traffic doesn't benefit from it. Right now anything that has to move fast moves by air, that's the market that needs to be attracted to rail. Local truck deliveries don't benefit from the consolidation unless you are going to be going from one warehouse to another. Why waste the weight of the container, when you can use simple pallets and lightweight air containers?

We need to look at ways to improve high-speed rail, not just get somewhere within the ballpark of Europe. If we are going to spend the money on it, then make it fast enough at the start.

The other issue with frieght wieght is allowable gradients . Short light frieghts should be able to climb the same gradients as the passenger trains .french tgv's have grades of 1 in 26 , i believe . From some pictures posted in the world wide forum , it looks like the germans have even steeper grades . this would cut row costs , and allow them to follow motorways etc .

The pallet idea would be great, if the shippers would accept it. Consider that in the EU they recently, ~2004, did a study of a pallet based intermodal system complete with sorting all the way down to a delivery truck route and have yet to implement it. The railhaul was to be passenger type cars similar to the TGV Fret concept. It must be noted that the TGV Fret concept, which uses duplex style cars and side loading doors along the length of the cars, has also not been built.

They ship pallets on aircraft all the time. I can't imagine it being particularly more difficult that containers.

cloudship wrote:They ship pallets on aircraft all the time. I can't imagine it being particularly more difficult that containers.

Why would it be great? It seems to me that pallets would add lots of problems, load shifting if not wrapped correctly, ID of loads, trans loading. I am thinking with containers HSR would have all the advantages of oceanic containers....no shuffling of loads, the product is locked away, all of the units are the same size thus leading to efficiency in movement. You have containers at the origin, they load them up and call the truck(s) to move them up to the rail-head. The containers are then stAcked and when train time comes they are quickly loaded into the trainset hopefully using a conveyor and automatic load lockdown system. After the train arrives the conveyer unloads the train, and the containers are loaded on to waiting trucks. I am thinking that the load/unload time should get down to 30 minutes, that the max time in the terminal at either end would be one hour. This process would use very few humans, most of it is automated. Some of the units could be refers for food which would plug automatically into a power supply.

the computer systems to do this already largely exist at the major container ship ports, would need modification only.

I think the main issues with typical freight containers are that they add weight and are too big. Ultimately the container adds weight outside of the weight of the product itself. The pallet will also add weight, but not as much as a whole container. Plus, the container has to be strong enough to structurally support itself while moving and being stacked. On a normal train this weight simply replaces the rail car itself, but for a lightweight, highly aerodynamic train, you are still going to have to have some structure to make the container aerodynamic. And it still will be a lot of weight that is unnecessary.

The other issue is that many companies don't fill up whole container. If you are going to bother with high-speed shipping, you are not going to want to have to fill a whole container before sending the product. In fact, you might not want to add that extra step of dealing with the container. Everything will have to be loaded onto some kind of skid anyway, so why go through the extra of putting it into a container?

I am following the idea of cargo aircraft here, and how they handle freight. Their containers are a lot smaller and a lot lighter. But even then they have a lot of stuff which simply gets put on a pallet. Once it is properly wrapped and secured, put a RFID tag on it and use a forklift. Agreed it is not quite as quick as loading a cargo container, but the time spent here will end up saving time at the warehouse.

8'-6" wide x 9'-6" tall is too big? Containers only weight around 56,000 - 58,000 lbs maximum - loaded with freight. That is not too heavy either.

Remember the container must be on a 8,000 lbs chassis and still make it under the roughly 65,000 limit for a trailer so that the entire rig is less than 80,000 lbs. In fact even the 65,000 lbs a trailer weighs is not too heavy for high speed rail line axle loading.

I don't think you are going to gain any real aerodynamic advantages over the standard container until you pass 110 mph.

However, containers do have the problem of having a lot of tare weight when in the road mode. A typical trailer might weight 13,000 to 14,000 lbs but a container and chassis will weigh around 16,000 lbs to 17,000 lbs+. This means a container must be loaded differently than a trailer. It stills pays to be compatible with the existing system.

I started this thread knowing the disparity that exists between road funding and HSR funding. It has been the US policy to expect HSR lines to be built with private capital and operate at a breakeven mark.

However, such is not the case with roads. The current $0.184/gallon federal gas tax, which pays 80% of road capital costs, only equates to a user fee of $0.006/mile. Trucks pay a slight bit more but have a user equity ratio of 0.80, in other words they do more damage than they pay for, so I have assumed cars fill their spots. $0.006/mile, so what you say....

Well, in the case of new interstate construction this "user fee" hardly covers the cost of the construction. Consider that most rural interstates have 25,000 AADT, yielding only $55,000 in revenue to repay the 80% capital match.

Since the state gas tax is fully committed to maintenance and whatever construction costs now that they have a mature network there really isn't anything left on their side but maybe to get the 20% match by putting off other projects. The state costs also would not account for uninsured motorist hospital treatment and other direct costs to the states.

So, $55,000/year at a 30 year 5% rate would be $845,488 in capital. Divide this by 80% and the total construction cost could only be $1.057 million a mile.

However, a 4 lane rural interstate, such as the proposed I-69 in Indiana is going to cost $27 million a mile at the last estimate. 25 times the capital that can be afforded by the gas tax. Urban interstates might have 100,000 AADT but they cost a lot more to build and rebuild.

Of course since the federal gas tax hasn't been raised since 1993 we could use an inflation adjusted number of $0.24/gallon but that still only yields $1.403 million a mile.

The National Transportation Revenue Study Commission just released a report today calling for an increase in the gas tax of around $0.24/gallon (per radio report). I assume this would be the Federal gas tax. But even the resulting $0.40/gallon would only yield a capital of $2.340 million a mile. So new construction would still be around 8 times as expense as the "user fee" pays for.

Were does the remainder of the Highway Trust Fund money come from? Mostly from taxing fuel used on local roads maintained or built with local or private funds. That money belongs to the people not to highway interests only!

If trailer based rail intermodal can contribute to $3.000 million in capital alone, while removing the maintenance burden on interstates, saving fuel and labor, avoiding more deadly accidents, and providing a ROW for the use on intermediate speed passenger rail this makes for an excellent counter to the construction on new interstates. More importantly the public actually wants this and is just looking for a funding mechanism.

Even one of the larger alternatives to an immediately constructed high speed rail line, the Trans-Texas Corridor, does not propose to actually build automobile lanes immediately under the public-private scheme put forward. See page 84, they intend to build the 4-lane truck tollway first with no automobile lanes and then only construct the separate auto toll lanes once what I would assume is a combined toll lane reaches a LOS of C. The rest of the Trans-Texas Corridor report

The TTC private group is looking to charge automobiles $0.125/mile and trucks from $0.45 to $0.50/mile in 2010 dollars as a toll. The Virginia experience indicates that such a high truck toll rate would not fly with the over the road carriers.

The other question is with truck operating costs in the $1.60 range there is no way they can add $0.50/mile and be competitive. However, intermodal rail could accept have an effective $0.30/mile toll and still provide a $0.90/mile service slightly faster that overnight truck.

TxDOT and the TTC group are having a series of meeting this month and next after some nasty kickback from the public on the I-35 alternative. But I do not see anywhere in their promotional literature just a single truck tollway operating at LOS of C with a family in the middle! HSR is supposed to be only a future component of this corridor when the other toll lanes are filled up. My prediction is the TTC proposal is going downhill once a lot of this becomes common knowledge.

Well, just is case anyone is curious this link brings you to the French infrastructure charging page. The PDF's to the right show the various charges per train/km for using the different classes of the network. On other pages there is discussion of one mixed use TGV/Freight line to the south as well as a discussion of mixed use lines.

To mix 140 - 155mph passenger Trains with 65 - 75mph conventional freight trains is no problem, that happens every day between Berlin and Hamburg, Wien and Linz, Tours and Bordeaux or Karlsruhe and Offenburg.

At night conventional freight trains also travel on high-speed-lines (at daytime there are 175mph-ICE-trains).

For those questioning the limits of mixed trailer freight and high speed trains see this excellent report in PDF format I have been speaking about what the report calls a Category II freight train, intermodal at 120 km/h (75 mph). As you get into the grades discussion you can see the certain sweet spot for such an intermodal train with moderate power on high speed lines.