What would a High Speed Freight Train look like?

From Europe!!!! for TTX!!!

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v105/ ... RCargo.jpg

This study of high speed rail freight offers some insightsa in to the market , handling equipment , and rolling stock that may be used in high speed freight service .
http://www4.banverket.se/raildokuffe/pdf/MP0102.pdf

David Benton wrote:This study of high speed rail freight offers some insightsa in to the market , handling equipment , and rolling stock that may be used in high speed freight service .
http://www4.banverket.se/raildokuffe/pdf/MP0102.pdf

If it's Euro trains it's apples-oranges comparison to the U.S. because their freights are nowhere near as hefty as ours. Since a lot of our HSR lines are only proposed to be semi-HSR because of existing infrastructure constraints the economic upside is going to have to figure in freight co-mingling. That needn't be much of a constriction. Class 5 track allows for 80 MPH freight, but there's so little of that outside the NEC. Freight mainlines top out at Class 4 (60 MPH freight, 80 MPH passenger). Just upgrading the track class, particularly when you start getting into HSR-ish Classes 6, 7, 8 solves a lot of that problem if the freights can start doing 90-100+. The speed penalty doesn't have to widen. Having adequate passing sidings, grade crossing elimination, and de-abandoning some convenient slow-speed radial freight routes as congestion bypasses solves the problem a lot more practically than re-engineering the whole concept of a freight train. That's a nonstarter for the private freight industry that does just fine with a lot of older refurbished equipment and little need to invest in bleeding-edge tech.

This is tougher in the west where the freights own just about all the lines, but in former Conrail territory out in the northeast and mid-atlantic the states snapped up a majority of the lines in the RR bankruptcy fire sales and landbanked pretty much all of the branchlines that were still extant when Penn Central went belly-up. Connecticut, for example, has government ownership of all but 2 mainlines--the heavy-use P&W's and NECR mains--. two strategic connecting branch (PAR Highland Line, a few small sections of the Armory Branch that haven't yet been consolidated under state control), and a few industrial track stubs that would never in a million years need passenger service. Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire are almost the same and will probably lock almost everything non-NECR or P&W down in a few years the way PAR and CSX are dumping real estate. For the NEC and that future dream of an inland NYC-Boston bypasses there are a whole lot of state-controlled options for diverting freight traffic without compromising freight throughput. This is doable because all the Class I's and II's are getting out of what's left of their local business and consolidating to big-time transload operations with fewer yards and bigger yard build-outs of the ones they keep. CSX's Boston pull-out, relocation to Worcester, and turning over of its branches to short lines is a prime example. As long as the capacity's there to get their double-stacks to a transload yard, they don't really care what routes they cede to the MBTA and Amtrak or whether their dispatching priority takes a back seat. It doesn't affect their bulk business. The passenger track improvements they reap from passenger investment more than offsets having to play second-banana on traffic priority.

What the U.S. needs to do over the next quarter- to half-century is work to secure some re-route alternatives to its heavy, heavy freight corridors out west that are HSR targets. It's going to take more a public-private partnership to make it happen, and regulatory changes will probably have to reflect that. But the RR's had plenty of western bypass routes before everything got trimmed back (albeit with less landbanking foresight), so it's not like those states don't have options similar to those in ex-Penn Central/Conrail territory. It's mainly a matter of rethinking the partnership. The RR's seem willing because it's mutually beneficial to them, but it's more a change in philosophy and the nature of cooperation than just straight-shoveling subsidy at the RR's to relocate their traffic. I don't see a lot of will right now at the gov't level to change old habits, mainly because of how dysfunctional public-private partnership is across the board when it comes to public services. But survival of the country depends on them belatedly getting with that program in the next decade or two. This kind of rethinking perpetuates itself across the board when it's templated in a lot of areas. We just might have to suffer an economic depression and a bunch of social unrest before pure survival instinct finally pulls their heads out of their arses.

The Chinese proposal to build a railway between Pacific and Caribbean in Colombia is usually said to be a competitor to the Panama Canal, but it is also a competitor to Union Pacific.

george matthews wrote:The Chinese proposal to build a railway between Pacific and Caribbean in Colombia is usually said to be a competitor to the Panama Canal, but it is also a competitor to Union Pacific.

Would the transloading and train be faster than a trip through the canal?

As far as UP goes ... does much cargo go from a boat in California to a boat in the gulf? Or does a Panama boat-train-boat route be enough of an improvement to compete in getting trainloads to the eastern US?

justalurker66 wrote:

george matthews wrote:The Chinese proposal to build a railway between Pacific and Caribbean in Colombia is usually said to be a competitor to the Panama Canal, but it is also a competitor to Union Pacific.

Would the transloading and train be faster than a trip through the canal?

As far as UP goes ... does much cargo go from a boat in California to a boat in the gulf? Or does a Panama boat-train-boat route be enough of an improvement to compete in getting trainloads to the eastern US?

The Colombian line has two purposes. One is to speed up Chinese exports to the eastern US; the other is to carry coal going to China.

Um , did anyone actually read it ???

I don't think there is an economic reality to support moving TV's, ipods, etc. around at 180 mph. I'm guessing the railroads right now have freight transportation as optimized as it can get. What we need is the ability to safely mix lower speed freights with higher speed (120 mph) passenger trains, all on the same tracks.

Mike has hit the nail squarely on the head with regard to freight of substantially high value. The competition there is between air freght and trucking; rail transport seldom enters the picture, with the singular exception of moving containers from the piers to "distribution centers", and there only if the distribution facility is a fair distance inland.

One subject which would interest me very much, and which, for whatever reason, seems to have very ittle research available, is the rail carriers' loss of time-sensitive freight of moderate- to high-value as the highway network developed. When the first long-distance truckers emrged, around 1930, the railroads answered, for a time, with dedicated freght service in intermediate corridors like New York-Buffalo, New York-Pittsburgh and San Franciso-Los Angeles. Sometimes, these runs, which usually operated overnight, were accorded first-class status in Employees Timetables of the day,

After World War II, several of the Eastern trunk lines made a final play with sevices dedicated exclusively to less-than-carload (LCL) traffic - NYC's Pacemaker and B&O's Timesaver/Sentinel services sported a fleet of specially-painted, easily-identifaible boxcars. And the Pennsylvania had several westbound freights, none of which operated on Sunday night/Monday morning, all symbolled "LCL". But nothing worked well as completion of the interstate highway system enhanced the truckers' advantage. The PRR "LCL" fleet was eventually redesignated as the "PR" series, and filled itself out by returning empty cars that formerly moved west on extras.

For whatever it's worth, during the years this writer worked in common carrier trucking as a dispatcher, the highway carriers never seemed to prosper from small shipents either. Prior to deregulation, if the major carriers didn't have direct authority to serve samll communities, they had to turn the shipment over to a small local carrier who did (and just about everybody had some gaps in their authority) and often didn't follow through on the originating carrier's commitment as quickly. When deregulation came to pass, a handful of large carriers expanded into the monopolized local markets, and hundreds of small carriers bit the dust. It wasn't long before all but the strongest of the major players followed suit.

When I retunred to the freight business in 2008 after a long hiatus, in a DHL distribution center, one new tactic which I was suprised to discover was that producers of small, but high-value or-time-sensitive shipments (custom home computer systems and gift boxes of citrus fruit were two overy common items) would ship a large numbr of orders to the same region via a common- or contract-carrier trucker, then let UPS, FedEx or DHL handle the local delivery.

So i wouldn't look for rail carriers to get in on almost any of this business soon. What might be possible, hovever, would be the recapture of the carload-size shipments of perishable (I. E: dressed meat and produce), merchandise, and occasional (I. E: specialty steel) shipments .... if the infrastructure can be rebuilt and sufficiently fine-tuned.