The future in freight cars: a tight market has not deterred freight car builders from bringing new ideas to the table and manufacturing products for niche markets and new ventures - Cover Story - Industry Overview

Railway Age, Sept, 2002 by Christopher Ytuarte

The freight car marker in the second quarter of this year began what is expected to be a long, slow recovery, as evidenced by a modest uptick in business (p. 6). Builder backlogs grew for the first time in nearly two years. Business for many car types is expected to start picking up at a quicker pace next year, driven in part by a strengthening economy and by the fact that there are a lot of aging railcars that don't meet today's capacity requirements or are simply reaching the end of their useful lives.

Aluminum coal cars are just one example. Electric utility demand for low-sulfur western coal mined in the Powder River Basin will increase over the next few years, says Peter Toja of Economic Planning Associates. Western coal burns cleaner than eastern coal, but at a lower BTU value, so more of it is needed to produce an equivalent amount of energy. That means more 286,000-pound gross rail load aluminum cars will be built, as older, lower-capacity steel cars won't fill the demand.

"There's a lot of 'tire kicking' going on at present," says Trinity President of Rail Operations Martin Graham. That's one reason why most builders haven't reduced their efforts to produce new designs. While railroads and their customers (who in many cases are directly responsible for development of new car types) haven't exactly been beating down carbuilders' doors, their interest in innovative products hasn't let up. Carbuilders have responded with a host of new ideas, some of which are targeted toward niche markets that railroads are attempting to fill in their quest for new business.

One such market is the nuclear industry, a tiny segment in the rail business but an area in which decreasing storage space is forcing energy companies to find a means of transport. The Federal Railroad Administration recently said that "the safety of rail shipments involving spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste" is "ranking at the top of FRA's priorities."

According to Kasgro Vice President of Engineering Jon Odden, moving nuclear waste is a budding business. "Every indication within the nuclear industry is that all these plants have problems with storage," he says. "And short-term storage is going to be on-site. So this is a burgeoning, precursor market right now, before this stuff starts moving out to Yuca Mountain and Utah."

Kasgro is working on a four-truck, eight-axle, depressed-center flat car for inter-plant movement of waste products, an order specifically designed for the Palo Verde nuclear generating plant outside of Phoenix, Ariz. "With the nuclear industry running out of inside storage, Palo Verde was forced to store waste outside," says Odden. "They had to decide how they wanted to transport the stuff. They were looking at doing it by truck using a straddle lift or by railcar. They already had tracks, so rail won."

Though it is not designed for interchange, Kasgro has applied for a patent in anticipation of marketing just such a car. The 175-ton unit is 11 feet wide, with a 13-foot low deck two feet above top-of-rail. It can reach a maximum speed of four mph. Movement within the plant requires the car to navigate a 400-foot curve, a task engineers factored in when designing it.

"They needed an extremely low high deck, and to do that we couldn't fit a standard bolster," says Odden. "What is unique about the car is that we used Meridian Rail Swing Motion trucks and mounted the inboard centerplates right to the center sill of the car. But the outboard centerplates can float, which will allow the car to curve on their property."

Odden is optimistic that nuclear waste cars will be in demand for many years to come as waste products are moved to off-site locations. The Kasgro car, he says, will be in service and proven by the time energy companies and railroads begin looking for nuclear transport options. Trinity is working on a similar car.

Another carbuilder moving aggressively into markets it has not traditionally been associated with is Johnstown America. Hoping to "diversify a little bit so that we're not so dependent on coal," Senior Vice President of Marketing and Sales Ed Whalen told Railway Age that Johnstown is actively pursuing new markets in which they see the opportunity to increase the efficiency of existing cars.

"Our theme has really been about increasing the payload of the car and making it more efficient," he says. "We're trying to develop other product lines to broaden our base, Even through this downturn in the industry, we have maintained our product development budget in an effort to broaden our offerings from mainly coal cars and flat cars out into some of the other markets."

One of those markets is steel, for which Johnstown is manufacturing two new cars. Its new slab car is a skeletonized unit designed to carry steel slabs that are between processing, typically enroute from one plant to another before being rolled into sheets or coils. According to Whalen, these types of steel slabs have traditionally been carried in mill gondola cars, while his company's new slab car can carry more product and increase productivity. Thus far, Johnstown has provided these cars to Burlington Northern and Santa Fe, and has received a lot of interest from other U.S. and Mexican railroads.