Searching for a safer ride - moving motor vehicles

Railway Age, June, 1993

The U.S. railcar fleet today includes more than 32,000 autorack cars-- roughly 18,000 trilevels and 14,000 bilevels. Depending upon whose count you use, they handle about 65% of the setup motor vehicles moving to market, including domestic, import, and transplant vehicles. It's big business for railroads. The equipment fleet handling the business is worth more than $3 billion.

But some customers aren't happy. There's too much damage, they say, because of ride quality and other factors associated with today's autoracks.

TTX, the provider of the flat cars on which the racks ride, is doing its best to attack the problem. It's planning to put improved trucks under 27,000 cars by the end of 1997. It's replacing end-of-car cushioning devices, and it's installing improved air brake equipment.

TTX is also working on improved rackcar designs. An articulated car was exhibited last September in Chicago, as was a larger articulated design developed by Santa Fe.

But the customers are demanding more, and that's what led to a meeting in the Detroit area in February, a meeting of what was called the Future Distribution Systems Task Force (FDSTF). The outcome was supposed to be, and it may be, development of improved methods of moving motor vehicles by rail, perhaps with various companies working together to develop solutions.

One organization, the Greenbrier Companies, believes that it has a solution, and it's called Autostack. . Minimizing the human element. Autostack has been under development for more than half a decade. It got its first commercial application last year, moving General Motors vehicles from California to Hawaii via SeaLand. But it.was regarded as a system--a containerized system in which the human element in loading/unloading is minimized--which would have a small niche market, mainly for premium-priced vehicles, and/or in specialized operations such as the SeaLand movement.

That was before Ford Motor Company and Burlington Northern announced that all Ford vehicles (except oversized ones) moving in a corridor between the Detroit area and the Pacific Northwest via BN would move in the Autostack system. Ford has said that more assembly plants in the East and Midwest will convert to Autostack in the next year or so.

GM has had experience with the SeaLand movement; Ford is using the system and plans to grow it. Greenbrier says that conversations are continuing with these manufacturers, with Chrysler, and with offshore/transplant manufacturers. Obviously, a good deal would be to have Autostack containers loaded in both directions, which would be possible with domestic vehicles moving west and imports moving east. But that's not really necessary in order to have balanced movements, backhaul traffic. The Autostack racks used in six containers can be collapsed to fit into one container, freeing five boxes for merchandise traffic on the return movement.

In the BN-Ford operation, vehicles from several assembly plants are loaded in 48-foot BN America containers at a CSX Transportation facility at New Boston, Mich. From there, they're moved over the highway to BN's intermodal terminal at Cicero, Ill., and hoisted onto double-stack cars for movement to the Pacific Northwest.

* 72 hours vs. seven days. That's perhaps not as efficient as an all-rail move might be. But it's a 72-hour move from Detroit to the Pacific Northwest. A rackcar movement, BN says, would likely take seven days. An Autostack container leaving New Boston at 2 p.m. can make a night train out of Cicero.

Why not steel-wheel interchange? BN says it's for the usual reasons, including interchange delays and what some BN people call "a lack of vision" so far as rates and service are concerned.

Is Autostack going to be, as some have said, "disruptive" so far as rail transportation of motor vehicles is concerned? As a virtually no-hands-on system, with vehicles moved in fully enclosed containers in double-stack service, it provides the damage-free environment that vehicle manufacturers are demanding, Greenbrier is convinced. And the numbers on vehicle damage tend to prove what Greenbrier says.

* The rack factor. Whether the new system will be "disruptive" depends on your viewpoint, and perhaps on how many racks you have in the system. Racks, lessors say, can be depreciated over a seven-year period, much as trailers are. Flat cars are depreciated over a longer period. Many new racks have gone into service in recent years, built by Thrall Car and Trinity Industries. At the same time, many racks now in service are nearing the end of their useful, depreciable, customer-acceptable life.

The growth that this new system has will probably be evolutionary, over a period of years--but, given the insistence of the vehicle manufacturers on improved performance, perhaps not many years-- for Autostack or for some other system yet to be seen.

TTX plans to make major improvements in its rackcar fleet between now and 1997, to improve the ride quality of the cars. And there may be new designs coming from the FDSTF meeting. But TTX can't do anything about the racks themselves, because it doesn't own or control how they're built and maintained. Nobody, in the meantime, is working harder on building better racks than the builders who do the job.