AIL INTERMODAL FREIGHT makes sense for many shippers. It is a fuel efficient, economical way to move trailerload freight for long distances. Just look at all the stack trains and all the rail cars loaded with piggyback trailers.
However, rail intermodal has drawbacks as well. With conventional piggyback, and certainly with domestic containers, rail intermodal is infrastructure intensive. Vast handling yards for hundreds of rail cars and large mobile cranes for trailer and container handling are required at both ends of the line. Doublestack freight requires two highway chassis for every container-one to deliver the container to the origin yard and one for delivery from the destination yard to the receiver. Added to these is the fact that rail linehaul service is not always as efficient as it might be.
A number of intermodal carriers have learned to confront these difficulties and provide high quality service. One of the oldest is TemStar, a division of Mark VII Transportation. TemStar is located in Lombard, Illinois, one of the western suburbs of Chicago. The parent company operates from headquarters in Memphis.
Perishables in Piggyback TemStar operates in the most difficult segment of rail intermodal service. The company is dedicated to moving perishables cross-country on a regular schedule using a fleet of 350 refrigerated trailers. Although the fleet is considerably smaller than the 1,500 trailers once operated by its predecessor company Transamerica Distribution Services, it remains one of the largest in the perishable piggyback market. Those trailers mostly are 48 ft long, although a few 45-footers remain in the fleet. Mark VII purchased the intermodal assets and business of Transamerica Distribution Services in 1991.
TemStar's TOFC fleet uses Chicago as a crossing point for its cross-country service. For the past five years, almost 90% of piggyback service has involved delivery from shippers in California to receivers on the East Coast. Eastbound trains with trailers operated by TemStar and its competitors arrive in Chicago on one of the western rail lines and are transferred to a rail ramp across town for the balance of the trip to the East Coast.
The company recently instituted a new service from California to Chicago and an area 250 to 300 miles to the east and southeast. This service eliminates the need for significant supporting infrastructure, because the trailers run directly on the railroad tracks in dedicated, scheduled trains. No heavy equipment is required to assemble a train.
First Trains, June 1999 On June 11, 1999, TemStar dispatched its first Ice Cold Express train from San Bernardino, California, to Naperville, Illinois. The first westbound train departed the Chicago area on June 18.
Ice Cold Express is not the first intermodal carrier to make use of RoadRailer technology. A number of dry van carriers have used RoadRailer trailers for several years. However, Ice Cold Express is the first carrier to offer refrigerated service and the first to assemble trains dedicated almost exclusively to refrigerated RoadRailers.
Ice Cold Express is a joint venture of TemStar Mark VII, the Burlington Northern and Santa Fe Railway, and GATX Capital Corp. The new intermodal service operates a fleet of 185 refrigerated RoadRailer trailers in two dedicated weekly trains, one departing eastbound and one westbound on Fridays. Trains average 60 to 65 trailers. The BNSF would like to see an average of 100 trailers per train. The maximum trailer count is 120 per train. Adding a second weekly train in each direction would require TemStar to acquire 150 to 200 more RoadRailers, says Joe Garrity, TemStar general manager.
Long Trailer String These are not insignificant trains. At 100 trailers per train, they would be more than a mile in length, excluding the locomotives and rail couplermate at each end of the trailer string. However, they are the most aerodynamic equipment on rails and among the fastest commercial trains. In contrast, doublestack trains are among the slowest because of the immense weight of the cars, containers, and freight.
In addition to aerodynamic efficiency, RoadRailer trains are considered extremely safe because of their braking capability. Starting and stopping a conventional freight train is a laborious, time-consuming process as the coupling slack between cars is stretched upon starting and taken up during stops. Conventional rail knuckle couplers may allow up to a foot of slack between cars. This variable space also contributes to the cargo-jarring ride associated with rail service. A RoadRailer train contains only one knuckle coupler between the locomotive and the couplermate. Once the slack between these two is eliminated, the train moves as one piece with the last trailer in the string moving in exact pace with the locomotive.
RoadRailer trains have one other big advantage over traditional rail intermodal equipment. Riding lower to the track, the trailers experience almost no lateral sway compared to piggyback trailers that sit on flatcars well above the road bed. "We have been able to load a single pallet in the middle of a trailer and have it arrive at destination unmoved," Garrity says. "In fact, we have proved the effectiveness of the RoadRailer concept this past summer by handling two of the most demanding products in the business. We have moved ice cream and strawberries, both with outstanding success."
Six Years in Development Ice Cold Express is the creation of R C Matney, CEO of Mark VII. RoadRailer is a superior technology to trailer-on-flat-car with the potential to move rail intermodal carriage much closer to the service levels of highway carriers, he says.
Matney has been interested in the idea of moving highway trailers by rail without flatcars since the late 1970s. Mark VII has actively looked at a RoadRailer project for about six years. Active planning for Ice Cold Express began about two years ago.
Equipment and rail scheduling are the keys to succeeding at Ice Cold Express. With the exception of a connector tongue extending out from the nose and a pocket in the rear frame to receive the tongue of a following trailer, refrigerated RoadRailers are little different from conventional highway trailers. They are built by Wabash National with conventional sheet-and-post construction. Side sheets on the 53-ft trailers are 0.050" prepainted aluminum installed over vertical posts spaced 12 inches apart from the nose back to the landing gear and 24 inches apart from the support legs to the reinforced rear threshold.
DF-Rated Trailers Wabash National will build refrigerated RoadRailers with sidewall insulation ranging from 15.8 inch to four inches. Ice Cold Express specified 21.2 inches of insulation to provide a greater margin of safety for deep frozen loads. Trailers carry a DF (deep frozen) rating according to Refrigerated Transportation Foundation standards. Extruded aluminum scuffbands are recessed into the sidewall to provide 973.8 inches of clear load space between the sidewalls. This allows shippers to load pallets side-by-side on their long axis, says Jim Koepke, sales manager for Ice Cold Express.
Trailers are comparable to other high-cube vans. The inside length is 52 ft 2 inches, and the inside height is 1023.4 inches. Internal volume is 3,627 cubic feet. Trailers weigh 17,800 pounds, near the top of the acceptable range for a highway carrier, but they are still able to handle the weight requirements for a full range of perishable or frozen commodities. However, compared to a container and chassis, RoadRailers are relatively light, which is an asset in the rail operating mode. The rail bogie adds only 11,000 pounds to each trailer, still only a fraction of the weight of a flat car under a conventional piggyback trailer.
Rear frames are available as stainless steel or powder-coated mild steel. Ice Cold Express specified the powder-coated version.
Ultima 53 Refrigeration Temperature control for the new trailers is provided by Carrier Transicold Ultima 53 units charged with R-404A. Although average transit time is no longer than a typical trip between California and Chicago by highway, Ice Cold Express took the safe option of specifying 110-gallon fuel tanks for the refrigeration units. Garrity says that Carrier Transicold units were chosen for the fleet, because Carrier seemed to be farther along with its remote tracking and system control at the time the order was placed.
Ice Cold Express keeps track of trailer location and load condition through a tracking and communication system provided by Arinc in Colorado Springs. The Arinc system uses a flat antenna that glues to the trailer roof. Communication equipment hooks directly to the refrigeration unit's microprocessor controls.
The tracking and control system will be implemented in stages. At present, it is a relatively passive system that transmits trailer position and refrigeration condition once a day. "Essentially, the trailer wakes up every morning at 6 am and calls home, sort of 'Hi, I'm here,'" Garrity says. "We can interrogate the unit at any time during the day if we need more information than contained in the daily status report. In addition to location, we get discharge air temperature, box temperature, unit fuel level, and notice of operating mode-continuous run or start/stop. We can command the unit to turn on or off, change temperature, or change operating mode. We haven't implemented it yet, but farther down the line, customers will have access to this same data across the Internet. They will be able to check location and load status, but will not be able to issue commands to the unit."
Checking Unit Settings The tracking and communication system has many of the same attractions for Ice Cold Express that vehicle tracking has for highway carriers, Koepke says. "We can do a better job of checking our equipment such as making sure that cartage drivers have the refrigeration unit set properly for the load," he says. "Basically, we use the Arinc system to perform the same task remotely that we used to pay an inspection service for."
"Arinc has turned the lights on about intermodal equipment status," Garrity says. "Now we know where our trailers are and what they are doing. Nothing gets lost anymore. We're no longer driving in the dark. Let's use a delivered trailer as an example. The location tells us that the trailer is sitting at a distribution center. That's all right if we don't have a load for it. But the condition report tells us that the refrigeration unit is running. That information indicates three possible options. Somebody forgot to turn the unit off. The trailer isn't unloaded yet, or it is being used for mobile warehousing. No matter what the answer is, we now have enough information to help keep our operation running efficiently."
Ice Cold Express trailers run on air suspension 100% of the time. On the highway, trailers run on Wabash National air-ride. The rail bogies-nearly the rail equivalent of a steel-wheeled converter dolly-also run on air suspension. In fact, air suspension is the key to assembling and disassembling a RoadRailer train. Air suspension also is a big selling point for most customers, Koepke says.
Easy Train Assembly Basically all that is required to assemble a train is a length of track, a positioning tractor, and a compressed air source. The tractor is used to position a trailer astride the rail line. The highway suspension is inflated to raise the rear of the trailer above normal highway ride height, and the trailer is backed onto a rail bogie. When that connection is secure, air is released from the highway suspension, which allows a set of steel springs to lift the tires off the ground. The trailer is left sitting on the rail bogie and its landing gear. The same procedure is followed with the next trailer. Once the rail bogie is in place, the leading trailer is pushed back until the connecting tongue on the following trailer is seated in the rear frame pocket. A vertical pin locks the tongue to the leading trailer. The process continues until a complete train is built.
When a train is completely assembled, it is much like one extremely long articulated rail car rather than a series of individual cars. The only conventional rail car coupling in the train is between the locomotive and the couplermate that leads the trailer string. In a highway doubles train, the following trailer is a full trailer sitting on a converter dolly pulled by a pintle. RoadRailers are connected semitrailers, each sitting on a rail bogie under the trailer at the rear.
The time required to assemble a train depends on the amount of track available. The BNSF RoadRailer terminal in Naperville has two tracks and can put 15 to 17 trailers into a train every hour. It takes four to six hours to build a train and less time to take it apart. The cutoff time for trailer arrival in Naperville is 2 pm with a scheduled train release time of 3 pm. According to the BNSF schedule, the train must depart no later than 4 pm. Scheduled running time for each train is 58 hours.
Selling the Service Scheduling is the pivotal issue in selling the new service, Koepke says. "Before the first train was planned, we already had a list of potential customers," he says. "TemStar has been in business for years serving a large group that is used to rail service. With Ice Cold Express, we have something new to offer, a schedule that is a little faster than conventional TOFC and highly competitive equipment."
Ice Cold Express is designed to serve Southern California and the Midwest. The target area in California is from Fresno south. In the Midwest, the targets are Chicago and the cities to the east. "We take the trailers out of the train and deliver by highway to cities such as Indianapolis, Grand Rapids, and Milwaukee," Garrity says. "If we pull the train into Chicago and then truck the freight back west to St Louis or Des Moines, we add excess mileage to the trip and begin to make highway carriers more competitive with our service."
Limiting the majority of the service area to the Midwest should help improve equipment utilization. In most cases, a rail intermodal carrier can count on 12 to 14 round trips per trailer per year when the freight moves all the way across the country. By terminating most of the eastbound freight near Chicago, TemStar can raise its trailer utilization to 16 to 18 trips a year, Garrity says.
Amtrak to East Coast Roughly 25% of Ice Cold Express freight will go on to the East Coast pulled by Amtrak passenger trains. This is designed to take advantage of the high speed and frequent scheduling of Amtrak. "Until they begin putting passenger cars on a siding somewhere for two or three days at a time, we shouldn't have any trouble with our eastbound schedules from Chicago," Garrity says.
The target audience for Ice Cold Express is frozen food shippers and chain store distribution centers. These customers tend to unload trailers relatively quickly, which will allow scheduling for a return trip. Koepke says that Ice Cold Express wants to haul a significant volume of frozen foods as well as time-sensitive dry freight out of California. "We don't want this to be a produce train only," he says. "One good source of freight is frozen commodities entering the US through ports in California. Shippers and marine carriers have discovered that the service is better and that container utilization is higher when imported goods are removed from containers and loaded into trailers for inland delivery."
The next step in the process, obviously, is adding a second train. "We want to have the equipment and the customer base ready for a second train in time for the peak harvest season in 2000," Garrity says. "One train each way weekly makes a little money. A network of refrigerated RoadRailer service has the potential for generating strong profits."
