Re:(erielack) LCL Traffic

["Janet & Randy Brown" <jananran_@_mymailstation.com>]

Again, Paul -- not quite.  Erie/EL didn't HAVE Lifschulz do anything.  The Railroad offered Lifschulz a low rate and good service, and a lease on a terminal building.

Erie/EL and Lifschulz recognized, in spite of the common trend to the contrary, that special circumstances made boxcar and float the most rational way to get the freight out of the garment district and off the island.  They had hundreds of customers sending thousands of shipments of tens of thousands of packages to thousands of customers all over the continent.  Sending hundreds of little trucks scurrying around and then through the tunnels to New Jersey was not -- and still is not -- economical, and the higher volume trailers coming into vogue for TOFC wouldn't fit through the tunnels:  Holland can't take anything over 12'6", if that, and Lincoln can't take 13', if that.  A 13'6" trailer would (does) have to go up the congested island of Manhattan, across the Washington Bridge, and back down the equally congested roads on the New Jersey side.  In comparison, boxcars on floats still seem a good alternative.

I don't know that they ever considered loading big TOFC trailers at, say, 28th Street and then floating them across.  I would imagine that labor jurisdictional disputes would have strangled that idea aborning.

All this time, the institutions of city and state government were giving them no help at all, preferring to demand that ALL trucks be barred from Midtown during the day so that cars could move.

Go figure!

Randy Brown
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Quite correct, Randy, my description was sloppy. Of course the forwarder was the customer. Let's just say that as a whole, LCL was a money-loser for the RR's, so they encouraged the shift to forwarders; thus they could retain the business at a profit by letting others do the costly pickup and delivery etc. For example, Erie and then EL had Lifschultz maintain a freight house at 28th St in Manhattan. Let me rephrase the question: why did the forwarders continue to use boxcars on EL when on most other RR's the traffic apparently moved exclusively by TOFC? This is especially puzzling in the case of 28th St, where cars had to ride the costly and time-consuming floats while beginning in 1971, EL had an efficient, mechanized intermodal facility across the river.

Paul Brezicki



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