(erielack) Re: The advantages of faster intermodal

["Paul Brezicki" <doctorpb_@_bellsouth.net>]

I think what Kneiling had in mind was primarily domestic traffic; he talked about "landships" in the late 60's and early 70's when the international container trade was a relatively small piece of the transportation pie. His thing was the "integral train", where the basic unit was the train instead of the freight car. He opined that the existing configuration of the rail industry with it's yards, local freights and "loose cars" was failing (which was indeed the case), and the way to salvage the industry was with a radically different approach involving "landships" of permanently attached cars hauling containers or bulk commodities sailing an "iron ocean" of rail routes owned by seperate infrastructure companies. His trains would operate more like trucks or ships, from origin to destination with no intermediate stops, with a single crew utilizing onboard sleeping quarters. Since it was an "integral" train, traction motors would be distributed throughout so the train could tackle steep grades at 40 mph and accelerate and stop quickly.

The concept was considered far too radical and of course was largely ignored. Those were the "if only" days of a declining industry, ie: if only the industry was deregulated, if only we had work-rule reform, if only the government would stop subsidizing the competition, if management could only get it's act together, then the industry would flourish once again and traffic would flood back onto the rails. Well here we are in 2006 with dereg, 2 man crews and a financially healthy industry, and we find the loss of market share in domestic merchandise has continued unabated. Without Powder River coal and international containers the industry would be a reltively small player in America's transportation network. So I've often wondered lately if things would have turned out differently if Kneiling's ideas had been embraced. There has been some incremental change in that direction with articulated intermodal and auto cars. Electropneumatic braking has been experimented with. Apart from these there's been no fundamental change. An intriguing "what-if".

Paul B

A lot of the art of scheduling for domestic intermodal has been lost as this 
nation's manufacturing base vanishes and we increasingly focus on moving huge 
land-ships loaded with containers full of imports.  I'm not sure that's what 
John Kneiling had in mind when he coined that term, but it fits.

WDB


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