The List appears to be in the 4th of July doldrums, so at the risk of beating a dead horse, I'll revisit this topic. The impetus is the July Trains which was devoted to this topic, and in particular, the "map of the month" which tracked 4 loaded freight cars. Each carried petrochemical products from the Gulf coast to the northeast and Virginia: 2 tankcars of liquid latex and a boxcar and flatcar (bulkhead with aluminum containers) of synthetic rubber. The scenario is supposedly representative of typical movements, with this type of lading typical of today's loose-car traffic. However, 3 of the cars were bad-ordered enroute, and the other was delayed by Christmas and New Years holidays, when rail freight traffic more or less grinds to a halt. As expected, transit times were slow, typically two weeks from shipper release to delivery, giving an average speed of 6.4 to 7.2mph. The flatcar took an amazing 3 weeks to get from Beaumont TX to Danville VA for an average speed of 2.5mph. 2 of the bad-order delays consumed 5 days, which is hard to explain; you could almost imagine a car being built in 5 days. Including one such delay, it took the flat 8 days to get through New Orleans. The cars spent most of their time sitting in yards, with several 36 hour dwell times, and it took 38 hours to get one car through E St Louis. CN showed the most hustle, getting the boxcar through Chicago in 4 hours. This car was also bad-ordered (in Toronto) but CN got it moving again in 44 hours instead of 5 days. There were several inordinate yard delays, including 36 hours in Springfield MA and 6 days in Danville VA. However the cars made good time on the road. Thr transit time looks bad, but car utilization is worse. Since they don't make a lot of liquid latex in Connecticut, the cars almost certainly returned empty to the Gulf. The trip times don't include days spent on sidings waiting to be unloaded and loaded, or any time spent cleaning the empty cars, and all this must be included in cycle times. I'll be charitable and assume this will cancel out the bad-order/holiday delays incurred by each car, and the cars returned home at the same breakneck speed without other delays. Excluding the boxcar, which may have found a return load, we have an average loaded speed of 3.2mph for the tanks and 1.3 for the flat. At this speed, the cars make about 12 loaded trips per year. To bring in some EL content, one of the EL in Color books has a reproduction of an advertising piece I'd seen years ago concerning transit times to the Long Island RR: 32 hours from Chicago, 15 hours from Buffalo, and "24 hours switching and classifying to EL float". Then there's the carfloat ride, interchanging to the LIRR, and the day or two it would take the LIRR to get the car to the customer. Things haven't changed much in 35 years. I'll conclude my comments tomorrow. Paul B The Erie Lackawanna Mailing List Sponsored by the ELH&TS http://www.elhts.org To Unsubscribe: http://lists.elhts.org/erielackunsub.html ------------------------------
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