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Freight railroads generally have operated the same way for more than a century: They wait for cargo and leave when customers are ready. Now railroads want to run more like commercial airlines, where departure times are set. Factories, farms, mines or mills need to be ready or miss their trips.
Called "precision-scheduled railroading," or PSR, this new concept is cascading through the industry. Under pressure from Wall Street to improve performance, Norfolk Southern and other large U.S. freight carriers, including Union Pacific Corp. and Kansas City Southern, are trying to revamp their networks to use fewer trains and hold them to tighter schedules. The moves have sparked a stock rally that has added tens of billions of dollars to railroad values in the past six months as investors anticipate lower costs and higher profits.
Calling all Railroad Tycoons...
(Score: 2) by mobydisk on Friday April 05 2019, @02:34PM (2 children)
I don't understand the benefit of transporting the trailer+truck+driver, rather than just transporting the trailer. I suppose it saves the step of moving the trailer between the truck and the train, but I thought that part is pretty easy.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 05 2019, @03:21PM
It means less time taken in loading and offloading, and less machinery required. All you really need is a ramp.
Driver drives up, on, parks. Rides the rails, at a higher average speed than the truck could achieve because of various factors including traffic, no pit stops, etc. and then you have a fresh and ready driver to do the last mile trip.
You spend a lot less on fuel as well (trains are around three to four times as efficient per ton-mile as trucks are) and you have less risk (trains are safer than road transport).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 05 2019, @04:41PM
The benefit? Trucker lobby gives you votes...
The U.S. could leapfrog the world in rail tech, because lets face it, all our rail infrastructure is so badly out of date that there is no reason not to refactor the whole system from the ground up.
Really there should be four tracks from Halifax all the way to Miami (N/S freight, N/S pax), and Seattle to SanDiego. Freight trains fuck up the rails they roll on, so if you're going to have pax trains at all, they should roll on separate tracks. Second, there are not enough bridges to keep dumbass's from dying at railroad crossings. The issue is right of way.
What would be interesting to graph how much new right of way has been laid with track in the past 50 years. My guess is nearly none in the past two decades.