Cheap efficient trucking is the most often cited cause of the decline of cargo rail transit in the United States, but after studying cargo rail, I believe that trucking is only a piece of the puzzle. 1/n
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If you go back 70 years most goods travelled by rail. It is greatly more efficient to have a single large engine and single driver move 100s of railcars than it is to have 100 engines and 100 truck drivers do the same. This remains true to this day. 2/n
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However, where we make things has changed. We've gone from a manufacturing nation to a net-importing consumer nation. Most, with a few exceptions, of what we buy today is made in Asia. Largely it arrives in intermodal containers. 3/n
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Unlike a railcar, these containers cannot be unloaded from the side and thus they cannot be unloaded on industrial rail spurs. Here's a rail spur that goes into a warehouse being unloaded from its side. 4/npic.twitter.com/SjEZpoLyaB
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Here are some standard intermodal containers on a train. Their only doors are at the back and because they are loaded in a long sequence forming a train, there's no way to unload the goods from a train. You need a truck. 5/npic.twitter.com/jHhznavNZn
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So basically, even though it's many times more efficient to have goods sent directly to a warehouse by 100% train, you can't. You need a truck to bring the container from the warehouse to the train terminal and then you need another when it reaches the destination terminal 6/n
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So your options are: use two trucks and a train or use one truck. One truck often wins out. It's faster, simpler, and unless you're going very long distances, more efficient. So these days, industrial spurs are only used for things made on the american continent i.e. 8/n
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Paper, wood, ore, soybeans, cars, etc. These things ship by train still and are often moved, loaded, and unloaded directly into warehouses without the use of interstate trucking. In summary, cheap trucking wasn't the rail killer alone. It needed the container to become the 9/n
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International standard, which outmoded warehouse to warehouse pure rail transport for an ever growing portion of the goods our country transports. 10/10
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End of conversation
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