Rail Transport

Characteristics of Rail Transportation

Photo courtesy of NavataOpens in new window Rail carriage accounts for 37.1% of total freight ton-miles (more than 14% of actual tonnage) in the United States, which places railroads after motor carrier as the second dominant mode of transportation. However, in some countries such as the People’s Republic of China, the countries of the former Yugoslavia, and Austria, rail remains the dominant transportation mode.

Although rail service is available in almost every major city around the world, the railroad network is not as extensive as the road networks in most countries. Thus, rail system lacks the flexibility and versatility of the road transport.

Indeed, rail carriers offer terminal-to-terminal service rather than the door-to-door service provided by motor carriers. Therefore, railroads, like waterOpens in new window, pipelinesOpens in new window, and air transportOpens in new window, need to be integrated with trucks to provide door-to-door services. Also, rail-roads offer less-frequent services compared to motor carriers.

Advantages of Rail Transportation

• Rail transport is useful for transporting heavy items that have to travel a long distance.
• It is convenient for transporting bulk items, for example, raw materials like coal or iron ore.
• It generally costs a lot less than road or air transport does (but it is not much cheaper than sea transport).

Disadvantages of Rail Transportation

Rail transport is not as versatile or flexible as road transport, because:

• It limits you to fixed tracks which have already been built. (You cannot just create a new route.)

• It provides terminal-to-terminal service only (for example, Durban station to Johannesburg station only), rather than point-to-point service where warehouse goods are delivered straight to the customer, as is the case with road transport.
• There are fixed departure and fairly fixed arrival requirements: times cannot be adjusted to customers’ needs.
• Although it generally costs less, on a weight basis, loss and damage ratios are often higher than with other modes of transport.
• Rail transportation is relatively slow and quite unreliable, as the loss and damage ratios of rail transport for many shipments are higher than other modes. As a result, the railroad is a slow mover of both raw materials (e.g., coal, lumber, and chemicals) and low-value finished goods (e.g., tinned food, paper, and wood products).
• Railroads have high fixed costs and relatively low variable costs. Expensive equipment, multishipment trains, multiproduct switching yards and terminals, and right-of-way maintenance result in high fixed costs. However, the variable costs are low, especially for long hauls, so rail carriage generally costs less than motor and air transport on a weight basis.

Railway Transportation Network

A railway network is made of single or double track lines that connect several different train yards together. When a customer calls for a service, an appropriate number of railcars at the nearest main yard are chosen, inspected, and transported to the freight pickup point.

Loaded cars return to the origin yard to be ordered, grouped, consolidated, and assembled into blocks.

Using blocks in train transportation systems has many economic advantages such as full train loads and the management of longer car strings in yards.

During the long-haul transportation trip, the train may travel on single-track lines, so it is common to meet trains traveling in the opposite direction. In this situation, the train with the higher priority passes first.

The train may be stopped in middle train yards where cars and engines are regularly inspected and blocks are separated from one train and put on another.

At the final yard, the first blocks are detached from the train and disassembled. Then cars are inspected, put in order, and moved to their final destination to be unloaded. Once a car finishes its delivery trip, it may move to a new pickup point and then be assembled in a new block or it may wait empty for a future assignment.

Managing the main yard’s operations is the most complex activity in a long haul railway transportation system.

New Developments in Rail

Rail transport has seen some new developments, some of which include:

• computerized routing and scheduling of cargo (track-and-trace methods, which are useful with lost goods);
• the possibility of leasing and owning rail cars (which saves delivery time to and from the train);
• improvements in rail car identification (there are fewer lost items and it is easier to control and identify goods).