_Freight Posters.pdf

In the early 1900s, Model T cars, manufactured at Henry Ford’s Highland Park plant near Detroit, were designed specifically to fit into a boxcar so they could be transported by rail to auto dealers across the country. Two to four automobiles would usually fit into one boxcar. Sometimes the car chassis and body were shipped separately to save space. Ultimately, only a few could be hauled in each car.

As the auto industry grew, ever larger and longer boxcars were needed to haul more cars. Faced with increased demand, railroads designed a rail car specifically for the movement of automobiles—the autorack. These specialized pieces of railroad rolling stock used to transport cars and light trucks began to replace standard boxcars.

The first autoracks were simply long flat cars with initially two (and later three) levels of storage that could hold anywhere between eight and eighteen vehicles. The car itself was 89 feet in length and provided guide tracks for the automobiles as well as interior tie-down equipment.

They could be quickly loaded and unloaded, another advantage over the boxcar.

At the start, autoracks were either open or came with side-shields. In the 1980s, fully enclosed autoracks eclipsed open cars as shippers wanted to ensure cars arrived at dealers in pristine showroom condition.

Autoracks greatly increased the number of automobiles carried per railcar. Today, a single train can move 750 automobiles at once. Each year, freight rail moves nearly 75 percent of the new cars and light trucks purchased in the United States. Railroads serve most of the 70-plus automobile manufacturing plants across North America.

Freight rail, being part of a larger integrated transportation network, enables the sale of millions of new cars every year, further empowering the mobility of the American traveling public.

The Birth of the Autorack

MOTOR VEHICLES:

As the use of open autoracks went up, so too did damage to their cargo, so shippers demanded and got enclosed cars, which are now commonplace.

The Vert-A-Pac system allowed Chevy Vegas to be stacked vertically on specially designed rail cars that lowered shipping costs and kept the subcompact

Vegas affordable. Introduced in 1970, these novel racks were discontinued along with the

Vegas in 1977.

Once a vehicle is loaded onto a rail car, auto ramp professionals secure each wheel to the rail car with special straps and chocks to keep it securely in place and damage free during transit.

Photo Credits: Unloading Model-T Fords from rail cars, (Image 1 and 2): Courtesy of The Model T Ford Forum, [Public Domain]

3 Tier Autorack: Library of Congress, [Public Domain]; 2 Tier Autorack: Library of Congress, [Public Domain];

Enclosed auto carrier: Slambo. [CC BY-SA 2.0 (via Wikipedia Commons)]; Auto carrier end view: Prompt Critical at en.wikipedia; Autorack Handlers: The Daily Herald/Paddock Publications

Background image: u/millera99-production, Reddit

The United States is the world's biggest grain producer. Corn, soybeans, oats, wheat, rice, rye, sorghum, and barley — all considered grains — are used for everything from baking ingredients to animal feed to ethanol production. Freight railroads play a critical role transporting that grain to domestic and international markets.

As railroads expanded, farmers reached new markets with lower transportation costs. Farmers would haul their crops to the local grain elevator, which was served by a railroad spur. Every 20 or 30 miles, there'd be another elevator with another spur, and the railroad companies would pick up a couple of cars at each stop. The old wooden grain elevators, which eventually grew to hold tens of thousands of bushels, towered beside railroad tracks. Bigger, modern grain silos built of metal and planted at busy regional rail hubs did away with the need for the older grain elevators.

In recent years, railroads have acquired thousands of new high-capacity covered hoppers for carrying grain and load them for carriage in highly efficient "shuttle trains," moving high volumes of grain reliably and cost-effectively. Shuttle train-loading elevators—high-capacity, high-speed grain loading facilities—work with rail cars to speed up the loading of crops. This minimizes the number of times grain trains stop to load up at successive grain elevators.

Adequate grain car capacity is critical to efficient grain marketing and transportation, which is why railroads work with freight car providers to supply a rail car fleet that is as large as can be justified economically.

Shuttle trains have helped to increase not only the efficiency but also the velocity of the rail network. In the mid-1990s, only 2 percent of grain moved by trains longer than 100 cars. Today, that number is around 40 percent.

Rail transportation to seaboards is very important for grain farmers, as increasingly large quantities of grains get loaded at ports and shipped overseas. In fact, nearly half of America's production of soybeans and wheat has gone to exports during the past 10 years.

The Expansion of Shuttle Unit Trains

GRAINS ON THE GO:

With loading and unloading capacity of 60,000 bushels per hour, high-capacity metal grain elevators serve 100-car-plus shuttle trains capable of holding some 350,000 bushels each. Trains are now loaded in

12 hours or less, so cars can move and keep turning and delivering to markets much quicker than in the early days of the first wooden obelisk elevators. Many obelisks remain as historic relics.

Photo Credits: Corn Field: Petr Kratochvil (publicdomainpictures.net); Soybean Field: Jason Jenkins, courtesy of Missouri soybean farmers; Wheat Field: Public Domain;

First Grain elevator: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/public domain; Second Grain Elevator: Courtesy of the Kansas Historical Society; Grain Train Container Car: Washington State Department of Transportation;

Images 7 to 10 of trains with modern grain elevators: Jason Jenkins, courtesy of Missouri soybean farmers and their checkoff, through the Missouri Soybean Merchandising Council; Background image: Public Domain

Railroads are efficient at moving heavy freight such as steel over long distances and can develop customized solutions to move even bulkier infrastructure items where they need to go. For example, the fabricated steel in the Golden Gate Bridge, which opened in May 1937, was loaded in sections onto rail cars, taken to Philadelphia and then shipped by boat through the Panama Canal to San Francisco. Rail shipments of the steel from manufacturing plants in New Jersey, Maryland, and Pennsylvania were timed to coincide with the construction of the bridge.

Today, about 60 percent of steel used in infrastructure is transported by rail, from girders and cables to structural steel, steel pipe, and steel plate. These are often moved on bulkhead flat cars or steel gondolas. Steel is used in bridges, tunnels, rail track, and in constructing buildings such as fueling stations, train stations, ports, and airports.

Flat cars can also be equipped to haul heavy equipment made of steel, such as transformers and generators and other power-generating components across North America.

For example, more than 400 manufacturing plants across the United States help to manufacture the 8,000 components found in a typical wind turbine, which can weigh up to 335 tons. A single wind turbine blade can be the length of an airplane and weigh 77,000 pounds!

Freight railroads transport the massive wind turbine blades to their destination, where they are assembled and connected to America's electricity grid to begin producing clean and renewable power.

Railroads are ideal for safely and efficiently transporting heavy, bulky freight—including heavy vehicle equipment.

If not for railroads, many more trucks would be needed to haul commodities over state and municipal roadways.

Flat Cars Transporting Infrastructure

HEAVY FREIGHT:

New sources of energy such as wind power rely on carefully planned freight rail routes and specially designed cars.

Specially designed pipe flat cars move pipe for drainage and other infrastructure projects.

Photo Credits: Steel Foundry: Courtesy of The Baltimore Museum of Industry; Golden Gate Bridge: Public Domain;

Turbine Blades and Generator (images 3 through 7): Courtesy of Union Pacific Railroad;

Pipe Flatcar: Pashkov Andrey/Alamy Stock Photo; Background Image: Umptanum at English Wikipedia [Public domain]

The first patented refrigerated car was built in 1867.

Air, forced over blocks of ice in large compartments on each end of the rail car, kept perishable food cool.

Ice to fill the rail cars was naturally harvested from lakes and ponds. The ice cakes were stored in insulated buildings next to the tracks. Since 45 to 55 pounds of ice melted each hour, icing stations were located at regular intervals along the rail route, and adherence to strict schedules was necessary to prevent spoilage.

Eventually, natural ice proved unsanitary and inefficient for keeping perishable food shipments cool during long rail trips. Refrigeration technology provided the solution: mechanically manufactured ice.

An early breakthrough came from Chicago’s Swift Meatpacking Company that developed a refrigerated car that allowed the company to ship butchered meats to all parts of the country and abroad—ushering in the "era of cheap beef," and in doing so radically altering the meat business. The Southern Pacific and Union Pacific Railroads formed the Pacific Fruit Express Company in 1906, specifically to transport perishable fruit in refrigerated boxcars. In 1971, Tropicana launched one of the most well-known examples of a refrigerated car with the transport of its orange juice on the “Great White Juice Train.”

Today, new refrigerated boxcars are built with energy-efficient cooling systems and GPS tracking—not only to track railcars’ trip progress but also to check temperature, fresh-air exchange, and diagnostics, sometimes from thousands of miles away on a computer. The ability to ship meats, dairy products, and fresh produce in refrigerated cars, far from their points of origin, greatly increases both farmers' markets and consumers' food choices.

Rail service forever changed diets across the United States. All this was possible in large part because of refrigeration.

The Evolution of Refrigerated Cars

FRESH FOOD:

Gustavus Franklin Swift, Sr. (1839–1903) founded a meatpacking empire in the Midwest and is credited with the development of the first practical ice-cooled railroad car.

Fruit Growers Express, a railroad refrigerated car leasing company, began as a produce-hauling subsidiary of Armour and

Company's private refrigerated car line.

Anthony T. Rossi, who founded Tropicana in 1947, pioneered orange juice transport via train. In 1971, the "Great White Juice Train" became the first unit train in the food industry, consisting of 150 100-ton insulated boxcars that shipped bulk orange juice weekly from Florida to New Jersey.

Photo Credits: Gustavus Swift: Library of Congress [Public domain]; Reefer Schematic: Lordkinbote [Public domain]; Swift factory: Library of Congress [Public domain];

Ice Packer: Jack Delano [Public domain]; Fruit Growers Express: Klaus Nahr [CC BY-SA 2.0 Wikimedia Commons)];

Reefer: Photo by Sean Lamb (User: Slambo) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (Wikimedia Commons)]; Juice Train: Sanibel Sun [CC BY-SA 4.0 (Creative Commons)];

Tropicana Railcar: Harvey Henkelman, (Wikimedia Commons); Anthony Rossi: State Archives of Florida, Florida Memory

Freight railroads use an impressive fleet of specialized rail cars to carry an array of raw materials used by America’s construction industry. Designed to maximize efficiency, these cars help railroads deliver the materials customers need at a price that keeps them competitive.

Lumber is often transported on centerbeams, a bulkhead flat car reinforced by a longitudinal I-beam. The standard 73-foot centerbeam flat car can carry about 200,000 pounds—enough framing lumber to build six homes—and is efficient because it can be loaded and unloaded from both sides at the same time.

Steel, another construction material, is transported in specialized flat cars. A loaded flat car may carry 110 tons of steel per car, including I-beams, and various kinds of pipe ready for immediate construction use.

Crushed stone, limestone, sand, gravel, and gypsum travel by freight from quarries or suppliers to cement and ready-mix concrete plants where products such as brick and concrete are produced. Small covered hopper cars, designed with a permanent roof and a bottom opening for easy unloading, are often used for bulk shipments of dry cement.

More efficient loading and unloading ensures the equipment is turned more quickly, lowering costs.

Gondola cars are often used for carrying aggregate material such as stone, sand, and gravel. Aggregates are used as the foundation for highways, roadways, and even railroads.

Aggregates move from origin to destination in dedicated trains, which minimizes switching or reconfiguration of the train. Typically, domestic rail transport of aggregates is less than 300 miles, since stone, sand, and gravel are produced in nearly every state.

Construction Cargo on the Move

BUILDING MATERIALS:

To maximize efficiency, railroads have engineered a lighter weight flat car that can carry one additional steel slab per carload. Railroads also haul the iron ore, steel scrap, and coke that make steel, which goes into the creation of automobiles, appliances, and construction projects.

Photo Credits: Images of Gravel, Sand and Aggregate (images 1 through 5): Titus Tscharntke [Public domain]; Stacked Wood: CComber, iStock Images; Centerbeam Flat Cars: Slambo at English Wikipedia. [CC BY-SA 2.0]; Steel Plates on Flat Car (images 9 and 10): Courtesy of Arntzen Corporation; Covered Hopper Cars: Michael Barera [CC BY-SA 4.0]; Open Gondola Cars: Public Domain; Loading Gondola Car: Courtesy of Cedar Mountain Stone Corporation;

Limestone loading facility: Courtesy of Cheney Enterprises; Hopper Car diagram: Courtesy of patentsencyclopedia.com lntermodal trains provide long-haul movement of shipping containers and truck trailers by rail, combined with a road or water movement at one or both ends. From greeting cards and furniture to food products and computers, almost everything found on a retailer's shelves might have traveled on an intermodal train.

Up until the 1950s, most goods transported via water were shipped loose or packaged in boxes, bags, barrels, or other relatively small containers based on the commodity. Today, the shipping container has largely eliminated the need for handling individual pieces of cargo, resulting in drastically reduced shipping costs and delivery times.

Starting with the advent of the modern shipping container in the 1950s, American freight railroads have invested heavily to build a world-class intermodal rail network that ensures U.S.

global competitiveness. New or expanded inland and near-dock intermodal terminals have been built to facilitate the transfer of containers and trailers among rail, truck, and ship.

In the early 1980s, railroads first introduced double-stack container trains, which doubled the amount of cargo that could be carried. Over the years, freight railroads have raised clearances, upgraded tunnels, and strengthened rail lines throughout most of America's 140,000-mile freight rail network to accommodate double-stacked intermodal trains.

U.S. rail intermodal volume tripled between 1980 and 2002 and today accounts for a very significant percentage of revenue for major U.S. railroads, with exports and imports accounting for the largest share of U.S. rail intermodal traffic. Thanks in part to intermodal freight rail, average rail rates have fallen 46 percent since 1981—allowing most rail shippers to move nearly twice as much freight for the same price.

Serving World Markets

INTERMODAL:

Photo Credits: lntermodal Train: The Maritime Executive· Harry Valentine; Blue Stacked Containers: Slambo at en.wikipedia [CC BY·SA 2.0]; lntermodal Dallas City: Association of American Railroads;

Horses Unloading Circus Train: University of South Florida; Unloading Ringling Train: International Independent Showmen's Museum; Ringling Bros, Circus Train: James G. Howes, via Wikimedia Commons;

lntermodal Crane: Association of American Railroads; Background Image: Williamborg, via Wikimedia Commons

“Piggybacking” of wagons, also known as “circus style,” was pioneered in 1872 by P.T. Barnum’s circus. Barnum developed a crossover plate that allowed horses to pull circus wagons on and off trains via a single ramp. Once onboard, circus wagons were rolled from train car to train car, a streamlined process that saved time, effort, and money. The circus built upon this approach when it modified truck trailers and loaded them onto its trains — an early example of the railroads transporting truck trailers and ushering in commercial intermodal.

Historically, coal has been the single most important commodity carried by U.S. railroads. Before the opening of railroad lines to mines, coal was carried via rivers on barges and on timber-made flat boats, called "gondolas" (a nod to the Venetian rowing boats). The rail cars first employed in the haulage of coal were thus named gondolas after these shallow-draft boats.

Early coal mines were distant from power plants, and rail became the most economical means for moving bulk commodities long distances. The mix of heavy and bulky materials hauled into and out of mines gave rise to several generations of railways, at first made of wood rails with horse-drawn rail cars and eventually replaced with iron and commercial steam locomotives.

Many of America’s earliest railways were built specifically for the transport of coal including the Philadelphia & Reading Railroad and the Carolina, Clinchfield & Ohio Railway. They not only facilitated the movement of coal but were among its largest consumers as coal-fired locomotives became common.

Today, most freight-rail-carried coal moves in open-top hoppers.

Nearly half the nation’s electricity comes from coal, and most of that coal is delivered to power plants by railroads. In recent years, technological advances in natural gas extraction and greater reliance on renewables such as wind and solar have led to a decline in coal’s share of U.S. electricity generation—resulting in a drop in the amount of coal moved by railroads. Despite this decline, coal remains an important commodity for railroads and for the broader economy. In fact, railroads haul nearly 70 percent of U.S. coal to its destination—enough to power 78 percent of American homes. Coal is also used in steelmaking, cement manufacturing, and other industrial applications. While the domestic market for coal has been in decline, the export market has grown in recent years.

Coal is consumed in large amounts all over the country and shipped to world markets from several ports. That’s possible because the United States has the world’s most efficient and comprehensive coal transportation system, led by railroads.

Rail Delivers Power to America’s Homes COAL:

The hauling requirements of coal gave birth to some of history’s most powerful train engines, including the Virginian Railway’s class EL-2B, the largest two-unit electric locomotive used in North America (pictured at right above) and the Chesapeake and

Ohio’s Allegheny (pictured at right below), which could move 140 coal cars over steep climbs in the Allegheny mountains.

The Stourbridge Lion—named for the lion painted on the nose and the place where it was built, Stourbridge, England— was the first locomotive ever operated in the United States and tested to haul coal.

Photo Credits: Stourbridge line first run: Clyde Osmer DeLand, artist [Public domain]; Unloading a coal barge: Walnutport Borough, http://walnutportpa.org/home/; PV&K Coal Co.: Russel Lee, 1946, modified, from the ANARA;

Virginian EL-2B: John Smatlak, 2015; C&O Allegheny-1601: Scott Fairchild; Awaiting Shipping: A. C. Shelton, Getty Images; Coal Loader: Robert Nickelsburg, Getty Images

FREIGHT

RAIL:

Expanding Markets

Creating Efficiencies

Delivering Innovations