It’s about time that Long Beach is able to provide on-dock container rail handling. Drayage trucks have been a massive source of pollution in the area since the 1990s. Even the Clean Trucks initiative, helpful though it was, can’t keep the particulates and other noxious elements of diesel exhaust down. The proper solution is on-dock rail.
Though this won’t touch the total cost of the project, it’s enough to get it going. It can certainly fund studies and preliminary work.
The time frame isn’t till 2025 for the first trains, though.
This interactive page shows key information about Class I railroads in the US. It displays the average speed of trains while moving, average dwell time in a yard waiting to be switched or unloaded, and the number of cars in service. You can select the figures for each Class I rail, and the time shown on the graphs, start and end.
The data comes from the Surface Transportation Board compilation of data provided by the railroads themselves, and is probably a bit late due to the deadlines for submitting figures.
The graph of speed for BNSF is especially interesting. It shows a recent spectacular jump, from under 25 mph to over 26 mph. Clearly the message is getting through to rails that they’d better move cargo.
Dwell time, spent sitting in yards waiting to be switched on, has for BNSF been rising recently, pointing to a new bottleneck. It had better start working on these problems.
We also don’t see which particular sites or segments of the rail line are contributing to the changes in the figures. That’s for each rail to figure out and make corrections. But seeing an overview of what’s going on will provide motivation for rails to do their part to keep congestion down. And a rail does not want to be perceived as slow-moving, for sure.
I hope we can count on the authors to keep updating this page, so the visibility will provide an incentive for rails to improve.
Standards for port call activities could provide a basis for a data exchange system for status, and could also provide motivation for a priority basis for specific containers.
There’s currently no message or signaling system allowing all the supply chain partners to move a given container to know the required speed of service. Partners can’t coordinate unless they know precisely which containers need to be moved when.
The standards for service steps in the port would make it easier to determine when a container was behind schedule and expediting was needed to meet the level of service guaranteed.
Of course, the standards proposed by DCSA need to be tried out by ports, and the system needs to be tweaked based on what they find. But it’s a good start.
Supply Chain and Logistics 