Josef:
The rule of thumb for well over a decade has been that rail can compete with trucks for intermodal shipments only at distances greater than 400-500 miles. Each container shipment can be different; so the rail or truck decision is some combination of cost AND transit time with only the customer knowing which carries more weight in their modal decision. Anyhow; with this in mind; containers coming into JAX, Savannah or Charleston that are destined to points in the Southeast will likely make their entire trip over the road. To some extent, NS and CSX seem to be acknowledging this reality, by building new intermodal ramps (CSX at Cartersville, GA and NS at Gainesville, GA) where the idea is to have containers trucked from the ports, consolidated at the ramps and then moved by rail to destinations outside the Southeast.
This is kind of a reverse process to what both NS and CSX do in the northeastern U.S. where containers from the west and south bound for points in New Jersey and metro New York City and Philadelphia are ramped in Harrisburg (NS) and Chambersburg, PA (CSX) and moved over the road.
The one exception to short haul intermodal seems to be the FEC. We have a production site near Mobile and have trucked containers to JAX; transferred them to FEC intermodal trains and railed to Miami for loading aboard ships. Transit time wasn't as important to us as cost and this was actually less expensive than trucking the entire distance. Ramping the containers in Mobile on either CSX or NS wasn't really an option as neither railroad supported intermodal trains / schedules that would work for the Mobile to Jacksonville leg.
Wall Street rail analysts and Class 1 CEO's are scared to death of autonomous trucks. I won't pretend to be a visionary but; I question the level of concern. Our interstates are already jammed with trucks - try driving on I-40 in Arkansas or Tennessee or I-81 in Virginia. If you removed even 25% of the intermodal traffic currently moving by rail and tried to put in on the highway (assuming the dray carriers could find the drivers); I think you would have near gridlock. To me; the only way autonomous trucking can successfully divert large volumes of intermodal business from rail to truck is by having dedicated rights of way over which autonomous vehicles may operate. And we've already got those dedicated rights of way - they are called railroads.
Curt
