Curt,
As most people know, one of the largest considerations when setting rates is Direction of Traffic. Because of the large Proctor & Gamble production facility in Cincinnati, a lot of highway trailers are needed. So many that truck lines used to dead head trailers to the Cincinnati area. Kansas City was the opposite, not enough outbound loads to fill all trailers unloaded in their metropolitan area. Therefore, any commodity moving from Kansas City (commercial zone) to Cincinnati could move at an artificially low rate. One such movement was the regular movement of flour from KC to Cincinnati. Pla-Doh was manufactured in a rather dated building not on a rail siding. The inbound flour requirement was about 120,000 pounds per month and the transcontinental truck lines were knocking themselves out cutting the rate to attract those three monthly loads.
Those same truck lines (many are no longer operating (Time-DC CF, Trans-Con, for example) may have taken over the movement of canned goods from the caves at Bonner Springs to Indianapolis, Columbus, Louisville and Cincinnati.
If my memory serves me right, at one time only trucks were used for transporting grain from Iowa elevators to the barges on the Mississippi. I think the IC had a service using one engine and a skeleton crew to move three or four cars at a time from one elevator to the river on a daily basis. This would have been similar to the Australian road trains and kept a few trucks off the highways. Yes, the American railroads can be competitive in certain lanes with certain traffic.
Along with deleting S-I-T tariffs and service, I doubt if Trap-Car service is still offered. REA is dead. Many changes. And some of the container trains moving from one coast to the other could be in Land Bridge service which is from one port to another, from one ship to another ship, Asia to Europe via part of the way on US railroads. The railroads do good work.
John
