Lighter, aluminium freight wagons, double-decker ones and more fuel-efficient locomotives have lifted the number of ton-miles per (American) gallon of fuel from 332 to 457 an improvement of 38%.But the fastest-growing part of rail freight has been "intermodal" traffic: containers or truck trailers loaded on to flat railcars.
An Ozarker only by calling, he was never the real thing.Wal-Mart's "icon is the intermodal container," writes Nelson Lichtenstein of the University of California in "Wal-Mart: The Face of Twenty-First-Century Capitalism".
Like its rivals, the port is "intermodal", meaning that it welcomes not just ships but also barges, trucks and, alone among American deepwater ports, six Class I freight railways.
The federal government should do what it can to ensure that these areas, first of all, have the infrastructure they need to thrive.This means, among other things, an enhanced federal role in projects that cross state borders, including not only the interstates but intermodal freight and high-speed rail.
Yet Bill Zollars, boss of Yellow Roadway, America's largest trucking firm, says that poor rail services have forced him to put 20,000 intermodal shipments each month back on to trucks.Now, however, trucking too is near capacity.
It announced that it is looking at ways of harmonising car taxation; it trumpeted the fact that 80,000 pages of European Union law are about to be translated into nine new languages; and it signed a memorandum of understanding on "intermodal Pan-European corridor VIII"—ie, some roads and railways linking Albania, Bulgaria and Italy.
In 1956 Malcolm McLean, a trucker from North Carolina, launched the first "intermodal" shipping container, which could be transferred easily between lorries, trains and ships.
The container took on a growing role in North American intermodal transportation in the 1980s.
Two different managerial approaches to intermodal freight service have developed in the United States.
The Delaware River Port Authority administers the Ameriport Intermodal Rail Facility, the Port of Philadelphia and Camden, a ferry service, the PATCO high-speed transit line, and the Benjamin Franklin, Walt Whitman, Betsy Ross, and Commodore Barry bridges over the Delaware.
He has been back on the market for a while, and is putting the finishing touches to 2005 figures for his Intermodal Resources business, which is a kind of 'T' with next-generation technology.
