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My wife and I decided to take the scenic route home from the SF Bay area Sunday, and followed the UP tracks from Gilroy to Castroville. At Pajaro we caught up with a southbound UP train and watched it go over the Elkhorn Slough. Very pretty, but darn it I didn't have my camera with me!
I was curious, the train was nothing but empty double-stack cars (I'm not sure what you call them). It was at least half a mile long and completely empty. No containers or nothing. Do these kinds of trains only haul freight in one direction or was it just moving cars needed elsewhere? Not knowing much about freight operations it seemed a little odd.
------------------ Trust God, love your neighbor, and never mistake opinion for truth. -Mr. Toy
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Mr. Toy, These are called 'bare-table' trains (and other similar words) by railfans; not sure if the employees call them that too. It is a statement about the US economy...we import a lot more than we export (at least as far as containerized freight goes), so they sometimes have to return the empties back to port for another load. Evidently they aren't able to find enough export freight to do loaded backhauls. I used to see trains like this occasionally in the South Bay, returning to LA/Long Beach harbors.
MP
Posts: 874 | From: South Bay (LA County), Calif, USA | Registered: Aug 2000
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posted
That sounds like the IOALBR train that UP runs to reposition container flats to the Long Beach CA area. This is a regular southbound train on the former SP Coastline. To learn more about current operations on the former SP Coast Line read the "headsupcoastfans" group at yahoogroups.com . http://groups.yahoo.com/group/headsupcoastfans
The train symbol breaks down like this: I= intermodal OA=Oakland LB=Long Beach R=repositioning move
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"The train was nothing but empty double-stack cars (I'm not sure what you call them)." I believe that the individual cars are referred to as 'well cars.' I was in Fullerton a few years ago, and a railfan I was talking to knew that a bare-table train was coming before he could even see it. Daniel3197, do you know how many scheduled trains like this there are (at least on the West Coast)? I've seen 4 or 5 on the BNSF Seligman Sub in the last few months. I found it strange that they would send them all the way across the nation, but I guess it's the most economical thing to do.
Posts: 553 | From: Flagstaff, AZ USA | Registered: Apr 2001
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One of the most unusual things I have seen is when bare table trains pass each other going opposite directions. Once I was at Fullerton and a train of empty stack cars was going west towards the harbor and a train of empty pig flats was heading east! It looked terribly counterproductive. BNSF seems to run two or three of these bare table trains every day, at least in this area. The empty pig flats are often transferred between intermodal facilities in Hobart and San Bernardino, while the empty stack wells almost always head toward the harbor.
Posts: 246 | From: Anaheim, CA | Registered: Apr 2002
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