Road-to rail-to road ( RoadRail Trucks)

[McColm]

Both Canada and Australia use road-rail vehicles, but unlike the Europeans they don't use low loading flat bed wagons to carry trucks and trailers. Instead they either use a Rail Car Mover or Hi-Rail/Hi-Rail Truck system which raises and lowers the rail wheels using a pneumatic or hydraulics. They even use trucks instead of a locomotives to haul the freight.

My idea is to be able to drive your truck and trailer straight onto the track to form a convoy. Each lorry would be fitted with hydraulic rail wheels and coupling system, the drivers would remain in their cabs with the neutral gear selected and brakes in the off postion. The rail company would then supply four or more high performance RoadRail Trucks to provide a push-me-pull-me in order to move the convoy. Two at the front and two or more at the rear, depending on the length or if any hills are along the route.
The drivers would arrive at their terminals refreshed and ready to carry on their journey.
 There are scaled models that you can buy that have the railwheels and rubber tyres for your layout, some are motorised. Its just a question of adapting a suitable lorry or lorries should you take up this idea.

[TsrJoe]

check out the old Kitmaster Road Railer kit, a really neat model consisting of AEC, cab unit and artic container/rail wagon, my late father had a rake of these weighted for use on his layout, definately different, especially when pulled with a suitable shunter (in his case a scratchbuilt Sentinel type!) 

[PR19_Kit]

Ah yes, the RoadRailer...........

Back in the 60s I did some work on them, as the 52 Roadrailer vehicles were built by Pressed Steel, who I worked for at the time. BR had the whole train of them operating on trials out of Stratford Yard in East London and we did test runs on the Eastern Region every few days. The last van was kitted out as an instrumentation vehicle with cables to various sensors along the train, and it had seats and heaters and coffee making stuff etc, but it was excrutiatingly uncomfortable! One thing we determined by the tests was that the ride got worse and worse the nearer you got to the rear of the train, something to do with pitch forces being transmitted through the coupler from the vehicle in front.

I've got a few of those RoadRailer kits built into a display model, one standard vehicle, one match truck, one of the prototypes, which had flat roofs and were shorter, and one Roadrailer flat car. We built two of the latter vehicles but they never had their running gear installed as the railway unions refused point blank to bring the idea into service.

Apparently they objected to non-railway union drivers, ie truckers, onto railway property, and so BR had to can the whole idea and all 52 vehicles were scrapped.  

The kits were originally made by Scalecraft, an offshoot of Kiel Kraft, and were then taken over by Peco. I don't think Kitmaster had anything to do with them.

[TsrJoe]

Scalecraft, yip my apologies (just found a few unbuilt ones in the stash with their black, white and red header cards) id also forgotten the neat rail link units too that came with one of the kits

cool hearing first hand information about the units, i never knew the story of them til you posted that snippet there, yet another 'project cancelled' for British Railways i guess ! (RTV1 anyone ?)

cheers, joe

[McColm]

Thanks for the info PR19_19Kit

[Hobbes]

The Russians do this as well on occasion:

[Hobbes]

It's an interesting idea. In real life it was probably made obsolete by the introduction of the standard container. Much easier to just put those on the train rather than having to install (heavy) rail equipment on road vehicles.

[PR19_Kit]

I knew I'd got a piccie of my Roadrailer train somewhere...........




The loco is an Airfix Drewry Class 03, that was a pretty close match to the Pressed Steel yard shunter. The next vehicle to the left is the match truck which carried the front of the lead RoadRailer, and every other vehicle hooked onto the one in front with it's nose weight being carried by the previous vehicle. The lead vehicle in the train is the standard BR RoadRailer, one of 50 'production' vehicles, the second is the proposed, but not built, RoadRailer mineral wagon, and the last is the RoadRailer flat, of which we built two but never fitted the wheels. The second car it's carrying is a model of my Hillman Super Imp at the time.  

The truck is the Leyland Hippo that came in the complete kit and it's bringing in one of the two prototypes, which had flat roofs and was about 2'6" shorter than the production vehicles. The Prestcold titles were hand painted   they took for EVER!

[McColm]

Thanks for that. I'll have to check on ebay to see if there anykts still out there.

[rallymodeller]

Really, you don't see them in North America anymore, either. Most intermodal rail traffic these days is either containerized or specialized flatcars with fifth-wheel hookups and the trailers are driven onto those, two at a time. The RoadRailer was prominent back in the Sixties and Seventies but the cost of the specialized trailers was seen to be prohibitive compared to standard over-the-road trailers or container "spine trailers". Additionally they are difficult to incorporate into mixed trains as their railholding is different than even unloaded standard cars (they are much lighter). Canadian National was a major early proponent of the system, and they have all but abandoned the system in favour of well cars and straight containers.

[rickshaw]

It's an interesting idea. In real life it was probably made obsolete by the introduction of the standard container. Much easier to just put those on the train rather than having to install (heavy) rail equipment on road vehicles.

Except just using containers means that you must double, triple or quadruple the handling.  Anything that reduces the amount of time, effort and wages that must be expended on moving the containers means improved profits for the transportation company.   Road-railers have the advantage that effectively you load the vehicle once.  The container remains on the vehicle from door-to-door, even if that journey requires a railway segment.  However, they are more expensive and aren't efficient on long-distance journeys.  They fulfill a need but primarily for (comparatively) short distance journeys.  So, downunder, you wouldn't seem them used to take goods across the continent but you would seem them used to take goods from one capital city to another.   On long-distance journeys, it is more efficient to carry the maximum number of containers possible for a given train length and that is where double or even triple (if the tunnels are high enough) stacking with well-cars come into play.   

[rallymodeller]

It's an interesting idea. In real life it was probably made obsolete by the introduction of the standard container. Much easier to just put those on the train rather than having to install (heavy) rail equipment on road vehicles.

Except just using containers means that you must double, triple or quadruple the handling.  Anything that reduces the amount of time, effort and wages that must be expended on moving the containers means improved profits for the transportation company.   Road-railers have the advantage that effectively you load the vehicle once.  The container remains on the vehicle from door-to-door, even if that journey requires a railway segment.  However, they are more expensive and aren't efficient on long-distance journeys.  They fulfill a need but primarily for (comparatively) short distance journeys.  So, downunder, you wouldn't seem them used to take goods across the continent but you would seem them used to take goods from one capital city to another.   On long-distance journeys, it is more efficient to carry the maximum number of containers possible for a given train length and that is where double or even triple (if the tunnels are high enough) stacking with well-cars come into play.   

Even on short journeys, containers still have the edge. The equipment cost at the transfer point is not really raised that much by handling equipment; many places use modified front-end loaders for the job, while others use wheeled thingmajigs that straddle the cars or even big forklifts. A spine trailer can carry many different kinds of loads as well, while the roadrailer is limited to only the kind of load it was built for. You can get ISO containers for bulk liquid, refrigerated containers of all kinds, plain boxes in 12', 24', 36', 40', 42', 48' and 53' sizes, even armoured and otherwise protected units; and the container itself becomes handy storage at the delivery point. It is dropped off and the trailer returns to the intermodal depot to get another load.  With a roadrailer this practice is expensive downtime while with an ISO container it is just part of the life cycle they were designed for. Our local hospital just finished a major rebuilding that had all the trade unions in a fabricated office block made out of stacked ISO containers, each one being a workshop. Once the job was done, they were gone within a couple of days. And an ISO container has the added benefit of being not only locally transportable (there are specialized smaller flatbed trucks that do the job around here, like modified car haulers), but the same container can be loaded up the next day and be off to the Antarctic. It's a matter of standardization, and the ISO container idea has the edge.

[McColm]

     Michelin experimented with a number of test prototype railcars with pneumatic tyres back in 1932 known as ETAT and sold the design commerically to various indepent railway companies,around ten were constructed.  Strapping was added to the inside wheel to avoid derailment.They looked like a six wheeled truck and four wheeled trailer unit built as a carriage with seating. Looking more like a bus than a train. The steel frame had a plywood skin. Power was from a 96hp four-cylinder Panhard & Levassor petrol engine, which drove the first two axels of the front bogie. Wheel diameter was 0.85m, and total wheel base 11.02m; with a weight of 4.37 tonnes, they could accommodate 24 passengers and run at a speed of 100km/h (60mph ish). Two were put into service by SNCF, they were withdrawn by the petrol shortages of the second world war. They took just three hours to complete the service from Paris to Argentan which was faster than the normal train running times.
The type 12 was slimlined with spats covering the wheel bogies and a larger pronounced engine in the front. Double driving position was added for the return journey.
Continental Modeler ran an article about this subject back in January 1991 page 33 '' Historic French Locomotives in HO-16,
ETAT 'Micheline' type 11 railcar'' by Marc Neyret.

[rallymodeller]

FYI, ETAT was one of the French national railroads and a predecessor to SNCF, not a train type. For example, the Bugatti railcars were operated by ETAT.

[PR19_Kit]

There are some sets on one of the Paris Metro that use the Bugatti principle of tyred and flanged wheels. They're limited to one particlular line AFAIK, but they certainly achieve the desired object which was to provide a soft and quet ride, I've ridden on them more than once.

Roadrailers use swappable wheelsets though, there being a flanged steel set for rail travel and a tyred set for road travel. On the BR 'railers they were mounted on independantly hinged frames that were motored into and out of position using an air motor on the underframe. I believe the American versions have 2 axle trucks that motor up and down vertically, but I've never seen a real one so far.