Comparison of trucking and rail as freight modes

Introduction
Freight transportation acts as a role to provide delivering goods from
one place to another. It also assist the development of economy by
transporting the particular goods for business use within a particular
time. Thus, the demand of freight transport increases over the years
because of the contribution of transportation in the development of
the countries especially in the field of business. There are different
ways of freight transportation in order to ensure the goods are
delivered in a most sufficient way by considering situations such as
cost, distance, efficiency and others. The trucking and rail are taken
as the example to compare the difference of it in the aspect of
economic, social and environmental impacts.
Rail plays a significant role in the delivering services and it helps to

Economic
Lower cost and acceptable speed of particular transport will be
chosen as it helps in development especially in the field of business.
The overall cost of the vehicle depends on the location, comparison
of types of the vehicle and others in order to minimize the cost
within the set range of the budget. Besides, the social costs which
affect by the people and goods should also be considered as making
the selection of vehicles. Private costs are defined as the direct
expenses which includes the operating cost and speculation in
general facilities. Operating costs are the types of costs which
usually related to the expenses of maintenance, fuel, depreciation
and particular insurance of the freight transport.
During the estimation of private costs, the main consideration is the
price of delivering the goods by using truck and rail. The private
cost is said to be equal to the cost or expenses to supply the
services by society under an ideal market situation. The ideal
market situation will not exist in the real world since there always
have uncertainties and accidents which might happen during the
delivering services.

For the private costs of truck, the highest cost is the cost of labour
while the expenses of fuel is the second highest cost. The truck
freight can categorised into two types which are Truckload (TL) and
Less Than Truckload (TLT). According to David J. Forkenbrock (1999),
the analysis of truckload is shown in Table 1. For the category of
truckload, the carriers can be divided into six types such as general
fright, refrigerated, automobile transport, tank truck and others.
Since the general truck has the highest usage compared to other
types, only the private cost of general freight is taken under
consideration. In 1994, the operating cost of the general freight TL is
$ 1.25 per-mile, 8.42 cents per ton-mile and the average load is
14.80 tons.
The freight rail varies with different situation and it can be divided
into 4 types of freight rail which are heavy unit train, mixed freight
train, intermodal train and double-stack container train. Heavy unit
train consists of 100 lightweight cars. The weight of each car is 26
tons and it carries 105 tons of cargo. The train is travelling 1000
miles with 100 % empty return rate. Mixed freight train is mixed
cargo which carries 90 cars. The average weight of the car is 32
tons and the averages weight of cargo is 70 tons for each car. The
train is travelling 500 miles with 45 % empty return rate. Intermodal
train comprises of 120 truck trailers driving on 120 articulated spine
cars. The average weight of trailer and spine cars are 28 tons and
14 tons respectively. The train is travelling 1750 miles with 5 %
empty return rate. Double-stack container train comprises of 120
wells on 24 cars and weight of each car is 80 tons. Every car can
carry 5 wells and every well can carry 2 stacked container boxes.
The power required for all these 4 trains is 3000 BHP locomotives.
Table 1: Private Operating Costs of Railroad Scenario

Social
External costs are defined as the additional costs in order to prevent
the accident or uncertainties which might happen during the
process of delivering processes. It is because the actual cost of
transportation services will not be taken directly without considering
the risks of the services. The over consumption of cost for

transportation services might happen when the external costs are

higher than the external benefits.
Private cost

Reference
The significance
University.

of

freight

transport.

2016.

United

Nations

http://archive.unu.edu/unupress/unupbooks/uu24ee/uu24ee0t.htm
Forkenbrok, David. J. 1999. Comparison of external costs of rail and
truck freight
transportation. Pergamon, Publick Policy Center,
The University of Iowa, Iowa City.
http://nexus.umn.edu/Courses/ce8214/papers/Forkenbrock2001.pdf