The Different Types of Trucks (Lots of Pictures)

Yes please do thank you for pointing people at this thread I'll probably ad more pictures and stuff soon. I figured there's a lot of confusion because sometimes people will ask me questions thinking that private distribution fleets operate and do the same jobs as whole sale common carriers and that's simply not the case and I wanted to state there is a difference.

 

Another part of trucking that is not really talked about as much or really asked about is "Intermodal".

Back in the day trucking wasn't like it is today and I'm talking way way back late 1800's all the way to probably the mid 1970's.

In those days there wasn't UPS, FedEx, DHL all the LTL companies that exist today. You didn't really have Schneider, Swift or Werner, Erb, Cealadon etc etc none of that was even in existence yet.

You had this right here:

The Pennsylvania Railroad and there fleet of rolling stock, that is how goods traveled across the country, sure there were trucking operations yes, any of you ever hear of a company called CF? (It's a rhetorical question) however Leeland James was still a nobody out in Oregon, during the Pennsylvania Railroads hey day.

Really LTL trucking and trucking like we have today didn't really get going until after the World War II I've tried to look up trucking during World War II and there isn't a whole lot on it. I think part of it was because of rubber and fuel rationing, railroads carried the bulk of the mass transportation during World War II.

Anyhow back in the day the railroads did it all, they were UPS, FedEx, Schneider, Werner, Amtrak they were everything all tied into one.

The only thing you really had was the post office and companies like Wells Fargo and Stage Coach operators.

And this went on and on for years. It wasn't until post World War II that the big LTL operations like Pacific Intermountain Xpress and Consolidated Freightways and Roadway really started gaining legs. Yes they were around yes they handled freight and shipped freight lots of it, but they were not the major player.

Everything back in the day, was shipped via rail road in box cars and if it was mail then it was given high priority and shipped via the mail car on the passenger trains.

Back in the late 1800's early 1900's commercial aviation wasn't a thing you took The Pennsylvania Railroad when you wanted to travel.

It's funny to think and this is how far we've come or gone backwards depending on your point of view, but

The Pennsylvania Railroad in it's hey day had a larger operating budget then the United States Federal Government and employed 250,000people.

As far as equipment of the Pennsylvania Railroad the Altoona, Locomotive shop was the Pennsylvania Railroads main locomotive and car shop it was the big one and they built locomotives there and built rail cars there, they did everything there fixed stuff, scrapped stuff, built new stuff, freight cars, passenger cars everything. We could spend a whole day just talking about the different kinds of mail and baggage cars the PRR had it's almost beyond comprehension.

(Some of you will know instantly where that photograph was taken, I took it, with my Camera in August of 2015. It's probably the most famous piece of railroad in the country probably more famous then the golden spike in Utah.)

Anyhow, what's this got to do with trucking?
Back in the day before massive whole sale mega trucking and UPS and FedEx, say you were a small time distiller in small time small town. Say you had a customer who bought your liquor and sold it in there bar, in Chicago.

Well you would take your liquor load them up into your horse and buggy and take them down to the train station. There would be a box car parked on the "team track" and the station agent would do the paper work and get your few cases of liquor ready for shipment and load them into the box car and the freight train that came through once a day would pick up that box car and take it away to a railroad freight depot where it was broken down and resorted.

Essentially what LTL break bulk is today is what the railroads did 100 years ago.

Here's some video's to show what I mean:




However around World War I they created the Railway Xpress Agency which was basically a parcel trucking arm. Instead of taking your goods to the train station. the Railway Xpress Agency would come by and pick up your goods and take them to the railway depot.

This was modern day parcel trucking. This was pre UPS and FedEx.

You had railway freight depots where all day long hundreds of men with carts and hand trucks and tow motors loaded and unloaded box cars by hand. Everything was shipped by the railroads.

Well in the 1950s the Interstate Highway System was starting up trucking was giving the railroads quite a bit of competition, so the railroads especially the Southern Pacific Railroad they were really the pinoneers of this started there piggy back service. This really was the start of doing away with floor loaded box cars and transporting from plants to rail depots and breaking loads down and resorting all of that was done away with when Southern Pacific introduced it's "Piggy Back" service and Pennsylvania Railroad rolled out it's Tructrain service.

In modern times we even had Conrail Mercury and NS-Conrail Triple Crown.

Conrail Mercury and NS Triple Crown though are more whole sale transportation based, but what all this inter-modal did was it made the 40ft box car obsolete and really killed off a lot of what box cars did to begin with.


This is the Southern Pacific's Piggy Back truck this is what started the whole intermodal frenzy of today.

See no longer did you need a "team track" or to have your own rail road siding if you wanted to use the railroads.

Say a potato chip manufacturer needed to get it's chips to it's distributors in Washington State and it's factory was in Los Angeles. The Southern Pacific would come out with there trucks and the chip maker would load the trucks and then the trailers would go on trains and be shipped to what ever city they need to go to. The next morning the trucks would come back maybe with a back haul of potato chip tins and the trailers would be reloaded with chips.

Now the Southern Pacific did however still have a break bulk facility and they used there trucks to service less then car load customers. It wasn't all that uncommon to see an SP 24ft trailer making a delivery to a small grocery store. A pallet of canned goods may have shown up at the freight depot and the pallet was broken down and sent out on route trucks for delivery. The railroad express agency also did the same thing with parcels.

Do any of you guys remember seeing these back in the day?

I know I did, used to see these on all kinds of trains out here in Ohio in the early 1990s before Union Pacific bought out Southern Pacific.

The closest company you have today in my opinion doing everything from 1 box delivery all the way to mass whole sale transport and cross docking depot work is the Canadian transportation truck provider known as Erb.

 

Erb is a major whole sale transport provider that deals with temperature controlled commodities mostly and Erb does way more then anyone else from huge truck load shipments to single parcel delivery of temperature controlled freight mostly food goods, they do it all.




From whole sale transport to, medium whole sale all the way down to end user. Erb has warehouses and distribution centers all set up for mass food distribution from 5000 cases to 1 case they pretty much cover all the bases.

They pick up multiple shipments from maybe one warehouse take that trailer load to there own warehouse and then break it down and send it on it's way sometimes across the US, sometimes across Canada sometimes in a 10 wheeler to New York City other times in a single axle straight truck to many of there less then truck load customers in Canada.

There kind of doing what the railroads used to do only there using trucks.

 

Here's a certain kind of trailer you do not see to often. These are FedEx Ground parcel pups. Actually FedEx is the only company running parcel pups. UPS used to have them, but do not any more.

These trailers have an underbelly and can be loaded with more cargo. Often times these trailers are hand loaded off a conveyor and are stuffed to the gills with packages. These trailers run from hub terminal to end of the line spoke terminals to keep all of the packages flowing for FedEx.

 

This vehicle here is known as the FedEx P-1000 this is the flag ship of the FedEx fleet. This type of vehicle is known as a "step van" and is often used in dense heavy route delivery work, especially in the delivery of bread, parcels and textiles. Step vans work well for routes where there are many stops, but the pieces per stop is very low.

The driver can move very easily in and out of the cab of the truck and from the cab to the cargo area out and back very fast thus making them very efficient on routes where there maybe 100 stops and 120-130 packages to deliver. Where it's in and out all day you can hop in and hop out there very good for work of that nature.

 

There sleeper straight truck operation is actually a big part of what they do. One of there drivers told me that every Erb Terminal now has some kind of sleeper straight truck. Alot of shipments going to food distributors are really only 2-3 pallet shipments, believe it or not. So what Erb does is they break down the loads and say Sysco is only getting 2 pallets of ricotta cheese and 2 pallets of already cooked and processed deli turkey and some other cooler items, Erb will consolidate those all into a load and run them in the sleeper straight truck to who ever the final customer is.

Believe it or not while the food companies do take entire truck loads of fast moving stuff, they take many partials as well. Like we do a lot of backhauls that are only 4 skids. So what Erb is doing is they go to a food terminal pick up an entire 53' trailer load of a million different shipments. Then take it back to there warehouse unload it store it resort it and reship it in the sleeper straight trucks. Erb is kind of like an LTL consolidator specifically for the food industry there like an LTL outfit that specializes in broadline food service stuff.

It's funny though the warehouse that loads my trailer everytime I've been there, there's always 1 or 2 10 wheelers in the waiting pool waiting to be unloaded.