Why do so many Americans hate European trucks?

Two days doesn't have to mean 48 hours, it can also be less like 36 hours. Perhaps the train will drive at night, remember that in Europe we have a lot of passenger trains, so that freight trains are often travelling at night on certain routes.

 

Very simple, reefer is loaded at the production site, truck takes it to the railway station, reefer is loaded on the train. At the destination the other way around, reefer is loaded onto truck, and brought to distribution centers.

Can't tell you, both systems exist.

Moving containers is done by highly automated cranes, takes just a few minutes per container.

 

I'm sure it won't. That company spend a lot of time, money and negotiations setting up the whole thing, but forgot to ask you.

 

Yes indeed, there's a very busy freight train route from the harbour of Rotterdam to the harbour of Genua (Italy). The Swiss built the new 35 miles long Gotthardt railway tunnel at a cost of over $ 9 billion for this traffic.. There are even freight trains from London (and other cities) to China.

 

Containers were possible too, we did it from time to time.
The way we did it - certain trucks drive only around Poland, and then we had trucks in Benelux and UK.
Trailers were shipped between Poznan (PL) and Rotterdam (NL), since train was arriving in Europoort, shunting to P&O and Stena was possible, so trailer could leave Poland, and arrive in UK 3 days later, no truck needed in-between.
You need to keep in mind few facts.
1. Export loads we could use containers 75% of time, some customers wanted lowdeck trucks, but import loads were HUGE problem for containers. I believe 80% of time they came back empty to PL.
2. Containers with chassis tend to be heavier than modern curtain sides, so loading 25T was problematic.
3. We had 20+ trucks, but only few chassis,
4. Driver can swap trailers himself, you can't do it so easy with containers, so it took sometimes 3hrs to swap containers (especially in the middle of the night).
5. Could be just my bad luck, but always had a problem with containers. ILU numbers (the ABCD1234567 number) was assigned strictly to our trailers, so always easy to see which trailers is mine. With containers I had situations were they were "stolen" because someone had this very container 3 months earlier, and thought it's his. My boss was so fed up that he re-painted all of them, and assigned his own, new ILU numbers.

So generally we had box trailers (only mega), curtainside (standard and mega), reefers and containers. Reefers were useless on train, too much risk, later they put pallet boxes on them, and used them for normal OTR trucking.

Containers we used only when we had to much loads, but always, I tried to inform customer, that we can cover those loads, but there are certain problems related.

The biggest drawback of using trailer was that it had to be speciall trailer (so called huckepack), and after 2 years, it looked like it was 10 years old, thanks to nobody giving a #### about them.

 

Whole world would become such a nice, peaceful place, if someone would ask me from time to time, Wiktor, what should we do.

I'm always keen to help.

 

Here you go:

 

Are railroads as heavily government subsidized in EU as they are in NA?

 

Commuter or freight trains?