Overweight/heavy container best practices

We quickly learend that long term leasing the cost per chassis [around 2013] was less than 1/3rd of the daily cost from chassis depot pools and everyone was billing 2x that price to the cutomers.

As a local only operation we sere doing around 25,000 moves a year starting with Trac and DCLI recycled pier chassis, some of the DCLI still said 'Sealand' and the maintenance cost was steep.

Now we have over 600 chassis and got rid of the trash; some of the initial new milestone chassis are now on lease for over 4 years and the maintenance costs are still in line with the newer chassis. Our maintenance vendor has a roving unit that rolls through our drop yards and a few customer lots doing PMs and he is a happy as the drivers and owner operators.

99% of our business is within 40 miles of the port and we are up to 30K moves a year with around 95 port guys.

The port guys do 2,3 sometimes [when the moon, stars and the ILA aglign] 4 turns a day so flat 10:00 x 20's and misisng lights were a big problem that is now elimnated.

 

I hated hated hated pulling containers

the chassis was always garbage .
Never maintained.
Tires and brakes and lights never work.
Leaf springs broken etc etc


I don’t think I ever hooked to a chassis that had all good tires , all the lights worked and all the brakes were adjusted.

and the tires are always total total garbage.
Then the people at the rail yard would be mad when you brought one back in with a blown or flat tire. And would always try to make the driver or tractor owner pay for a new tire .

 

Unfortunately, in our area, direct leasing is not an option, the way these pools are setup

 

It was a slow changeover. NY/NJ had all 3 Trac, Flex and DCLI setting up to deal with all the chassis the steamship lines dumped. DCLI came about just to deal with allthe Sealand/Maersk chassis and is the only one with direct lineage to a steamship line.

Still it was a mess until the termnals eliminated on-site chassis pools. You could not use former brand X chassis at line Y, etc. and our SCAC became the prefix on our chassis until the off-site chassis depots eliminated accidentally droping and loosing one of our leasers.

We spent a few years jumping through the hoops as, one by one, they were eliminated.

Railhead areas didn't have the huge numbers like a large port so there are fewer choices.

NY/NJ moves around 8500 containers a day by truck in addition to all those going by rail directly from the port.

 

Also depends on the local regulations
When I lived in Biloxi we would sometimes pull containers from the port that would be overweight on the trailer or drive tandems on the interstate but they were legal on US Hwy 90 which ran parallel to interstate 10.

so we Ran them on hwy 90
With all the rickety drawbridges .

You could also get a blanket permit for several states that cost like $200 a year, that allows you to be overweight on the tandems , if your load originated in a foreign country .
You couldn’t be over 80k gross, but that permit allowed you to be over 34k on the tandems .

pulling a 20 foot container that has 47,000 crammed in it , is no fun at all.
It’s Very twitchy .

 

Permits in the North East cover 'indivisible' [sealed container] loads up to 90K gross.

 

Radials are correct. Here in TN, we have annual container over weight permits. When the scales couldn't give you ticket for overweight because of the permit. They started looking at the tires load rating. Most 10.00 x 20.00 don't have load rating to carry over weight.