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Record W1596158304

Investigating private railroad operations and the locomotive issue

2008· article· en· W1596158304 on OpenAlexaboutno aff
Barton Jennings

Bibliographic record

VenueJournal of Transportation Management · 2008
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldBusiness, Management and Accounting
TopicTransport and Economic Policies
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsTruckTransport engineeringEngineeringBusiness
DOInot available

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

INTRODUCTION Private, industrial or in-plant rail operations are seldom explored and little researched practice that, nevertheless, play major role the movement of freight worldwide. Additionally, with changes the railroad industry, the issue of how to power these private railroads has become major issue for the system owners. Transportation textbooks seldom cover the practice, and if they do, generally state that private rail operations are not commonly used. For example, one text states that private rail transportation basically means that the user buys or leases railcars, provides rail tracks on the property, and some limited cases, provides switching within the plant (Coyle, Bardi, and Novack, 2000), with later editions not even discussing the practice. However, research into the shows that just as with the motor carrier industry, where private fleets comprise the largest segment of the trucking industry (National Private Truck Council), private railroads greatly outnumber common carrier railroads. According to the Association of American Railroads, there are more than 600 freight railroads operating today Canada, Mexico, and the United States, forming seamless integrated system across North America accounting for more than 40 percent of all freight transportation (2009). However, what is not clearly recognized is that all of these shipments start and end at tens of thousands of individual locations. In the United States alone, The Comprehensive Guide To Industrial Locomotives (Reed, 2002) lists more than 2000 private rail operations using more than 3500 full-sized railroad locomotives. Canada, according to the Canadian Trackside Guide (Roberts and Stremes, 2005), has almost 250 private rail operations using nearly 600 fullsized railroad locomotives. In addition to these numbers, manufacturers of other rail switching devices such as mobile railcar movers list thousands more private rail operations among the tens of thousands of origins and destinations of rail shipments. A search of the Internet using several search engines, as well as number of academic data bases, reveals little about private rail operations. Several encyclopedia-type websites such as Wikipedia and NationMaster have very similar definitions for private or industrial railroads. For example, NationMaster.com (2009) states that an industrial railroad is a type of private railway used exclusively to serve particular industry inside mine or factory compound. Both website go on to give examples of such railroad. The industrial railroad example provided by NationMaster transport say clay from quarry to an interchange point with main line railway, where it would be transported to its final destination. The line would be owned and operated by the quarry company, and would exist solely to serve the quarry. The definition goes on to state that most industrial railways are short, usually being only few kilometres long, but there are notable exceptions--examples of which include the iron ore-carrying railways Western Australia which are hundreds of kilometres length and exist to transport iron ore from the inland to the coast. BACKGROUND Limited academic research exists on the benefits of private rail operations, particularly for North American operations. However, some recent research has been conducted on private in-plant rail operations Europe. Lubbecke and Zimmermann (2003) stated that in order to maintain timely around-the-clock production process it is often opportune or indispensable to operate private industrial railroad. Since paper by Charnes & Miller (in 1956), apparently no attention the operations research literature has been drawn on in-plant railroads. However, ongoing privatization and market deregulations the railroad sector force these railroads to offer better transportation quality, and to decrease charges. Industry experts North America agree that private rail operations are often essential and exist due to industrial demand. …

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.691
Threshold uncertainty score0.322

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.001
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.017
GPT teacher head0.213
Teacher spread0.196 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designObservational
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations1
Published2008
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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