I have been moving equipment for a while. My father started the company I work for in the late '80s, and I used to ride with him in the summer (between school grades) to make money. I have been driving equipment haul trucks for over 10 years, everything from box trucks, to flatbed straight trucks, to tractor trailers.
I will say this first: If the equipment does not roll (ie no trucks), you have to crane or otherwise lift the load on. If the car was complete, minus trucks, you would still have side steps, couplers, truss rods, queen posts, needle beams, brake hardware, and any other various under body components. It would take much longer to disassemble all of these parts, than to load with cribbing (minutes vs. days). From the truck driver standpoint, I would rather figure out how to load a specific load, than to modify any load
Next, For the owners; If these rail cars were to be used long term, the truss rods and other body strengthening pieces would be better served on the car than off. If you wished to keep these pieces, not only would you have the time and labor of removing them, but even longer time to reinstall. And, (today anyway) you wouldn't want to work under a car suspended by a crane, so you would block it up first, then remove the hardware. The same cribbing could be used to block the car up during transport and no pieces would have to be taken off.
As for the trucker, the route is the same either way, whether the car has the metal hardware or not.
To recap, its faster and easier to load, strap, and transport the cars without removing any necessary parts, than to try to make the car sit flat.
The only real question to me would be the quality of the roads that were to be driven. If no precipitation for sevral weeks, and the roads are wide enough, most trucks would have no problem tackling a moderate dirt or gravel road. I would assume that any trucks already operating in a mountainous area, would have some sort of axle locker. And if no mud, there is almost no chance of getting buried or sliding...
$.020001
Casey
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/12/2017 03:29AM by Casey Akin.
