The encyclopedia · Engineering & Operations · Technical decision · 1986–1996
Norfolk Southern's RoadRailer ran as a truck on the road and a train on the rail.
A trailer that rides on railmen bogies and road wheels removed the crane from truck-rail transfer.
Norfolk Southern · Triple Crown Services
the move
Moving a truck trailer by rail normally means craning it onto a flatcar, which needs a big terminal, a crane and time, and the same works in reverse at the far end.
Triple Crown Services, a Norfolk Southern subsidiary, started in 1986 and used RoadRailer trailers that carried both highway wheels and rail bogies, so trailers were assembled into unit trains at origin and disassembled at destination without a lift.
The RoadRailer let one load unit run as a road trailer and as a rail car, so traffic moved from the highway to the rail while keeping door-to-door delivery, and a single trailer could form part of a 150-trailer train.
why it works
- The trailer is its own rail car, so no crane is needed to transfer it.
- No transfer means no costly rail terminal for the same movement.
- The trailer is loaded at the shipper dock and remains sealed to the receiver
- One driver can swap between road and rail, widening each side's reach
what transfers
Remove the transfer rather than pay for it: if the container is also the vehicle, the crane and the terminal disappear.
what came after
Triple Crown grew to about a quarter of a million trailer loads a year before railroading's economics and truck-only service squeezed it. Norfolk Southern retired most RoadRailer trains and shut the dedicated service in 2025, though the bimodal idea lives on in terminology and engineering.
references
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