Assessing Near-Dock Rail Loading and Offloading Procedures at the Port of LA/LB for Application to a Container Conveyor to ICTFs; Final rept

摘要

The objective of this short-term monitoring project was to produce a 'first-order' metric displaying the range of container near-dock rail loading capacities for various types of equipment and procedures presently used at the Ports of Los Angeles/Long Beach. The application of the general metric will be to evaluate recently proposed container conveyor systems as well as possible expansion of near-dock rail at the Ports. In addition to load/off-load times, labor requirements, area involved, and impacts on other terminal processes during load-unload were evaluated. Load/unload capacities-depending on approach-were measured to be as low as 10 containers/hour and as high as 65 containers/hour with typical capacities in the neighborhood of 40 containers/hours; sufficient for loading over 800 containers/day (two crews operating two shifts) at a single terminal. A longer, more detailed study would have produced upper and lower confidence bounds to the reported numbers. Actual costs of a lift will also vary with process and equipment, but are around $100. Specific costs cannot be documented by approach because of the competitive value of this data to terminal economics.