Education - Part 4
Transport
Under construction
Introduction
Concept of Transport
Railroads are transport organizations. Their purpose, therefore, is the movement of entities (freight or goods and people) between two points in space-time. As such they are classified as carriers, a topic we discussed in What is a Railroad?. See also UNECE and Britannica.
Introduction
Concept of Transport
Railroads are transport organizations. Their purpose, therefore, is the movement of entities (freight or goods and people) between two points in space-time. As such they are classified as carriers, a topic we discussed in What is a Railroad?. See also UNECE and Britannica.
Purposes
Transport or transportation is the means of moving things from one place to another place in some specified time. There are many sorts of transport, such as movement of water from a water tower to one's home, transport of voice messages from one person to another via a telephone system, movement of people and goods by truck, boat or rail, and so on, as illustrated below.
Transport or transportation is the means of moving things from one place to another place in some specified time. There are many sorts of transport, such as movement of water from a water tower to one's home, transport of voice messages from one person to another via a telephone system, movement of people and goods by truck, boat or rail, and so on, as illustrated below.
An artist rendering of various forms of transport, most still in use today
Here we are interested in transport by rail. See also UNECE RT.
Transport of goods by railroad involves the movement of large quantities from one place to another. This does not mean that a large quantity need be of just one kind of good in freight transport. Of course railroads transport car-loads of things such as gravel or milk, but bundles of individual items of all sorts, such as automobile parts or tires of various sizes and applications may also be transported, provided the bundle of goods is destined for a particular place.
Transport of people by railroad involves the movement of many people from one place to another such as from Philadelphia, PA to Baltimore, MD (although some may detrain at Wilmington, DE (while others may board there) or from Paris, France to Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Transport also involves the matter of time. Railroad customers would rapidly move to alternative transport if a railroad could not deliver goods in a timely manner. In fact, it was railroads in England that helped establish standardized time by publishing railroad time tables that were based on Greenwich Mean Time (called railroad time) from 1847 December 1.
All the above-mentioned factors, together with manufacturing and production, constitute the field of logistics. According to the Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals (CSCMP), logistics is the process of planning, implementing and controlling procedures for the efficient and effective transportation and storage of goods including services and related information from the point of origin to the point of consumption, for the purpose of conforming to customer requirements and includes inbound, outbound, internal and external movements.
Legal Matters
In the United States, the Surface Transportation Board (STB) has broad economic regulatory oversight of railroads, including rates, service, the construction, acquisition, and abandonment of rail lines, carrier mergers, and interchange of traffic among carriers (see Carrier in What is a Railroad?). These various matters are beyond the scope of our discussion but may be mentioned as needed.
Shannondell Model Railroad
Shannondell Model Railroad is a transport system, but only on a model basis. It moves freight and people over its layout but does not actually carry on commerce with any of the entities modeled on the layout, except for a bit of advertising.
Other Transport topics to come, such as bill of lading, forwarding agent, warehouse receipt, delivery ...