How many spare cars will an owner need?
It is prudent practice to keep 5 to 10 spare railcars on hand per trainset to account for bad-order cars and inevitable casualties. So if you’re a utility and you plan on running 125-car trains, you’ll probably order 135-car trainsets so that you have 10 spares available per trainset. This might sound shocking, but 10 spares will likely be consumed within 10 years due to wreck casualties. A large part of this high casualty rate is the fact that aluminum-bodied railcars don’t hold up very well in wrecks and are usually totaled on site. So, one or two derailments of a single trainset will easily wipe out several cars per incident – in some severe cases possibly even 12 to 15 cars at once! So if you’re a utility, what do you do when all your spare railcars are used up and your unit trains are short? The usual course of action is to lease replacement cars. This is why you see random lease cars mixed into utility trains. The other option is to purchase more new railcars, but in small lots t
