Special rail cars designed to ship new Ford Transit van

What do you do if your new transport truck models won’t fit the current mode of transportation?

If you are Ford, you work with the rail companies to provide an extra tall car that will allow you to ship your transport trucks and vans across the country and to various ports.

Ford deemed the change important enough and worked to make delivery of their new line of transport vehicles happen:

 

The van comes in a choice of three roof heights and the highest 110.1 inches tall allows a 6-foot, 4-inch person to stand upright.

That posed logistical problems when it came to shipping the Transit. For destinations within a 500-mile radius of the Kansas City assembly plant where the vans are built, Ford will truck the vehicles to dealers.

But anything further goes by rail and the medium- and high-roof vans, which are expected to account for half the sales, dont fit in the two-story cars traditionally used by automakers.

Ford worked with rail companies and rail car manufacturers to design a flexible railcar where the top deck is raised to allow as many as seven oversized Transits to fit on the lower deck with room for smaller cars on the shorter deck. The idea is similar to adjustable shelves in your refrigerator to accommodate milk cartons on the bottom and small jars on top.

The overall height of the rail car had to stay the same to fit in tunnels and underpasses.

Ford started working on the railcar project in 2010 when it began developing the 2015 Transit which will replace the long-running E-Series in Fords lineup.

Ford worked with Canadian National, Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern. More than 350 rail cars have been modified at an unspecified cost. But the automaker says shipping by rail is less expensive than by truck.

Use of these modified railcars helps us to efficiently ship these large vehicles from our assembly plant, deliver them to our dealers and get them into the hands of customers faster and more cost effectively, said Chris Lemmink, Ford vehicle logistics manager.

Ford spent $1.1 billion to retool its Kansas City to make the van and added 2,000 workers for a third crew in August.

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