10-17-2011, 09:20 AM
As soon as I say this, some one will post a link to prove me wrong, but that would then give you a definitive positive answer to your question, Steve. I don't think it likely that any auto racks would service a dealer directly. A small town dealer would probably not sell enough cars at a time to justify autoracks being delivered, and large dealerships are most likely too far from the tracks and often built in an auto-mall with many other dealers. The most efficient method is to bring the autoracks to a central location for distribution and unload them to go on to trucks for final delivery. The most expensive and labor intensive thing a railroad does is to make local deliveries of cars for loading or unloading. They would much rather deliver an entire train to a facility to be loaded or unloaded and let trucks do the local switching.