A STACK TRAIN

Intermodal trains are a common sight through Hillsdale, with a least two stack trains and one piggy-back a day in each direction.


Here, a domestic stack train passes through town with a variety of 53' containers, including these BNSF and Swift containers.

Here is a Pacer Stacktrain 53' container stacked on top of one of the AP&W's SCSU 48' containers. These are rapidly approaching retirement, as the intermodal industry has switched to 53' containers as the standard. The containers are riding in one of the AP&W's Husky Stack well cars. The 'Husky Stack' logo on the side identifies this car as being from the first order of 100 delivered by Gunderson in 1990. Later orders (300 more cars total) lacked the logo.

More Pacer Stacktrain 53' containers, along with two CIE Intermodal 53's, all placed in a rarely seen CIE Intermodal 3-unit NSC well car. The 'car' is actually three separate cars connected by drawbars to form one complete set. If needed, they can be separated, the drawbars replaced by conventional couplers, and run as individual cars. Delivered in 2000, CIEX 2002 is one of only 10 cars CIE Intermodal owns.

A close-up of the middle well car of CIEX 2002. All three have 53' wells.

Reinforcing that this is a domestic service stack train, is this shot of another rare bird- an Allied Van Lines 48' container! While the vast majority of Allied's fleet are conventional trailers, a small percentage are specially built containers that sometimes move by rail.