If you look at the litter along the tracks in the YouTube videos, you'll see that it's largely small consumer-level packages. I was surprised that there would be containers of those.
Railroads really really hate containers with a passion. Anything that doesn't need to be refrigerated or go on a boat, they will press hard to put it in a boxcar. Or in a 16-foot truck trailer sitting on top of a flatcar (used to see those go by all the time with UPS logos on them).
It's been years since I've seen a boxcar in an actual train. All the trains I see have double-container cars these days but hardly ever an old-school boxcar. They're as rare as a caboose.
I remember helping a local factory tear out all their boxcar lines from their warehouses 25 or 30 years ago to make room for additional racking to fill tractor trailers.
You probably live near one of the few containerized ports.
I used to live out in the middle of nowhere, but 300 feet from the BNSF transcontinental line. It was all boxcars, flatcars, bulk-goods hoppers, and tank cars.
Oh yeah, and the occasional finished airplane minus the wings.
Boxcars are still alive and well, anywhere other than near containerized ocean ports.
Regarding the warehouse, yes, trucking has taken over a massive amount of what used to be rail traffic. No doubt.
You probably live near one of the few containerized ports.
Sorry, I missed your response. I live near the lane between Detroit and Montreal. In the middle there's a very large intermodel yard north of Toronto. So 90% of what I see behind a train is containers, automobiles, lumber, grain, and tankers. From reading up on it, box cars remain popular with moving paper products, which makes sense to me as you can load much more weight than on a truck and time in transit is less of a concern than with other more sensitive products, less dense products.
That's what I heard as well, they also said thousands of packages. If it was thousands of packages then I would have to have been incredibly unlucky to have 3 for 3 out of thousands. That number must be off by at least a few orders of magnitude. I've also separately heard that Amazon, USPS, and FedEx is being targeted.
