Piggyback
Carrying road vehicles by railcar, known as piggybacking or trailer-on-flatcar (TOFC), was first introduced in 1822 in Germany, when farm wagons were loaded onto flatcars. In 1884, the Long Island Rail Road followed suit by hauling farm wagons from Long Island to New York City. The wagons were loaded onto flatcars; the passengers and horses traveled on other cars.

	TOFC, or piggyback transport, involves loading containers and chassis onto flatcars. Click on image to see a larger version.

Much of the practical inspiration for TOFC can be attributed to the circus, which used an efficient loading technique involving a special ramp to roll its wagons into place on flatcars. At one point, as many as 2,100 such ramps existed in the United States.

As TOFC caught on in the 1950s, the use of boxcars gradually declined for the same reason that the use of containers in ocean transportation brought an end to break-bulk cargo-handling. Using boxcars to move goods other than bulk commodities via rail was almost as labor-intensive and inefficient as using break-bulk cargo-handling methods to move goods by sea. In 1957, there were 750,000 boxcars; in 1992, there were less than 200,000.

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