St. Louis startup Intramotev, which produces self-propelled, electric-powered railcars, has signed a switching agreement with Eagle Drayage, a freight carrier also based in St. Louis.
Switching agreements enable rail-carried freight to go across different classes of railroads from manufacturing plants or distribution points to destinations.
"You go from things like plant railroads to maybe a Class 3 or a Class 2 railroad into a Class 1, and then you go back down the other sides," said Intramotev CEO Tim Luchini in a phone interview. "You end up back in plant railroads. So where we're at with this customer in Eagle is that plant railroad side. When the car gets there, it still needs to be moved around the facility. What we do for them is go pick up that boxcar full of product and move it to the spot where it'll get loaded and unloaded."
Luchini described how one day Intramotev one day could move freight from Southern California to Chicago, but they're starting at much smaller scales. He said more switching contracts or agreements providing electric boxcars for clients may happen in the future.
"Ultimately, we build the tool, which is the TugVolt," he said, referring to the battery-powered attachable railcar components. "It's a railcar gross rail-loaded to 286,000 pounds, but it also can service as a small locomotive. It can pull five fully loaded railcars with it; the benefit of that is there really is a gap in the marketplace. You see large, massive over-the-road locomotives, and then you see that no one is really making a competitive switcher product. Switching is trying to figure out the order and track that one of these cars needs to go on to get into the right train to end up in Kansas City or Chicago as it moves around the country."
Luchini declined to discuss financial components of Intramotev's agreement with Eagle Drayage, a family-owned, 100-year-old company. He said Intramotev is still venture-backed.
“Intramotev’s technology not only helps keep our team focused on what they do best but also lowers our internal safety risks,” said Eagle Drayage Chief Financial Officer Duke Koeller in a statement. “The TugVolt is revolutionizing our hauling operations by replacing antiquated car spotting processes, optimizing manpower allocation, and reducing overall downtime in our transloading process. It’s truly a game-changer for our business and our bottom line.”
Industry leaders are taking more interest in battery-powered trains; Union Pacific, for instance, unveiled a battery-powered locomotive this spring. Luchini said the big railroad's issue is the huge amount of power diesel locomotives generate, which is harder to replace with batteries than the models Intramotev builds.
"The technology for batteries is still 40- to 50-times less energy-dense than diesel, and that's a really big challenge to put that all into one unit," he said. "The way that we think about it is we shrink the battery system down, and we shrink it to be more granular. What that does is allow us to go down that cost curve. It also allows us to leverage the automotive supply chain, automotive battery packs, automotive motors. We can get those economies of scale, which makes everything cheaper."
Intramotev builds its units one at a time at its North St. Louis production facility; Luchini said its production was akin to a high-end carmaker three years ago, and he hopes it's akin to a Toyota assembly plant in three years. Around 50 employees work there in assembly and engineering.
It announced $14 million in Series A funding last month, four years after its founding, and has additional agreements with Iron Senergy in Pennsylvania and Carmeuse Americas in Michigan.
