American railroads were reluctant to invest in such specially built equipment. The Trailer Train Company, organized by the Pennsylvania Railroad and the Norfolk and Western Railway in 1955, stepped in to ease the railroads' financial burden a bit. Trailer Train purchased the flat cars from the rail car manufacturers, and the railroads that wanted to operate autoracks, purchased the racks that were installed on those flat cars. Such cars were easily spotted at trackside due to the reporting marks identifying Trailer Train on the flat car portion of the car and the railroad's logo (usually much larger) in the upper portion of the rack. This arrangement worked so well that nearly every autorack operating in the US was owned by a railroad, with only a few exceptions. Trailer Train became TTX Company in 1991; since then many railroads have themselves purchased the flat cars on which the racks were installed and TTX has itself expanded into purchasing and leasing out other railroad rolling stock. The development of enclosed autoracks also helped make several other innovative services work well. New designs and current usage Railroads of today are still grappling with the problem of loading more and larger vehicles onto autoracks. One popular solution is to create a double-length car that is articulated over a single middle truck so that each half of the car is about the same length as a conventional autorack. These cars, which can be seen in operation on many of the railroads of the western US (but also seen occasionally in the Great Lakes and Southern Ontario), are brand named AutoMax cars. These cars, built by Gunderson (a subsidiary of The Greenbrier Companies) measure long and tall; they feature adjustable interior decks to carry up to 22 light trucks and minivans. Thrall produced a competing articulated two-unit design. For greater flexibility and to improve car utilization, single-unit autoracks are being built that allow the number of loading levels, or decks, to be easily changed between bilevel (two) and trilevel (three), depending on which is in demand at the time. Greenbrier calls their version of this multilevel concept the Multi-Max, while the Union Pacific Railroad builds their own version, called the AutoFlex. The railroads have become the primary long-distance transporter of completed automobiles. Using the enclosed tri-level autoracks, they are able to provide lower costs as well as greater protection from in-transit damage (such as that which