container facility in southie

Cowford's right....Another big nail in the coffin for Boston is the hideous changes the
MBTA Green Line Extension (and that Community Bikepath Project) is going to do to
PAR's freight capabilities. This project is essentially bullying its way to the point where
it'll be torturous for PAR freights to get in and out of town. So you can forget abut revival
of the Mystic Wharf branch.

As far as South Boston goes, this is a pipe dream too given the restrictions CSX would
have just to run even one lousy train in and out.

D

hi all; i know that railroad pricing was the culprit. but what i'm uncertain of is how csxt/par factored in the convoluted railroad operations' costs. i suspect it was a mix of that and the assumed trucking costs. trucking costs are always overstated by the pricing folk. railroad pricing people are congenitally unable to avoid using presumed trucking alternatives in their pricing. for example GAF wanted to use millis for a distribution offload. the current distribution is from new jersey. roof shingles are perfect in boxcars for railroads. each boxcar carries about 4 truckloads. here is where road gvw works in favor of railroads. obviously delivery time does not but not important for roof shingles. CSXT calculated a truck rate that proved wrong. they did not price on their costs. i guess you get terminated in railroad pricing if you don't use assumed truck costs in establishing your price. my position is supported by the ongoing stb pricing dispute re: plastics and CSXT. CSXT has lost on a few of it's 40 corridors . be interesting to see the final overarching decision. anyways, a long about way of stating that our port railroads are not going to see significant container traffic. ken patrick

KEN-
Yet another agreement with you and in such a short interval!
Boston's days as a serious marine transshipment port are gone and very unlikely to return.
As far as your statement "railroad pricing people are congenitally unable to avoid using presumed trucking alternatives in their pricing," if it were a congenital condition, there should be genetic testing able to detect just such a congenital condition. Such a test would be able to help railroads no end in their pre-employment screening.
To continue the OT discussion in a more serious vein, GAF's seeking boxcar service to Millis, given the state of the line west of Medfield Junction and the interchange that would have to take place there, may well have led CSX to propose a throwaway tariff. CSX could have any number of sites west of Worcester that would provide both non-interchange rail and better highway access.

jaymac wrote:Boston's days as a serious marine transshipment port are gone and very unlikely to return.

I know that seems the case, but I felt the same way about Portland, ME and that is changing with Eimskip. The fact that Eimskip was in Boston and had potential rail access in Everett next to an active rail line, leaves one to wonder if someone dropped the ball here. looking on Google Earth, Eimskip's old dock and the railroad tracks on it, look brand new.

Nevertheless, Boston is certainly out of the running for attracting the next generation of huge Panama Canal containerships, but where are all of those smaller containerships going to go? Perhaps there is some potential to attract these smaller ships to Boston and other smaller ports as the bigger ports turn them away. Boston still has some geographic advantage for European and Suez Canal traffic.

They could run single-stack trains to Worcester from Boston and maybe even Portland for CSX and partners to distribute throughout the country on westbound doublestacks.

KEN PATRICK wrote:hi all; i know that railroad pricing was the culprit. but what i'm uncertain of is how csxt/par factored in the convoluted railroad operations' costs.

No, KEN, it wasn't railroad pricing or operations that was the culprit. The reason railroads have rolled back out away from Boston, as has occurred in many thriving metropolitan areas, is because there's much more money to be made using the land for activities with higher economic value than freight activities, and, most importantly, their market, for the same reason, has shifted away to places where land is cheaper. The demand for rail transportation is derived from other economic activity, not the other way around.

jaymac- my limited understanding of the gaf situatiuon is that gaf wanted millis. I thought that csxt should price to assist bclr . i see no rationale for csxt to offer a rate that eliminates short-line business. i believe csxt should do everything it can to assist a short line . if i were managing csxt pricing people, i would insist that the divsion was short line healthy. as for the condition of the trtack. mass dot rebuilt the charles ruiver bridge. to what end? csxt should price so as to utilize mass dot investments- not kill them. i offered the freight committee my opinion that csxt/pas should lower rates for business that utilized our mbta tracks. as i posted, the rate dispute at stb will prove that csxt has market control and, thus, must give back excess charges. i'm not anti -csxt. i just can't support an $8k per car number for something moving in a train of $2k cars. if we want to increase rail freight on mbta lines, we need to constrain the pricing demon. kern patrick

KEN-
It would seem that CSX should price so as to assure its continued viability and maintain investor confidence. If the ICC were still functioning, you might have a forum, but the STB has granted carriers far more flexibility in price structuring than the ICC did.

Since there was already a yard in Worcester, I assume most of the customers at Beacon Park preffered Brighton over Worcester or Westborough. It is a crying shame that Harvard University and the Ma$$ Pike colluded to push them out. The B&A main line is very boring these days (and grossly underutilized)

Sure some customers might have wanted to stay in Beacon Park, but the majority wanted central MA or don't care. It's been on the burner since the late 1980's and inevitable. Now with high-cube stack into Worcester, but undoable due to the costs into Beacon Park and the most-preferred site in Westboro prohibitive due to environmental constraints, Worcester is the place CSX and its customers want to be. The way intermodal pricing is structured to account for the door-to-door move and compete with over-the-road, and with reduced costs into Worcester with the new stack capability, no doubt CSX is equalizing things so not to jack rates up for those customers left inside 128. With Beacon Park closed I don't see any evidence that they've lost traffic, but, instead are seeing growth in intermodal, even for the likes of J.B.Hunt whose first preference is to use NS (Ayer).

Cowford wrote:You guys are getting it backwards. The freight railroad infrastructure declined in Boston (and New England in general) because the industrial base declined, not the other way around. If that's not true, identify an industry that may locate in Boston that would directly use rail. I'm thinkin' you won't see another Monsanto (formerly in Everett), Ford (Somerville) or GM (Framingham) ever again.

Yes. The New England industrial base started declining a long, long time ago. The textile mills started leaving before the First World War. We forget, but even the rail network and industrial base of 1950 was a shadow of what it was in 1900.

Another artificial movement was of industry to overseas (hence the monumental container traffic). It isn't more practical to manufacture everything in other parts of the world, it's just cheaper for various cultural and governmental reasons (imports and exports will always exist, but there's a lot of manufacturing that could and should be domestic). Eventually, when circumstances change, we're going to have to bring that stuff back home.

This doesn't aid the argument for a container facility, though. Still, every time I go by that facility, I see every one of those containers as trucks that don't have to be driven over the street (I do the same thing when I look at the imported automobiles in Charlestown). Every time I see a truck on the Mass Turnpike heading into or out of the city, I think of how much more sense it would make for it to be on the other side of the guardrail.

Efficiency increases with quantity. The more the railroad industry is brought back, the more efficient it becomes. Trains are more efficient than trucks any way you slice it, big or small, local or long haul. Perhaps a GP40 pulling a lone box car down a 4 mile branch line is an exception, but if you increase the traffic on that branch line (by actively seeking new customers), soon operating over it becomes practical. Certainly more practical than 1 tractor pulling its maximum capacity of 1 trailer on local roads, aiding the congestion on our public highways.

Still, no one's acknowledged my point that a major cost of trucking is on the infrastructure which is overlooked because it's not paid for by the industry itself (and therefore not reflected in its prices), but by local, state, and federal gov't. Beacham Street in Everett is a primary example of the wear and tear trucks put on our streets, which is much greater than what a freight car does to a set of rails. Without that conveniently ignored subsidy, trucking is not cheaper.

CRail wrote:
Still, no one's acknowledged my point that a major cost of trucking is on the infrastructure which is overlooked because it's not paid for by the industry itself (and therefore not reflected in its prices), but by local, state, and federal gov't. Beacham Street in Everett is a primary example of the wear and tear trucks put on our streets, which is much greater than what a freight car does to a set of rails. Without that conveniently ignored subsidy, trucking is not cheaper.

Acknowledged!

If the trucking industry had to supply their own infrastructure and didn't recieve the corporate welfare (roads, bridges, tunnels etc that they destroy) then we could have a real cost/benefit discussion compared to rail. Of course, with the demise of US manufacturing it made sense to eliminate many privately funded rail lines and let's not bring back Conrail, but highway fees only scratch the surface of the huge $$$ advantage that trucking enjoys from the government.

crail. you overlook the highweay trust fund. supported by fuel taxes paid largely by trucks- they use the most fuel per mile. the interstate funding came from the trust fund. as do repairs.
if anything, trucks pay a disproportionate amount.
as always, i opine that intermodal is not cost-effective for railroads. as much a one might guess the opposite, the truth is that 65% of railroad net income is coal-related. rail intermodal chases trucking.
ken patrick

As always, Mr Patrick, you never forego an opportunity to get it wrong.

The federal Highway Trust Fund is on the edge of insolvency (as early as this fall), due to the fact that both personal motorists and (more significantly) truckers do not sufficiently contribute "to the cause". The American Trucking Association itself is on record as "strongly supporting" an increase in fuel taxes to support sustainable maintenance programs.

Regarding your tired argument about intermodal, how does FEC actually stay afloat? I'm sure you're aware that 80% of their traffic volume is short-haul intermodal, much of it TOFC no less!

CRail wrote:Efficiency increases with quantity. The more the railroad industry is brought back, the more efficient it becomes. Trains are more efficient than trucks any way you slice it, big or small, local or long haul. Perhaps a GP40 pulling a lone box car down a 4 mile branch line is an exception, but if you increase the traffic on that branch line (by actively seeking new customers), soon operating over it becomes practical. Certainly more practical than 1 tractor pulling its maximum capacity of 1 trailer on local roads, aiding the congestion on our public highways.

Still, no one's acknowledged my point that a major cost of trucking is on the infrastructure which is overlooked because it's not paid for by the industry itself (and therefore not reflected in its prices), but by local, state, and federal gov't. Beacham Street in Everett is a primary example of the wear and tear trucks put on our streets, which is much greater than what a freight car does to a set of rails. Without that conveniently ignored subsidy, trucking is not cheaper.

Actually, there is a lot of debate about the share heavy trucking pays, but you incorrectly assert that it is nothing. You also state that trains are more efficient than trucks any way you slice it and that is also wrong. The truth of the matter is that heavy trucks do pay the majority of their share of highway costs, though where and how close to 100% is debatable. But, rest assured it is not free as you assert.
Also, trains are definately not more efficient in all cases (except maybe on the train set in your basement). Go spend a day with a truck driver doing pickups and deliveries and then a day with a switching or local railroad crew and tell me trains are more efficient in all cases.

The fact of the matter is that even in the most liberal pro-rail case, if you made trucks pay 100% of their costs for road infrastructure, their total cost increase would still be under 10%. Do you think that would be enough to dramatically improve rail's competitive position? Even when many other factors besides cost makes trucking more appealing (like ease of use, flexibility, better reliability, lower loss & damage exposure)? Saying "efficiency increases with quantity" is correct, but not in the sense you are using it for: quantity as in higher volume, longer distance, or heavier weight is where rail becomes more efficient than truck. Then, too, remember that rail also has inefficiencies: route circuity (generally running about 8% between major city pairs) and switching/classification, to name a couple.

Lastly, ask yourself why railroads began trucking and bus operations in the early 20th century. As I mentioned earlier, even if the government did not build highways, if railroads were allowed to become multimodal transportation companies they would have built/promoted highways and used trucking instead of rail in those applications where trucking is more efficient: shorter haul, lighter loading, lower volume.

It's OK to be a rail enthusiast- I certainly am one- but let's be realistic.