Gilbert B Norman wrote:Question to Mr. Dudley, or anyone;
Is HRR traffic, other than that they don't have to haul it as far to their one and only interchange with the B&A, within Massachusetts any more lucrative than that in Connecticut ( yeah, Mr. Android knows how to spell full names of those states)?
Yes. There's no Berkshire Line customers whatsoever between Century Aggregates a mile south of the North Caanan engine house and O&G a mile-plus north of New Milford station. That's why the CDOT-owned midsection went dark for as long as it did under Conrail, and why the line was partitioned the way it was between Conrail and B&M. It's mainly a function of geography. That's the portion of the line that hugs the river tightest and passes through the most acres of state forest. Lots of miles where it's pinned between US 7 (or another flanking road) and the river with no private property period, and a lot of the private property that does exist out in the hinterlands around the river are sporadic little acre, half-acre plots unsuitable for any commercial use except a pumpkin patch.
Housy's passenger excursion traffic was the original excuse to reopen the midsection, as freight alone wouldn't have risen to the challenge back then. With today's freight economics the thru route would have some utility if HRRC made the slightest attempt whatsoever to diversify from on-line scraps. A transload presence of any shape or form in the Danbury area would be enough to eke out enough viable thru traffic for a zit reporting mark (e.g. in the mold of Newtown transload...except making an opportunity out of it instead of a dumpster fire and many enemies). That's exactly how G&U is doing it on the MA 140 corridor, and how Mass Central in the rural MA 32 corridor of Worcester County has been doing it for years: take an area that's bereft of limited-access highways and has to make do with one two-lane corridor as its trucking lifeline, and ruthlessly squeeze every nickel of revenue out of transloads near the major diverging points. US 7 fits that mold to a T. It's a longer corridor, which is a challenge MC and G&U don't have on their ~20 mile mains. But if MC and G&U can work that business angle to margins that punch well above their weight without outside help...somebody with the right discipline and business acumen should by all logic be able to work the US 7 corridor to a floor of break-even-plus-one. Which is all a zit reporting mark needs, even in a "post- on-line" biz era. There's a Class I with one traffic profile on one end, a Class II with a different traffic profile on the other (and potential to up its area activity considerably if it got the Maybrook-east), a good mix of diverging truck routes anchored at both ends, big honking underutilized yards at the density thickets at both ends with cheap industrial property a stone's throw from said yards, and a slight skew towards rail-captive bulk aggregates for what traffic clusters near those ends. Juxtaposed against what those other zit indies like MC and G&U are doing, that reads like a set of fungible building blocks.
The only challenge here is that Housy management screwed the pooch so bad on Berkshire maintenance it's going to take a publicly-funded bailout to make it an operable corridor for the next reporting work. It's not possible to pull a G&U, have a new owner self-fund the upgrades, then immediately pay that back that cost in-house with profits. It's beyond the scope of any zit reporting mark to do pull their bootstaps up that high...including the ones who could turn a profit on this corridor if inherited track conditions were better than "condemned". So a bailout is inevitable. CT and MA long ago decided that losing the Berkshire altogether was an unacceptable outcome for the economic justice of the US 7 corridor, so the next recruit will get a rigorous up-front SGR commitment from public sources. You can quibble whether that sunk cost is worth it for sake of a zit reporting mark in today's rail industry, but the states made up their mind long ago that bailout was in their self-interest so that's how it's going to play out. The next zit mark will get a puncher's chance at doing something with the building blocks by having the states roll back the negligence on the physical plant. Then it's up to the business plan and how well it exploits those building blocks. If zits like G&U and MC can fashion a business plan out of transloads on similarly famished two-lane trucking corridors...there's nothing on-spec that says it's unachievable here. We're just going to have to swallow a pretty big cleanup bill before moving the next mark to the starting line.
But that does help.
