Portland Waterfront Rail Ops (Yard 8, Intermodal, etc)

The smell was all over Portland and South Portland. People several miles away could smell it. I can only imagine what it was like onsite!

The cover story on The Bollard this month is a lengthy piece who until recently was a "camper" in Yard 8. They titled it "Sherwood Forest: Life as an outlaw on the Fore River". We on this board may well call it "Ode to a Trespasser".

In February of 2013, I moved to the woods along the banks of the Fore River, on the south side of West Commercial Street in Portland. Alcoholism, and the consequences thereof, had brought me from the palace to prison to a halfway house to motels and couches and shelters and the street. At long last, I was truly free. I wasn’t on anyone’s couch. I didn’t have to check in or sleep toe-to-head with others in a sardine can. I had no keepers or keyholders, no white coats or blue coats. At 47, I was living with a little black dog in an orange tent in the dawn shadow of the Casco Bay Bridge.

I’d always wanted a place on the water....

The area’s proper name is Yard 8 — a rail yard owned, most recently, by Pan Am Railways, a freight company based in Massachusetts. Some called it Hobo Jungle, but it wasn’t really the Hobo Jungle of Portland (that’s down off St. John Street). We called it Sherwood Forest.

Some interesting recounting of run-ins with a B&M Policeman.

Fascinating read. Thanks for the link!

MEC407 wrote:Fascinating read. Thanks for the link!

I agree. That was a really really great read. Neat to see life from "the other side".

This article is a couple weeks old, but has some interesting details about the expansion:
Read it here at MaineBiz.com

(Edited by an Admin: No apology needed )

What do you guys think about the ATB (Articulated Tug Barge)?

CN9634 wrote:What do you guys think about the ATB (Articulated Tug Barge)?

Interesting design. I'm curious to see if the service succeeds.

What do you guys think about the ATB (Articulated Tug Barge)?

The MPA reports make fascinating reading.

http://www.maineports.com/highway-project" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

They are banking on moving a lot- A LOT- of Poland Spring water. (Almost 2/3 of their SB potential is based on PS.) I'm going to give it a further read this evening. From a cursory glance, they forgot little details, like drayage costs, container and tri-x chassis rental fees (that combined would blow up their competitive economics).

No one seems to notice the fact it is designed specifically for use of 40FT containers in domestic service?

They must be using insulated Containers,Cargo weight must be around 42-45,000 lbs(water bottles,cardboard boxes,
and Chep pallets).

That certainly wasn't lost on me. I get what they're trying to do:

Maine has an attractive road weight law and they're focused on dense freight, so 40' cans can be more densely loaded, getting 30 tons of freight in a box, rather than 22.5 (their stated max) in an over-the-road 53' van (as it must be loaded to run at 80,000 lb load limit to cross the state border). But the devil is in the details. First, they correctly point out (in the small print) that heavy boxes can't be moved in NYC, so they must be transloaded at the dockside "shed". Also, shippers or third parties would be responsible to provide both containers and chassis. So add box and chassis rental, container dockside storage fees, inland drayage (both ends) and transloading to their mid-range revenue estimate of $1,050 per round-trip, assuming an empty return.

The vessel would sail once per week. It would discharge in Portland on Mondays and load/depart on Tuesdays. So, do those discharged, assigned containers have to wait a week for the next trip south, or do they expect shippers like Poland Spring to flip several hundred containers in a ~24-hr period, regardless of where in Maine they are loaded? Same deal on the other end.

I find it hard to imagine this standing any chance of competing against truck or even a short-haul intermodal service.

The only way that type of scenario would work is if outbound containers were waiting, so when the inbounds are done being offloaded, they can start loading the outs. The plant does run 24/7 so they could certainly do it for a 24 hour turn around, if you leave the rail out of it.

You can't tell me that any customer would be willing to switch from 53' boxes to get more 40' boxes for domestic service. More containers needed to move the same cargo means way more costs.

CN, as long as they can fit 40,000 lbs of water into the container, then there would be no difference. Trucks are leaving the place with empty space. 40 feet pf water should equal 40,000 lbs (10 rows of pallets, 2 wide at 2,000lbs each).

So the question is: Can they get 30 tons of water in a 40 ft container