Rumford Branch, RUPO / PORU

I have a feeling ND Paper wont be long for this world. Old Town is closed for good as well as another mill they bought a few years ago. Once Rumford is gone I would expect the branch will be done for good east of Rileys, if the OSB plant ships a substantial amount of product by rail.

Do they still serve the grain elevator in Leeds? Might not be the total end of the branch if the new owners of the Jay mill site ship by rail.

CPF66 wrote: ↑Fri Mar 22, 2024 4:13 pm I have a feeling ND Paper wont be long for this world. Old Town is closed for good as well as another mill they bought a few years ago. Once Rumford is gone I would expect the branch will be done for good east of Rileys, if the OSB plant ships a substantial amount of product by rail.

I assume you meant west of Riley's.

Never say never but if tonnage is an indicator of health (it usually is, but not always) then Rumford is doing fine.

I don't consider the reopening and then closing of Old Town to be related to overall health of ND (and the Rumford Plant) in general.

Goddraug wrote: ↑Fri Mar 22, 2024 4:13 pm Do they still serve the grain elevator in Leeds? Might not be the total end of the branch if the new owners of the Jay mill site ship by rail.

Yeah a few cars every trip. The farm got into legal trouble a few years back and the number of chickens at the facility had to be cut and thus so did the inbound loads of feed.

ND Paper was looking for a source of pulp when they bought the Rumford mill from Catalyst. #10 and #12
machines make white paper while #15, the largest machine in the mill has been converted to make brown
packaging paper. #9 machine was converted into a pulp baler. If the customers for the paper products
disappear they could convert one or more machines to baled pulp production.

newpylong wrote: ↑Fri Mar 22, 2024 7:06 pm

Goddraug wrote: ↑Fri Mar 22, 2024 4:13 pm Do they still serve the grain elevator in Leeds? Might not be the total end of the branch if the new owners of the Jay mill site ship by rail.

Yeah a few cars every trip. The farm got into legal trouble a few years back and the number of chickens at the facility had to be cut and thus so did the inbound loads of feed.

Does that belong to the former DeCoster egg farm over in Turner? I recently saw that they're down to fewer than a half-million birds, compared to 2.3 million when they took it over in 2015.

Makes me wonder how many birds Decoster had at his high point in the 70's. At the time I was working
for MEC in the area and can remember better than 100 cars of corn in the siding at Leeds Jct at any given
time. The Leeds Jct agent-operator told me it mostly came from the thumb of Michigan and was released
to Decoster as he paid for it.

markhb wrote: ↑Thu Mar 28, 2024 3:09 pm Does that belong to the former DeCoster egg farm over in Turner? I recently saw that they're down to fewer than a half-million birds, compared to 2.3 million when they took it over in 2015.

Yes, DeCoster is now Hillandale. You see those factory eggs in grocery stores around here.

S1f3432 wrote: ↑Thu Mar 28, 2024 5:28 pm Makes me wonder how many birds Decoster had at his high point in the 70's. At the time I was working
for MEC in the area and can remember better than 100 cars of corn in the siding at Leeds Jct at any given
time. The Leeds Jct agent-operator told me it mostly came from the thumb of Michigan and was released
to Decoster as he paid for it.

That article I mentioned also said that one reason the Turner operation had scaled down so much is that Massachusetts passed a law requiring all eggs sold in the state to be from cage-free hens. Jack DeCoster only begrudgingly allowed his workers to be cage-free, so it's no surprise that there's no way to do that for the chickens at his former plants. Hillandale is now servicing its Mass. accounts from Connecticut farms leaving Turner with basically Maine and New Hampshire to cover.

Also, regarding total birds, I found a Press Herald article from the time he went to prison for causing a nationwide salmonella outbreak that said he had more than 2.8 million birds in 1977.

Rumford just got a huge upgrade at major capital cost and downtime. I know it's easy to panic after past issues, but switching 1 machine and temporarily cutting a small part of the mill workford in teh meantime isneither new, nor indicative of a long term major problem. Paper machines get converted to make a differnet time of product pretty frequently. Highly doubtful ND would have much of the whole operation shut down for most of a year at major capital cost just to walk away. The whole Chinese ownshership thing doesn't always isnpire confidence... but ND is a completely different animal on a completely different scale.... this isn't teh "same old" of a smaller company just trying to stay competive in a smaller, outdated mill against the major foreighn competitors. This IS the "major foreign competitors", who most definitely need that fiber source and the pulp production capacity and are clearly willing to put the money into it. Probably will be more changes in terms of changing paper machines over to different types as markets change, or replacing paper machines with additional pulp capacity though.

Yeah Rumford is doing well. They are making some good investments in it this week!

Generally speaking, when you close every other mill you have in the US in one summer, that doesn't make the health of your company look too good. The whole point of ND branching out into the US was to create a pulp supply for their mills in Asia. But with all of the other operations closing, I would say they built more pulp mills overseas to meet the demand they were looking for. After talking with some individuals who work/worked for ND, I definitely wouldn't say they are doing great at this point. But I will say they are better than Paper-Excellence Group, which owns Bowater-Ababbei, Catalyst, and Domtar. Which the individuals running that company have had a long history of buying competitors so they can close those mills and scrap them, to keep the demand and profit for the paper they produce up. That practice is what ended up killing I believe 4 mills in a two year period in Dalhousie and Maramichi, NB as well as a few other mills on the Gaspe Peninsula in Quebec.

The fact that they were pumping major capital investment into Rumford precisely as those other things were happening and did not cancel that project is probably pretty relevant to their overall plans

I believe the projects that were done at Rumford during the last shut down were to keep the mill going, vs. upgrades so to speak. The main work was the replacement of the lime kiln which was worn out, and most of the other work involved urgent repairs to sewer, water, and steam lines.