Cowford wrote: ↑Tue Apr 16, 2024 12:15 pm
3 pairs all in, not just intermodal, correct? And was this CP's prediction or that of the "foamer brain trust"? (I love that!) Either way, Saint John's intermodal potential has been way over-hyped.
I am not 100% sure, I remember that stat coming from Keith Creel himself in an interview on the CMQ transaction. I am not sure if those three train pairs were supposed to be just intermodal jobs, or if that included the existing train pair that was moving car load traffic. Although in the past when CP has run dedicated manifest and intermodal trains, IIRC the manifest trains were only running a few days a week. I know CMQ was operating the Moosehead 5-6 days a week pretty consistently prior to 2020. Once the sale was finalized on the Canadian side they lost a lot of crews and could only handle 3 day a week schedules on road jobs (They just doubled the 3 road jobs they were running per week so they had 4-6 locomotives and 100-150+ cars per trip).
The longest train I saw during that time was 6 units (3 SD40-2F's, the two CMQ AC44's, and another SD40-2F) and something like 152 cars of just mixed freight. I am sure the carload traffic has decreased quite a bit since then since a few customers closed or switched to trucks, some others stopped using rail due to a variety of issues with CP, and others eventually went to Pan Am/CSX. It will be interesting to see what will happen with the Dead River LPG traffic. CMQ moved all the stuff for points north of NMJ via the Moosehead, while cars for Hampden came via Pan Am. Once the derailment in Etna happened and I forgot the exact series of events, but DR lost a good deal of money because of that, they switched to CMQ/CP. I think the LPG for Westbrook started coming in on SLR about the same time. Regardless, if CSX started stealing some of the LPG back from CP that would really hurt CP. I am not sure about the comparison between rates for LPG and intermodal, but LPG is a high paying commodity. Not only that but railroads make a killing from storing loads in the winter time. Until CP cut up the storage tracks at NMJ (because some genius CP manager saw the tracks were empty and figured they weren't used anymore) CP, CMQ, MMA, and the BAR used to flood the yard at the farm in the winter with LPG until it could be unloaded. I know CP intends on building some storage tracks, but with the interchange down to a trickle, if CSX were to get some of the LPG going via District 1 to NMJ then to CPKC, I suppose they could work storage into their rates since very few of the yard tracks are being used these days.