Pan Am / Guilford Bashing

The increased capacity in the Bellows Falls tunnel could also funnel more business to the Fitchburg Line under NS.

roberttosh wrote:With NS' strong Intermodal and Auto franchises (they handle more units than CSXT in both cases), I have no doubt that they could double or triple the Intermodal business that currently moves over the former B&M. They would almost certainly capture some of the Auto business now moving over CSXT as well. I know for a fact that the NS and PAR have had very high level meetings regarding sale of the former B&M and offers have actually been made. Who knows if it will ever happen, but if it does, expect NS to really upgrade the line and for them to go head to head with CSXT.

One fact about an NS takeover of the B&M that's overlooked is how this would affect CSX's interchange traffic. Perhaps there could be some serious challenges from either CSX or shippers to an NS acquisition of any portion of Pan Am ?

Businesses and local communities best hope is for someone like NS to take over... these guys have been here long enough and we all know the track record.

This week they dropped some welded rail off on the bad sections of curves out on the West End. Just how much they dropped, who knows. I think the new rail was paid for with credit when they turned in all the scrap rail last year.

newpylong wrote:Businesses and local communities best hope is for someone like NS to take over... these guys have been here long enough and we all know the track record.

The businesses and towns would be better off if a motivated shortline or regional like the MMA or the P&W took over. Companies the size of NS don't concentrate on small businesses simply because an extra car here or there isn't worth the time. The problem with Guilford is that they are a regional trying to emulate the Class 1 style of operation, run throughs without local service.

Good point, except they don't have the power, the infrastructure, or the physical plant to successfully become a haul-only RR.

emd_16645 wrote:The problem with Guilford is that they are a regional trying to emulate the Class 1 style of operation, run throughs without local service.

Bingo!!! In addition to the usual pig-headed futility, this is one of the biggest problems with the Mellon-Fink crowd. The railroad should be run like the P&W, but they seem to emulate the UP instead. While it’s nice to have a grand strategy for the company, they should really try to pick the correct one!

Of course, in the end, they don’t achieve much of anything. While they ignore the small customers that “aren’t worth bothering with”, they can’t even manage to provide decent service to the few large customers they ostensibly covet!

Unfortunately, they seem to have a champagne taste but only a beer budget.


bozo

There are a few examples of Guilford not wanting to bother with local traffic near Bangor. For a while, the hauled fuel out of Bucksport for Webber Oil. They cut the service because it wasn't profitable enough! The loading facility at is right in the yard, easily serviced by the mill switch crew. They also refused to haul the chips to the GP mill at Old Town. Instead, the MMA hauled the chips from up north to Lagrange (next town over) from where the chips were trucked. When the mill shut down last year and the chips stopped moving, the MMA experienced a 4% drop in revenue.

Prior to Guilford, the MEC handled thousands of cars per year of both Wood Fiber (i.e. Chips, Logs, etc) and Fuel for the Paper mills. These moves were not big money makers like the inbound Chemicals/Clay and outbound Paper, yet they filled out trains and surely provided cash flow. It was not entirely Guilford's fault that this business disappeared, but their poor service, unwillingness to maintain/lease the required equipment and large rate increases certainly didn't help. The old Holtrachem plant at South Orrington was another company that moved a lot more local (MEC & B&M) traffic (i.e. Caustic Soda & HCL) by rail prior to Guilford, but once again, lousy service did a lot of that business in.

Speaking of Fuel, the B&M also had a pretty decent Fuel franchise running out of the Chelsea/Revere tank farms, but as was the case in Maine, this was low revenue traffic that Guilford just never seemed to care much about.

emd_16645 wrote:There are a few examples of Guilford not wanting to bother with local traffic near Bangor. For a while, the hauled fuel out of Bucksport for Webber Oil. They cut the service because it wasn't profitable enough! The loading facility at is right in the yard, easily serviced by the mill switch crew.

There are stories like that from all over the system. Somehow, I don't think they understand the concept of "marginal costs". Your story about Webber Oil is a perfect example. Just because something isn't quite as profitable as they might want it to be doesn’t necessarily mean that it shouldn’t be handled. They’re already maintaining the track (well, sort of!) and running trains to Bucksport for the mill. The fixed costs are there whether they handle the fuel or not. A smart business person would only take into account the additional variable costs (extra crew time, slightly more diesel consumption, etc.) necessary to handle the fuel traffic when making a profitability decision. Unfortunately, I get the impression that Guilford doesn’t think this way. I don’t know any specific details or inside info, but there have been too many stories similar to this one floating around over the years. Where there’s smoke, there’s fire!

Nobody should expect Guilford (or any other railroad) to handle traffic that is a net-money loser, that’s a given. It’s one thing to make a reasonable decision to abandon a 20-mile branchline because there’s only one small customer at the far end that doesn’t produce enough traffic to pay the bills. It’s quite another thing when you discourage traffic that could and should be handled by existing crews on existing trains!

Again, it’s my opinion that a lot of this leads back to their misguided belief that they’re operating the Union Pacific rather than a small regional railroad. The big guys can afford to skip out on handling certain traffic. Many of the remaining Class 1 mainlines are at or near capacity. In this situation, you want to maximize the amount of high-margin freight that you handle. Once you bump up against capacity constraints, the marginal costs of handling additional traffic shoots up, way up – you need to add tracks, improve signaling, etc. Once this point is reached, turning away the low-margin traffic makes complete economic sense.

Now, as I’m sure we’re all aware, there aren’t too many Guilford routes that are running at full capacity! The only part of the system that has any real capacity problem is a segment of the FML in Massachusetts between Haverhill and Lowell Jct. Even there, proper scheduling would allow them to run all the freights they would ever need. Another problem is the lack of a proper yard in Ayer, but this only became an issue after they made that sweetheart deal with Conrail back in the early 1990’s, not because of any real traffic growth.


bozo

They just about sold out to Conrail..rusty rail at the Tunnel
I was in Ayer a couple of weekends ago, and there were at least two railroad employees going in and out of the old tower and driving in and out of the yard. Word is that Ayer is being used for eastbound classification. As far as I know, two of the tracks, 1 and 2, are used just for the piggyback trains. The handful of remaining tracks have to handle the traffic, with one needed to be clear as a runner. If they still had the auto-rack traffic it would be a worse bottleneck. They have to use the #2 main at Westford and the #2 main at the Willows for set-offs and pick-ups.
If you want to see real scary rail, look at the Worcester Main. It's vintage 1926 iron!

Am guessing the EB classing that is done at Ayer is where Q-426 gets broken down into Portland/Rileys/Waterville/N Maine Jct blocks, where they are then picked up by EB's EDRU, EDWA & EDNM. I guess a lot of these trains don't stop at Rigby any more - in fact I saw a WB come through Cooks/CPF 201 at Scarborough on the passenger main last week. Am thinking some of these trains have to stop at Rigby to pick up Coal and Clay from Sprague heading East and to drop of Paper for Merrills and Fore River heading West (not to mention the rest of the local business). In any event, nice having 6 trains a day running on the Western to and from Rigby.

As far as I know, generally all the trains stop at Rigby as a crew change point. Both NMED and WAED stop to change out crews (if the crew makes it to Rigby).

If you can think of GRS as a real estate firm that runs the railroad as a side business, then a lot of their dumbfounding Business decisions start to make more sense.

My 2 cents.

BWP

You guys all have really good points which, after working for GTI and working the same local for 6 months in a row, I can wholeheartedly agree with.

Your assumptions about Ayer being used as a class yard are correct. THey even put utilitymen jobs on duty there.