NHAirLine wrote:Also, how much of Branford's rock is shipped out via truck versus P&W versus barged?
Branford ships a lot more out by barge. The quarry figures are available because Tilcon owns the Branford Steam shortline that serves the Branford quarries and takes all loads to the barge and to the P&W interchange on its own shortline track. Per the
CT state rail plan, p. 83, they did 1.3 million tons by rail in 2010. Big caveat: quarry loads are directly tied to strength of the construction economy, so it fluctates a lot...was 2.5M tons in '05 pre-Recession, bottomed out for the 2010 snapshot, probably rebounded considerably by now.
P&W is their only interchange*, and from their numbers (which include all of CT including the mainline) their yearly tonnage doesn't even come close to BSRR's in a good economy, and only somewhat more than BSRR's in a lousy economy. Which is a little misleading because tonnage ≠ carloads and a crushed stone carload is going to dwarf the avg. weight of "generic carload of any-goods", but shows that their barge traffic is way higher. How much so...you'd have to find other sources quantifying tonnage of everything else P&W ships in-state to isolate what % of BSRR's loads go to the Stone Train instead of the barge.
(*BSRR also interchanges directly with Amtrak as their primary east coast supplier of ROW ballast, but even in a heavy-construction year for them the amount of stone that gets loaded on an Amtrak work train is almost untraceably small in BSRR's overall numbers.)
