eustis22 wrote:so the adverse thing filing.....does this mean that PAR is going to reactivate service?They're trying to take the conveyor belt biz from Milford & Bennington. The adverse discontinuance filing is limited to only the 5 miles between Law Stone and Granite State, and not the unused outer 15 miles to Monadnock Paper Mill at end-of-track. So if they succeed MBRX would lose all current business, but technically still have rights to serve Monadnock. But Monadnock immediately becomes moot because their revenues would be zeroed out and they (1) would immediately fold before ever being able to make a phone call to the mill, (2) can't recover costs on that 15-mile run to serve very small carloads on the mill to ever live by that alone. So any which way MBRX goes immediately out of business.
Double-whammy to Billerica's spite game. A fallen flag, and NHDOT is left with little choice but to (not immediately, but inevitably) abandon all track beyond the quarry when it's unable to RFP for a new carrier, because PAR won't touch anything beyond the quarry.
As for the conveyor belt...nutty if they plan to run it as-is because it's 2 trips per day between quarry and plant. As if Billerica didn't already waste enough on taxi fare from slop ops they're now going to have to burn fares 5 days a week on a Nashua crew to handle this. And power rotation will be iffy since they can barely complete their own NA-1 job to Wilton without canning on the return trip to Nashua. I suppose if Law & GS invested in more siding storage and better loading machinery so their carloads could be more efficiently crammed into a single round trip that would do away with the need for the twice-a-day conveyor belt and allow for a vanilla NA-1 daily job to tack it on at the end. It's the only scenario that would make PAR appropriate enough profit margins for this spite move against MBRX to make a lick of business sense. But that assumes somebody's going to pay for the customer storage expansion, and that somebody is going to staff-up NA-1 well enough to run it on-time without need to outlaw most days on the trip back to Nashua.