Practically the whole NH Main from Winchester to Manchester (if not all the way to Concord) is full of abutting industrial parks with defunct rail sidings or siding clusters like Wilmington. Yes, it's mostly low-volume warehousing and outside of a couple outsized Tighe-like outliers that's nobody's idea of a profit center in 2017...but these locations have remained pretty stably industrial-zoned through recent economic cycles so it's not like they're all turning permanently into indoor trampoline or U-Haul rental sheds, or having faded "FOR LEASE" signs rot away for decades like the buildings they're affixed to. A carrier that gave a crap about chasing every carload could throw darts out of the OCS's cab window and pick up enough customers on that one stretch of central D2 to easily pad a BO-/LA-/NA- job's margins. And that's even acknowledging that maybe only 1 in 10 of the rail-accessible tenants on the NH Main may have any extant interest in using rail, or are located in towns where the NIMBY's won't attack the customer to thwart use of the siding, or that YMMV by town and state whether the local Chambers of Commerce and econ development boards have any interest in marketing and aiding the tenancies in their industrial parks. There's still enough of them right there at trackside that gaining pickups is little more than "shootin' free throws" to pad the margins. They don't even have to try, really, because the trickle-down effect of running reliable ops with non-antagonistic customer & community service for their LARGEST customers ends up sharpening their free-throw shooting percentage as a byproduct and gains them some on-line pickups without really needing to try. Run on-time between yards without canning and do classification with some degree of efficiency: get more bites at both the largest/juiciest IM targets while attracting a small swarm of gnats as well. Not hard, and not one iota's deviation from a master plan. It's eminently doable to pad the margins with smaller customers without having to expend one extra brain cell's effort on any sort of pivot to smaller customers that risks taking focus or resources away from big iniatives. This railroad has so much unexplored room for improvement that those local pickups simply get swept up in the aggregate improvements of taking care of business with their main profit centers.
Anybody but Pan Am would see opportunity in that...and pretty much everyone who makes a bid for D1+D2 when the system is ultimately partitioned will see the opportunity in what those 45 miles of central D2 from Montvale to Manchester can contribute in on-line free throws after the resulting railroad has reformed its whole means of doing business.
