CSX Activity in New England

State of MA approves Worcester yard expansion project..

http://www.telegram.com/article/2010122 ... 29916/1116

Reportedly the planned cost for the Worcester I/M terminal has risen from $100 million to $125 million with a good deal of the increase to go into re-building street access to the planned east end maintenance facility.

QB 52.32 wrote:Reportedly the planned cost for the Worcester I/M terminal has risen from $100 million to $125 million with a good deal of the increase to go into re-building street access to the planned east end maintenance facility.

From reading past articles, part of the increase in the cost of the project included "extras" like landscape work, public park improvements, and other work the City Of Worcester asked for. Supposedly there will also be a fee(?) charged by the City for each car that enters the yard, I recall it was $1.00 per car or some other figure.

From the Worcester Telegram article....

...."Mr. Murray said the project holds numerous benefits. It will bring more jobs to the region and use of double-stacked freight trains will reduce truck traffic on highways."

Explain to me how the use of double-stacked freight trains will reduce truck traffic on highways. The way I see it is if you bring in more boxes (containers) on double stack trains, you need one truck to move each box!!

Double stack trains run on the rails. Trucks run on the highways. Maybe I'm missing something here.

I guess in theory, by double stacking domestic containers, they should be able to lower their costs and thus reduce their rates and convert over the road moves to rail. Then again, CSXT also said they would take tens of thousands of trucks off the I-95 corridor heading into New England when they bought their half of Conrail and am still waiting for that to happen....

NaDspr wrote:Explain to me how the use of double-stacked freight trains will reduce truck traffic on highways. The way I see it is if you bring in more boxes (containers) on double stack trains, you need one truck to move each box!!

While it won't eliminate the origin and destination trucking to pick up at a shipper and deliver to a consignee, it also will not add a truck-trip in New England and eliminates long-distances highway travel. By way of illustration: a load from Warsaw, IN to Chelmsford, MA today moves via highway ~890 miles. With domestic stack capability into New England, CSX lowers its costs and rates and is able to lower the highway mileage competitive breakeven point so that the same move will go via rail over Chicago and Worcester ramps with ~160 miles of trucking at origin and destination, eliminating ~730 highway miles (more than 3/4 redux in truck-miles) with one less truck traversing I-90 through the midwest, across upstate NY and into New England.

QB 52.32 wrote:

NaDspr wrote:Explain to me how the use of double-stacked freight trains will reduce truck traffic on highways. The way I see it is if you bring in more boxes (containers) on double stack trains, you need one truck to move each box!!

While it won't eliminate the origin and destination trucking to pick up at a shipper and deliver to a consignee, it also will not add a truck-trip in New England and eliminates long-distances highway travel. By way of illustration: a load from Warsaw, IN to Chelmsford, MA today moves via highway ~890 miles. With domestic stack capability into New England, CSX lowers its costs and rates and is able to lower the highway mileage competitive breakeven point so that the same move will go via rail over Chicago and Worcester ramps with ~160 miles of trucking at origin and destination, eliminating ~730 highway miles (more than 3/4 redux in truck-miles) with one less truck traversing I-90 through the midwest, across upstate NY and into New England.

Also much much easier to schedule short-haul trucking from a local terminal than to have to come from out-of-state. You can avoid rush hour if you're just fanning out much shorter distances northeast/southeast from Worcester, north/south from Springfield, east & 495 from Westborough, etc. You can pretty much cover the whole of New England by truck within a few hours from their network of double-stack yards, which means much more flexible delivery schedules for customers during business hours (more revenue), a lot less running time (less fuel/wage cost) by being able to confine runs to off-peak/lighter-traffic hours, and much better on-time performance. You have to run all day if you're trucking from way far out-of-state, and even coming east from Selkirk it's a couple hours more up the gut of the Mass Pike on very hilly road that's only 4-lane NY to Sturbridge with frequent backups in Springfield and on the 84-to-495 stretch. Have to build in more time for longer runs on a less flexible schedule to plan for the inevitable delays and rush-hour overlap. Double stacking pulls a lot of those all-day trucks off the road and lets them do more narrowly targeted scheduling, and can spread the trucking routes more evenly from terminals located at multiple highways fanning out multiple directions instead of going Pike-or-bust. Not to mention the humongous fuel and labor savings advantage from going shorter distance in trucks. And even though there'll be more short-haul trucks on the road inside of Worcester, there'll be fewer of them running at rush hour. That obviously benefits commuters, and it actually reduces overall diesel emissions and sharply increases gas mileage to have a speed-limit trip most times instead of a slow stop-and-go while carrying a heavy payload.

I understand B724 derailed a locomotive yesterday (2/9) at the School St grade crossing in Northborough. Rerailing operations taking place this morning.

Derailment in Northboro, MA...

http://www.telegram.com/apps/pbcs.dll/a ... 19986/1116

According to what I heard, the derailment was caused by ice/snow buildup on the rails/crossing. Then again, the track is rated for 10mph or less in some spots on that branch.

Probably some subdued sighs of relief from PAR/PAS after it also happened to one of the big boys...

JDM864 wrote:I understand B724 derailed a locomotive yesterday (2/9) at the School St grade crossing in Northborough. Rerailing operations taking place this morning.

From MetroWest Daily News, with of course, a reference to safety and the proposed Transflo facility in Westboro: http://www.metrowestdailynews.com/featu ... rthborough

Poor 6241: Not only did it go on the ground, but it also got called a "freight engine car." It's probably demonstrative of how much railroad terminology has receded from the general public's consciousness that the reporter and/or editor couldn't/wouldn't come up with "locomotive" or, if that was too polysyllabic, just left it with plain old "engine."

More news :


http://www.boston.com/business/technolo ... air_space/


http://www.boston.com/business/graphics/14csxgraphic/

Teamdriver wrote:More news :


http://www.boston.com/business/technolo ... air_space/


http://www.boston.com/business/graphics/14csxgraphic/

I'm surprised they haven't been using those cranes already in a yard as big as Beacon Park. They're not all that complicated or expensive, and fairly portable because they can slide around the yard tracks. Cheapo Guilford has had one in its tiny insignificant-speck of a Plainville, CT yard for close to 20 years now. They're very common.

F-line to Dudley via Park wrote:

Teamdriver wrote:More news :


http://www.boston.com/business/technolo ... air_space/


http://www.boston.com/business/graphics/14csxgraphic/

I'm surprised they haven't been using those cranes already in a yard as big as Beacon Park. They're not all that complicated or expensive, and fairly portable because they can slide around the yard tracks. Cheapo Guilford has had one in its tiny insignificant-speck of a Plainville, CT yard for close to 20 years now. They're very common.

With these cranes costing 3-4 times that of a packer (sideloader), requiring expensive investment in the runways upon which they must operate, and a cost-effectiveness in high volume terminals, and, with Beacon Park's closure on the radar and volume dropping coming out of the early 1990's, the investment wouldn't have been justified.

What's most interesting about this article is the scale of intermodal terminal capacity growth being planned as opposed to the small capacity gains, above and beyond the niceties of new paving and support buildings, CSX made at the Conrail breakup and with their rhetoric of new I-95 corridor traffic into New England. Of course, these I-90 corridor improvements will yield 4 or 5 times the impact on their domestic freight intermodal linehaul costs in an already-successful lane compared with the impact of single-railroad economics in a north/south lane with higher relative network costs. Now, if CSX could get domestic stack clearance along the length of their I-95 corridor into New England as they'll have in their I-90 corridor, then that earlier rhetoric would become reality and they'd have to further increase their intermodal terminal capacity growth plans with another terminal in addition to, or replacing the one planned for, E. Worcester.