Delaware and Raritan River Railroad-General Discussion

Some other possibles are L&L Paving on Yellowbrook Road and Stavola across the street. Both are asphalt plants and use lots of bulk material.

Just on the topic of people who deal with asphalt, I have been hearing rumors that Stavola in Tinton Falls wants service from C&D once they get Farmingdale to Freehold open. Guess we will have to wait and see on that one…

More a history question than anything, but more or less across from Preston Google View shows a Monmouth County facility labeled as "Monmouth County Shade Tree", "Monmouth County Special Services", "Monmouth County Board of Elections" etc. OK, so it's a municipal building now, but there's a disconnected siding which leads to it.
What was this site used for back in the day, and did it get much (if any) rail traffic?

Not exactly sure what they do there but at one point like a year or so ago they wanted to start moving contaminated dirt out of there. That fell through though.

CR7876 wrote: ↑Sun May 29, 2022 9:20 am Nestle is one, Rex Lumber in Englishtown is another. Don't sleep on Stavola and/or Anchor as a potential landing spot for sand.

Do you know how many cars Nestle, Rex Lumber, and Stavola/Anchor would hypothetically get? I think Nestle would be the one that gets the most cars and most frequent service out of that group.

jdh823 wrote: ↑Sun May 29, 2022 10:46 am Surprises me that Nestle doesn't have any sort of spur and there's no evidence of one ever being there. Their other sites do get cars (hoppers for the most part it seems) so I'd say that could be the most likely.

There's a few junkyard/recycling facilities nearby as well maybe they could lure them in as well? Just a hypothetical guess.

Nestle received service on the line up until the late '70/early '80s - there was a gentleman on one of these threads who claimed to have been the supervisor for Penn Central or Conrail on the FIT at the time, and he signed off on Nestle terminating service and taking the switch out of their facility. If you look on Historic Aerials, you can see that they once had a siding. Now that it's been 40+ years since then, it's no surprise that there's no remnants of it left.

There's a scrap handler on 33/34 in Wall, Brick Recycling I think it's called, that used to get hopper cars - apparently, NJT banned those on the Coastline, so I'd imagine once the FIT-SOUS connection is complete, they will get service again. They used to get 2-5 cars a week.

Nestle did get cars at one point I believe. Idk if they would deal with C&D though, mainly for these reasons.

1. Right now they deal with a L O T of intermodal. More specifically, 20 foot marine containers. Most likely they are trucking these to/from Port Newark…

2. Remember, C&D says new customer side tracks need to made with brand new ties, brand new or relay 115 or 132 pound rail, brand new tie plates, spikes, and a requirement that the track has to be built to Class 2 standards. All that doesn’t come cheap, and the current inflation doesn’t help. Oh, and don’t forget the surveys and environmental impact statements!

3. Nestle already has the option of transloading from either the Freehold Team Track or from another company/area like Raritan Central, CSX Transflo, or NS Thoroughbred Bulk Transloading. (All are within 35 miles of this place) If they don’t already do this, (idk if they do) what exactly is C&D gonna do differently to pick them up as a customer?

As for Brick Recycling, they might come back. They were only getting like 1 car a month towards the end though, and even then the only outbound rail loads from them were heavy steel. Freehold Cartage has wanted rail service for quite some time so they can downsize their trucking fleet but they are further away from the track than Nestle, so good luck getting a siding built. Maybe a transload solution can be found?

Bracdude181 wrote:Nestle did get cars at one point I believe. Idk if they would deal with C&D though, mainly for these reasons.

2. Remember, C&D says new customer side tracks need to made with brand new ties, brand new or relay 115 or 132 pound rail, brand new tie plates, spikes, and a requirement that the track has to be built to Class 2 standards. All that doesn’t come cheap, and the current inflation doesn’t help. Oh, and don’t forget all the surveys they require!

As for Brick Recycling, they might come back. They were only getting like 1 car a month towards the end though, and even then the only outbound rail loads from them were heavy steel. Freehold Cartage has wanted rail service for quite some time so they can downsize their trucking fleet but they are further away from the track than Nestle, so good luck getting a siding built. Maybe a transload solution can be found.

The requirements for a new switch are verbatim from NS track standards, which CR also uses. That is pretty much the industry standard.

One day a week service did not work for scrap loads.

R&DB posted on aug 16th 2018. That a asphalt paving facility on yellowbrook rd in Howell might be a possible new customer. Is there any more info about this

@CR7876 Still though, all that costs a lot.

I can see what Brick Recycling would have trouble with once a week service during the times when they still got 4 cars per trip, but what about towards the end where they only picked the car up once it was full? Also I thought NJT banned those cars? There was a lot of talk about that when they stopped getting cars…

@baju That would probably be Stavola. Heard they might want service. We will have to wait and see…

Bracdude181 wrote: ↑Sun May 29, 2022 8:14 pm Nestle did get cars at one point I believe. Idk if they would deal with C&D though, mainly for these reasons.

1. Right now they deal with a L O T of intermodal. More specifically, 20 foot marine containers. Most likely they are trucking these to/from Port Newark…

I believe that once FIT-SOUS is reconnected, we can expect to see some single-stack intermodal cars, which would fit Nestle's needs then - perhaps we could see this even before then.

Bracdude181 wrote: ↑Sun May 29, 2022 8:14 pm 2. Remember, C&D says new customer side tracks need to made with brand new ties, brand new or relay 115 or 132 pound rail, brand new tie plates, spikes, and a requirement that the track has to be built to Class 2 standards. All that doesn’t come cheap, and the current inflation doesn’t help. Oh, and don’t forget the surveys and environmental impact statements!

See CR7876's response - that's pretty standard.

Bracdude181 wrote: ↑Sun May 29, 2022 8:14 pm 3. Nestle already has the option of transloading from either the Freehold Team Track or from another company/area like Raritan Central, CSX Transflo, or NS Thoroughbred Bulk Transloading. (All are within 35 miles of this place) If they don’t already do this, (idk if they do) what exactly is C&D gonna do differently to pick them up as a customer?

Here's the thing - the whole point of railroads is to have bulk deliveries at once, preferably directly to your business place. If you're a small operation like Laird's is, where they only need one or two tank cars a week, transloading is still cheaper than doing it by truck. But if you're Nestle, and you're getting big bulk loads all at once - having to have the train deliver it to a transloading spot, and then delivered by truck kinda ruins the point - I'd imagine it costs about the same and is way easier to just truck it the entire way. If Nestle were to use rail, they would need direct service for it to make sense.

Bracdude181 wrote: ↑Sun May 29, 2022 8:14 pm As for Brick Recycling, they might come back. They were only getting like 1 car a month towards the end though, and even then the only outbound rail loads from them were heavy steel. Freehold Cartage has wanted rail service for quite some time so they can downsize their trucking fleet but they are further away from the track than Nestle, so good luck getting a siding built. Maybe a transload solution can be found?

I'm pretty sure it's been said Brick Recycling's cars got banned from the Coastline south of South Amboy, for whatever reason. Either or, Brick was a small operation, and would definitely need more than a couple of cars a week to make sense of utilizing the railroad. If C&D could get 2x+ a week for them, and they were constantly getting around 5 or so cars (which I think their siding can fit), it would be economical for them. CR refusing to service the SOUS more than once a week has really scared away a lot of potential and former customers.

As for Freehold Cartage, they have a relatively small site - I'm not sure how much material they work with ther,e but I'd imagine a transloading option would work well for them

As for the sand rumors, if they are true, would C&D do the interchange with NJSL? Or would NJSL have the option to have trackage rights?

Regarding new industry sidings, Its not unusual for a RR to waive the cost of a new siding in exchange for a guaranteed # of cars per month.

Some quick notes.
- Re: Construction costs, we're also not talking billions here. Dunno what NJ install rates are doing these days, but it's generally possible to do these things for <$500k, especially given that these investments generally don't require enviro review. Generally, they'd not be doing this out of the goodness of their hearts, but rather because they think it'd save them money in the long run -- so really what ends up mattering here is the scale of projected savings vs the construction cost -- ROI, in other words.

- Re: transloading, it can indeed be an attractive proposition, and many shortlines find themselves competing not only with long haul trucks, but with short haul truckers which can offer shippers access to nearby class 1 transloads. That said, short haul trucking is often expensive, and transloading charges can be high; there are obviously many variables to consider when weighing direct vs indirect service (rates, reliability, equipment cycle time, service frequency, storage possibilities, etc) but *generally* speaking those with direct rail service will find it more economical.

I'm reasonably sure the new, soon-to-be operators of the FIT / Southern have done their due diligence concerning new and / or enhanced business. If there is none, they will end up with a very marginal operation.

It seems from anecdotal evidence their other operations have managed to increase business, although I have no numbers to back that up.

We shall see.

Where would they operate out of? Browns Yard? That is currently a CSAO (Conrail Shared Assets Organization) yard. Also portions of track are out of service along the Free3hiold Industrial track between Freehold and Farmingdale, NJ. Believe that rea would have to be looked at for feasibility of running trains, on the FIT (Freehold Industrial Track). A shame those tracks weren't kept in place years ago and used .

For the time being they will exchange in Red Bank and Jamesburg. Unsure where the engine will park. In Jamesburg they will probably park on the wye legs. Not sure about the Southern. I’ve heard they want to park on Woodhavens siding but I highly doubt they will allow it. They could park on the siding in Lakewood or at Cross Street, but the problem there is anything not behind a fence will be vandalized.

Red Bank might be okay as long as they leave room for NJT to park their stuff whenever they need to. Right now they only park their catenary inspection vehicle in there regularly. Sometimes the aqua and stone trains will tie down in there, but only as needed.