has anyone noticed the yards seem empty? the trains seem shorter?
SPACEMONKEY wrote:has anyone noticed the yards seem empty? the trains seem shorter?A yard with not too many cars in it is not necessarily a bad sign, cars are
supposed to be moving over the road and not sitting in yards in the first
place.
As for shorter trains, there are two sides of this one.
Some railroads give service to the level that they will run a train on a
schedule whether there are 50 cars to move on it or 150 cars to move on
it while other railroads will not run a train until they have the tonnage or
car limit for that particular train.
A railroad that handles a customer's freight as they say they will will do
better in the long run with more satisfied customers and will as a result
get a bigger share of a customer's business while a railroad that says the
cars will arrive in ten days and then have it turn out to be 30 days will
only handle what the customer has to give them to handle.
When I first started coming to Florida in the mid 1990's, the Florida East
Coast trains were not too long and generally operated by two units.
Today Florida East Coast trains are much longer and three units on most
of them. They don't even have huge yards all over the place to
accumulate cars, they keep the cars moving. They run their freight trains
on better schedule time than Amtrak runs down here. That is one reasson
that their business has grown big time. They are currently running 12
weekday scheduled trains and they have no rail connections down here of
any kind. Containers and vans, rock shipments north and lots of local
business make it a busy railroad.
Noel Weaver
