Maine Northern Railway (ex-MMA lines operated by EMR/NBSR)

Could be crude to the refinery. A lot of talk about Western Canadian crude heading to under-utilized refineries back east to capitalize on higher per barrel prices with Irving being a major player. With no pipelines to supply the sweet crude, rail is being tested as an option. MMA's Moosehead could be a player here as well if existing pipelines are utilized as far east as Montreal.

Should be easy enough to determine by tank car type (pressure or general service) or coomodity stenciling on side/placard UN number.

car check wrote:NB Southern should take delivery of two more SD40-2 engines as early as this weekend from Helm. HLCX 6315 and HLCX 8144 were to arrive in Moncton Thursday night. The increased traffic on their mainline is the need for more power. There seems to be a big increase in the number of tank cars going both ways.

I understand one of the newly arrived SD-40's was on today's westbound out of St. John, with just over 5000 feet of train. From watching a NBSR train on video last week, I also did notice the increased number of the larger tank cars in the consist.

I read a newspaper article a few weeks ago that mentioned Irving officials were in Western Canada, meeting with oil interests, concerning the receipt of Western Crude into the St. John Refinery. It also mentioned the use of rail to achieve this.

The newest and extensive source of crude in North America is the Bakken Shale Oil formations, encompassing sections of Saskatchewan and North Dakota........in fact, Williston N.D. has been described as the U. S. version of Fort McMurray, Alberta, with oil boom economics. Both BNSF Railway and CP Rail have been shipping ever growing amounts of crude from the area, to refineries in the last two years. CP has been using the Albany N.Y. gateway to bring oil east in 80 tank car blocks, primarily to New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

Since CP / NBSR already have traffic agreements to the Maritimes in place ( i.e the Auto Traffic.....Chrysler ), I agree with fogg 1703, that MMA's Moosehead Sub. should see an increase with the oil traffic.

Test traffic has gone via CN. Not sure if any has gone MMA. The SD40-2 power is not for crude shipments. If there was a CP agreement to send unit trains with crude, per the MO of the other jobs, chances are it would have run through power.

On an eastbound last week there were close to 50 tanks on it. Lots of them were shiny new TILX tanks and they were basically in two blocks. Were not the larger lp gas tanks. Next time I'm up around the yard I'll ask what they are.

I just traced some cars from the NBSR westbound of 3/29/12 on youtube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wpbbDbju7og) and indeed, they're empties showing for Stoughton, SK. Right now they're on the CPRS at Toronto so they must have moved across the Moosehead on the MMA to hit CPRS rails. A quick check reveals that Stoughton is in the Bakken area so they probably were crude oil loads for Saint John...sure enough, the cars are placarded UN 1267 which is "petroleum crude oil".

JAJ

Thanks for the tracing info Mr Joyce. While this is currently great news for either MMA or CN, I don't think the longterm plans (at least the ones I have seen) involve unit crude trains eastward to Montreal or St John. If the Sarnia-Montreal pipeline is reversed, look for Western Canadian Crude by pipeline into Montreal and put on barges through the St Lawrence and around to St John unloading at Canaport. The infrastructure is already there for Irving for maritime delivery as opposed to some major work needed to prepare for 80-100 car unit trains. Not out of the realm completely, but the economics to me would seem to favor a pipeline to barge as opposed to a pipeline to unit train from Montreal-St John. This all changes however if an all rail route from the West is the only option. And correct me if I'm wrong but CN already controls the lion's share of finished product west from Irving, so MMA may have its work cut out to try and capture this traffic.

fogg1703 wrote: While this is currently great news for either MMA or CN, I don't think the long term plans (at least the ones I have seen) involve unit crude trains eastward to Montreal or St John. If the Sarnia-Montreal pipeline is reversed, look for Western Canadian Crude by pipeline into Montreal and put on barges through the St Lawrence and around to St John unloading at Canaport.

The infrastructure is already there for Irving for maritime delivery as opposed to some major work needed to prepare for 80-100 car unit trains. Not out of the realm completely, but the economics to me would seem to favor a pipeline to barge as opposed to a pipeline to unit train from Montreal-St John. This all changes however if an all rail route from the West is the only option. And correct me if I'm wrong but CN already controls the lion's share of finished product west from Irving, so MMA may have its work cut out to try and capture this traffic.

I will have to disagree on some points.

A few weeks ago, I read an article that appeared in the Canadian Financial Post titled " As Pipelines Stall, Railways Keep oil Flowing ". I'll try and find the link to that story.

As I said in my last post, CP Rail and BNSF have quickly ramped up facilities to move oil from the Bakken sources.....both railways already had a major presence in the area to begin with. Last year CP moved 13,000 cars of Bakken crude and they project to increase that to 70,000. The rail tank cars on average each carry 650 barrels.

Irving has used rail for some time now, to move petroleum products from the St. John Refinery and yes, CN has played the major role in doing so. CN consists between St. John and Moncton N.B. are dominate with tank cars. The infrastructure already exists to handle oil at St. John by rail. Transferring product from pipeline at Montreal to barge, if that were to happen, I feel would slow down the delivery process, although the price of delivery certainly plays a role here also.

CN has a larger presence than CP in the Alberta Tar Sands Oil area but they haven't jumped into the fray as much as CP has, with the great expansion in the new traffic source, presented by crude oil. Again, if Irving brings increasing BAKKEN CRUDE to St. John by rail, CP becomes involved and that can only mean, increased traffic over the MMA.

Makes better sense for Irving to import crude oil from within Canada than from South America, as I believe their major source has been in the past. As far as shipping finished oil products west by rail over the MMA, remains to be seen.

One other point I'd like to make, a few weeks ago I listened to a news talk radio show involving today's Oil industry. The so called " industry oil expert " interviewee stated that pipelines are the only means to move crude to refinery, they must be built at all costs.......I think he needs to brush up on the facts.

CP marketing people have stated, rail will not replace pipelines but certainly rail can supplement the delivery of crude product.

While I don't disagree that the current traffic and potential new traffic from either Bakken or the Alberta Oil Sands has been explosive, will it translate into unit trains to Irving? I'm not convinced. Having never seen Irvings operation at St John I'm not sure what the rail infrastructure is or what the capacity for unloading railcars could be. From any aerial view it looks open enough in the immediate area to build the infrastructure for unloading large quantities of rail cars (unit trains) at one time, but this refinery was built for maritime imports of South American, African and for a while British crude. Why not use the current infrastructure and run an Irving tanker in Montreal-St John dedicated service to supply the refinery with sweet crude? The decision falls on whether its cheaper to barge/ship from Montreal or rail from Bakken or Alberta? I won't even begin to comment on this as I have even less of an idea of costs, capital outlays and capacities.

As Mr Highball stated most industry accounts have their sights fixed on pipelines for one because it is far more efficient (ie cost effective) and most pipelines are operated by companies aligned with the industry that have a lot more at stake than a railroad that is in it to haul their freight and there is some sort of disruption, strike, car shortages or any other issue that may arise to effect service, the railroads answer is to try harder next time, meanwhile costs are rising due to decreased supply. In short trains are far more unreliable than a pipeline. Unreliability=volatility=higher prices.

I do think the Line 9 will get reversed with Montreal being the end point not starting point, opening the 2 Montreal refineries to western crude as well as opening Portland Maine as an export terminal for shipments. A pipeline to St John probably isn't in the cards however the capacity and higher market value on the East, make transporting the sweet crude an interesting scenario.

Here is an article from 3/23/2012 in the Globe and Mail.
http://aol.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ ... ransCanada eyes pipeline to East Coast

Perhaps the Irving oil refinery is experiencing the same problem that the Sunoco refineries are experiencing in Pennsylvania. The Sunoco refineries in Philadelphia and Marcus Hook Pennsylvania make up 50% of the refining capacity in the Northeast USA. The Marcus Hook refinery closed at the beginning of 2012 and the Philadelphia refinery will close in July if a buyer is not found. Sunoco has lost many hundreds of millions of dollars the past few years. These refineries depend upon foreign sources of crude oil, South America and Africa. They must pay the world price for the crude. However, refineries profit comes from the difference in price between the crude the buy and the selling price of the refined products. U.S. domestic crude from the midwest costs quite a bit less per barrel than foreign sourced crude. So the midwest and Gulf refineries are making good money refining less less expensive domestic crude and Sunoco is losing hundreds of millions because they dont have the margin to make money. Sunoco tested some CP unit trains from the Bakken fields to Albany, and then barged the crude the rest of the way. I am sure there was no way they could ship 500,000 barrels a day this way, which is the capacity of the two refineries.

Perhaps Irving is facing a similar squeeze and is trying to ship cheaper domestically sourced crude. This could be good news for the MM&A, but not sure this experiment will work any better than it did for Sunoco.

Today, I read a reliable source, stating Irving officials are indeed working on details for a weekly unit oil train to their St. John refinery. No details as yet on which routing the train would take eastward.

As I mentioned in a previous post, should the crude oil source be from the Bakken Oil deposits ( North Dakota / Saskatchewan ), then CP Rail will bring the trains east, for interchange to MMA / NBSR .

Had a look at the consist on the NBSR eastbound into McAdam tonight and there were over 30 tanks of crude oil. Their origin was listed as Estevan, Sask. which is pretty much on the North Dakota border. Me thinks a sign of things to come!

Interesting if the unit trains become reality. It could look like the old days on the Moosehead with CP power running long trains, even if its just weekly.

If that all happens with CP, whats the biggest size locomotive they could use? Are the track and bridge conditions good enough to handle the biggest locomotives?

Anything that is currently on CP's roster would be fine over the Moosehead sub.