Pan Am Southern / Patriot Corridor Discussion

atholrail wrote:https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/Gui ... ges/125394


First NS Ethanol train coming for the P&W via Gardner...

For those of us not on that list would you be able to post the whole text here?

Thanks

Here's one quote from the group:

NS 66N-**-19 is out of Buffalo for the Tier route to Binghamton, then north to Mechanicville and on to Gardner, for the right turn to Providence. NS 8806/9824/9895, a buffer and 80 liquid loads.

First of the thoroughbred trains to alternate with the Green Mtn. Gateway

The meltdown continues. MOED tied down on the single iron at Ashton Ave (that's in North Adams). AD-1 crew was sent out to headpin the power and bring it to the yard office to be watered and then bring it back to the train and tie it down AGAIN. Then hopefully they can return to North Adams and go about their actual duties (switching the customers).

AD-1 ended up staying on that MOED which was made up on the 19th, yes the 19th in Mohawk. So the locals and the VTR didn't get their cars today.

Passed EDRJ at Buckland which has been there for 36 hours.

This railroad is a joke.

Just to pile on a bit, I noticed that a PLED train is still sitting on the south end of the Conn River runner. If I remember right, it's been there for well over a week. Must be a decent size too as they had to cut the train for Dooley's crossing. Appears to be mostly empty propanes and tri-citys but there are more than a handful of Sullivan loads in there as well.
On a positive note, there didn't appear to be a train on the Greenfield runner today ( first time in a long time )

How much longer can this go on before contract non-performance clauses get triggered?

If NS took over I can only imagine things will get worse before they get better. Just remember the meltdown the east-coast railroads faced when NS and CSX took over conrail. With Pan Am being in the shape it's in I can not imagine a speedy recovery, even with a load of money behind it.

I give it 5 years to complete NS ownership of PAS if not all of the B&M.

The Conrail split was a very different situation though. You're talking about taking an existing Class I railroad, with many thousands of miles of track and employees, and divvying it up between two other Class I railroads. There's no easy or smooth way to do that. A Class I railroad taking over a portion of a much smaller railroad strikes me as being a substantially easier undertaking. Not easy per se, but not the makings of a disaster either. Frankly I don't see how it can get much worse at this point. Eventually you hit the bottom and there's no place to go but up.

With the lower D+H going to NS,it might be a matter of time before NS goes before the STB to get a
"Directed Service Order" fot PAS at least. The "Meltdown" at PAR and PAS might finally knock off Fink
and Co control of PAR(aka ST,nee Guilford). Long years of pain may follow after takeover.

MEC407 wrote:The Conrail split was a very different situation though. You're talking about taking an existing Class I railroad, with many thousands of miles of track and employees, and divvying it up between two other Class I railroads. There's no easy or smooth way to do that. A Class I railroad taking over a portion of a much smaller railroad strikes me as being a substantially easier undertaking. Not easy per se, but not the makings of a disaster either. Frankly I don't see how it can get much worse at this point. Eventually you hit the bottom and there's no place to go but up.

Granted Conrail was much bigger, but if you look at all of PAR, not just PAS (which is bound to happen) It's the largest regional railroad in the country I believe. And before NS and CSX took over Conrail was already running smooth, or at least as smooth as a railroad could possibly run. So my thinking is not based on size, but if it was a mess for two railroads to split up and continue service on a smooth-running railroad, it doesn't look good for one railroad to take over a railroad already in a mess.

Understood, and you make a valid point. I guess my point is that Conrail was an excellent railroad, so the resulting disruption was a stark contrast to their usual smoothness. In the case of Pan Am, it's difficult to imagine how it could get any worse than it already is. Even if somehow the transition made things worse, that would only be temporary. It's like repaving a road. You have to rip it up and it's inconvenient and we all have to sit while the flagger waves opposing traffic through at 10 mph, but eventually it results in a brand new road that's much better than the old one.

The Conrail takeover by NS and CSX involved splitting in half a busy, functioning railroad and generating completely new traffic patterns and interchange points based on the new ownership map. That was a far larger and more complex undertaking than a theoretical NS takeover of the Pan Am entity would be. That would be a simple end-to-end combination that would require no immediate changes in operations.

Adding my own 2 +/- cents worth, parallel mergers -- and dismemberments -- tend to have more problems than do linear extensions. UP/SP was a notable example of the superior "partner" having little regard initially for the capabilities of managers or crews of the acquired "partner," with all the predictable outcomes and eventual refocusing of UP management styles into one that got the former SP back into fluid status. The changes during PC becoming CR becoming NS add-ons plus CSX add-ons plus Shared Assets had their own problems for too many causes, not the least of which included old rivalries and the desire to crush the competitors.
Whatever NW's style might have contributed to the early situations at NS, management seems to have learned. The NS part of PAS has also had a good amount of time to recon the PAR managerial part of PAS, and there may already be lists of keepers and those who get thanked for their service and wished well in their future endeavors. The rope for hanging oneself and the time allotted for the noose to be fashioned would seem more a matter of patience than impatience. After all, CSX is pretty much at capacity east of the Hudson, so NS can afford to appear patient: Madame Defarge appeared patient as she knitted the record of errors of the managers of France.

I wasn't suggesting a buyout imminent on anything more than the 5-year timetables newpy was suggesting. I just want to know approximately what non-performance clauses exist in the PAS partnership today where NS can look at its goods chronically not being delivered, tell MellonFink to pull over and get in the passenger seat, and send an armada of Pony power and crews up from Harrisburg like a conquering army to plant the flag at East Deerfield and Ayer. Not change the business and profit-sharing arrangement--a buyout or squeeze-out is not in the cards anytime soon--just flip the ops agreement on its head so NS is running the trains and PAR is the backseat driver...not the other way around.

At some level of nonperformance the additional cost of NS taking over logistics hits par with the revenue loss from deliveries never ever made on-time, and it becomes a no-brainer to not pussyfoot around any longer lest atrophy starts to depress the bottom line even more. I just want to know if that level is established in the contract, and what it would take to get it triggered. Does NS have wide discretion on when it can demand ops control, or do the conditions have to be so severe that they're basically meaningless and no amount of PAR crapulence gives them the leverage? Is it even performance-based, or can NS just decide whenever it wants that it's taking over if it takes on a sharp cost premium in the contract? In other words...is this in the ballpark where somebody in a Norfolk, VA boardroom is having strategy meetings on an action plan they may be prepared to execute?


Frankly, I'm not even sure PAR wouldn't welcome such a move. The whole system has been ops-gerrymandered for a couple of years now for stop-loss at getting PAS goods across the Corridor no matter how much things had to grind to a halt east of Ayer to make that happen. Now even that is collapsing on itself. Do they simply have a better shot at turning a higher profit in FY2015 and '16 if all their West End power and crews just get booted east to landfill the hole...you know, instead of actually repairing their dead line or doing new hiring or taking their chances with Amtrak/NNEPRA non-performance on the Western Route from lack of available track gangs, just retreat their rolling ruins to another division?