"Up North" Gawking (District 1 sightings)

By the time PAR / PAR's successor gets the MEC up to a continuous Class 2, CP will have the Moosehead sub up to Class 4.

The railroad won't even be sold before that happens.

PAR is sending a ballast train to Mattawamkeag tomorrow. Given the amount of track in need of ballast, and about 17 cars of ballast being dropped it will be a surface layer, if that. Does anyone know when lumber cars will start to move out of Enfield? I know that they dont have a functional kiln drier, but there are other dimensional wood products that can be cut that dont need to be dried.

My understanding was they were hot for inbound logs from up north, so that's a pretty easy spot to drag down from Keag. Not sure where the cars would come from or who's providing them, but I'm thinking off MNR and likely their cars too. And surely they may load out some finished lumber cars too, but as far as I can see they only have one track in place so it'll be a challenge to manage both in and out with just a single track.

I can't imagine CSX will be any more interested in log loads in Maine than CP was...

Well, probably not, but unlike CMQ/CP, Irving's log cars aren't sixty years old, and CSX (hypothetically) would only have to move them twenty miles, rather than the 100+ that CMQ was moving them.

Which log business did CP drop and when? Missed that.

A Lincoln-based poster on one of of the EMRY/MNR groups reports that 501 passed through at 16:30 with "10 cars of frozen ballast that wouldn't dump."

Another classic Pan Am moment.

F74265A wrote:Which log business did CP drop and when? Missed that.

Under CMQ we were hauling logs from Huber and Golden Road in Millinocket to Jackman for Pleasant River lumber. CP nixed that pretty quick, largely due to the age of the log racks, and the little profit involved in moving the cars.

didn't they just scrap some of those cars as well?

I understand turning away no profit business, but low profit business still adds to the overall bottom line

Probably a combination of old, tired cars needing constant TLC, low margins (railroads typically don't like handling business below a certain level of profitably) and the time and switching required to drop cars at Jackman, which doesn't fit into their expedited, PSR scheduling. If this business moved in 30 car cuts in brand new equipment on a second non expedited train they would probably look at things differently.

If cp is just running one road freight each way per day then dropping the pigs makes sense since cp’s focus is meeting promised transit times from SJ to Montreal on through traffic. Maybe this service could return if, like you mentioned, a lower priority train is added to the line to do local service and lower priority, but still profitable, business

Both CP and CSX CEOs last week at RailTrends talked about how there is a massive opportunity for Class Is with carload traffic.... what’s old is new again I guess...? Might shed some light too on their recent strategies with M&A activity (I’m still told CSX is Pan Am buyer)

I believe carload freight was always there IF the class 1s were willing to provide regular and reliable service. The service meltdowns following the mergers over the past 20 years didn’t help nor did the chaos from the introduction of psr. On the other hand, psr once properly implemented could really improve carload transit times