Selkirk hump to shut down?

As SD80mac stated earlier, there is often a "donut hole" effect when Amtrak shows up on CSX. For example, the hour from 5 to 6 PM on Saturdays would usually see no activity except for Amtrak 281. And when I refer to an average, I mean just that- an average of 2 trains per hour. Some hours may have 4 trains and other hours may have none. Everyone reading and posting here, myself included, understands there is no guaranteed traffic level. It was recently posted somewhere on Facebook that CSX has 38 scheduled road freights on the Buffalo-Selkirk corridor, plus Amtrak and locals. If that information is indeed correct, then that would equate to roughly 48 trains per day. Perhaps CSX is busier during the morning hours before you are able to get to Chili Jct.

I have seen other sites that state that CSX runs less than 30 regular trains on this line plus Amtraks and things like grain and alcohol. So that would fall into the high 30’s or lower 40’s for a day. Even the 48 you are thinking is still below what it was in the not so distant past. Think about it, the oil trains that were common are rare, intermodel has fallen off and coal is down to occasional Kodak trains. Another thing we had were the Hudson River dirt trains, they are gone. Now factor in that CSX often runs 175 or more cars in one train instead of a couple of 90 or 100 car trains. There was one morning a couple of months ago when there were three frt. trains and the total axle count for the three was just under 2500 ! A year or two ago that would have been 5-7 trains instead of 3. And how about some of the K trains, they used to be 80 or so mty tank cars, now they sometimes have full size autorack or grain trains stuck on the back end. This past Tuesday there was one with 80 tanks and TWO mty rail trains on the back end. All these things lead to less trains.
The bottom line is there are less trains running on this line than there have been and its not just by one or two.

C2629 wrote:The bottom line is there are less trains running on this line than there have been and its not just by one or two.

Somehow you managed to conflate this quote:

Matt Langworthy wrote:I was at Sand Patch 3 days ago- it averaged less than 1 train per hour. I also spent Saturday afternoons at Chili Jct during the spring and summer, typically seeing an average of 2 trains per hour. Given the need for helpers at Sand Patch, moving the traffic off that line seems plausible.

...into a statement that traffic was still the same as it was a few years back. That was not my intention. You can find other threads on this message board where it was generally agreed (myself included!) that traffic on CSX isn't as high as it was under Conrail. Nobody is denying traffic has fallen off somewhat. With that being said, you have provided nothing concrete to refute what I have seen i.e. an average of 2 trains per hour. Have gotten outside your morning comfort zone to watch CSX at other times?

Matt, you dispute my facts saying I have not shown you any proof, what have you shown to back up your two per hour claim ? I think part of the problem is you probably were not aware of how many trains ran on this line a few years ago so you think about two per hour is what it was. It was a lot more than two average. By the way, you say I have a "comfort zone" in the morning, and you base that on what ? FYI in the longer days of summer I get out 5-6 days a week for 6-8 hours starting around sunrise, then once or twice a week I get back out late afternoon till maybe eightish. I also work in a few sunrise till dark days each summer. And I do not exclusively go to CP 382. Here is a logbook page from 10-6-2011. Thats before the oil train days. You can see 22 trains listed on this page, and there were 2 more from that day on the previous page making a total of 24 trains from 0830 until 1500. There were plenty more similar days back then.

Looks like you've got Langworthy really fired up - he's over on Facebook trying to get a list of present-day train symbols. ...And the beat goes on....this is quite a bit like his postings of a week ago claiming that traffic on the NS Southern Tier line was booming.