Interesting to read that the problem South of the 49th more or less mirrors what’s happening (or not happening) in TGWN.
http://www.startribune.com/business/270840361.html
I wonder if that has anything to do with mothballed engines, furloughed personnel and general rationalization e.g. maxing out the motive power and keeping maintenance to a minimum (= breakdowns and delays). Oh BTW, it’s a rhetorical question!
Hans, so the story about food prices being high, because so much grain is being turned into ethanol for our cars that there is a grain shortage, is hog wash?
Thought so.
Don’t know about the USA, but up here most of the grain is for the export market, with ships lined up at Vancouver (don’t know about Prince Rupert) waiting to be loaded. The farmers steaming about the grain not moving and the exporters steaming because they can’t load the ships. And then there’s Hunter Harrison repeating again and again that it was a tough winter. No kidding! Were the railways prepared? Were there extra engines and crews to move the stuff?
I got a nice demo of how things work when I spent a few days in Jasper AB during February. Break down on a WB unit? No problem, we steal one off an arriving EB and let that train sit 'til next day or longer, screwing up the double tracked west approach to the Jasper yard.
Entertaining listening to the radio traffic while rail-fanning. Not so hot for the shipper who had to wait more than 24 extra hours to get that unit train through his balloon track.
I guess the difference between the grain rush of '03-05 is the addition of oil trains. Capacity was already at a high point that caused grain growers to leave a bunch of grain stored on the ground. I was told at the time that major exporting elevators in the Mid West were leaving grain on the ground in huge piles, than as soon as freezing temperatures hit they sprayed the stack of grain with water, freezing the first couple of inches of grain to protect the millions of bushels underneath. I know it took BNSF until late '06 for them to finally finish back hauling all that grain. I happened to hire out just as the grain rush was hitting (June '03) so it worked really good for my seniority building!
Now take that same situation as before and add increased coal and oil unit trains and you have a recipe for disaster. Farmers, grain shippers, exporters and importers (in the far East) will all moan and groan and the railroads will just sit back and do business as normal as they all have a monopoly on the market!
I’m not sure how much grain is exported verses grown for ethanol but I had heard at one point that the grain for ethanol was a completely different type of crop that was not for human consumption. I’m sure some farmer could explain better the differences between sweet corn (human consumption) verses feed corn verses ethanol corn.
100% of the grain that come into the West Coast (Ports of Vancouver, Pasco, Portland, Longview, Tacoma, Seattle) was for export. As HJ said (and my experience too) grain ships are likely waiting off shore to be loaded. I asked a grain employee at TEMCO (Tacoma, WA grain export facility) how many trains it takes to load one ship. He told me some number in bushels, which I had no idea. Then he told my it takes 10-15 loaded unit trains (110 cars each) to load one ship. His main beef with the railroad was that TEMCO only had limited capacity of storage and relied on BNSF to deliver similar products back to back. For instance deliver 5 trains of soybeans, then 10 trains of wheat, etc. Instead of 1 train of corn, 1 train of soybeans, one train of wheat, 1 train of soybeans, etc.