The poor chemical companies have no other source of transport than from railroads, over 2/3 served by only one railroad, which raises the rates dramatically as they have a monopoly.
Those poor chemical companies!
(source, June06 Trains News)
HEY! No chumming for FM, he’s out of season…lol…
LC
Wait until they deal with the “wonderful” waste haulers that I deal with! We have to keep sending exception requests to the EPA and NYSDEC while we wait for a trailer to fill up! Since we aren’t generating enough waste fast enough they will not pick up a partially filled trailer! The “goal” of RECRA was to reduce haz waste! WE DID THAT!![;)] Now, we can’t get the [censored] Truck operator to take the[B)][censored][banghead][
] stuff away within 60 days. We have to generate more Haz waste!?![xx(][banghead][%-)][D)] and don’t get me started on what they charge! OUCH! Could CN, CP, CSX or NS be worse? Likely, considering we would not come close to their minimum weight/frequency requirements!
Yup…
My railroad serves over 150 customers, with 100 plus being in the petro-chemical business.
They get same day service, cheaper switch moves, and personal service…
Shell Deer Park (largest refinery in Texas), Phillips, Solvay, Auto Fina, Ethyl Corp, Air Products, Hampshire Chemicals, Dow, all of them “captured” by the PTRA…and BNSF with the UP…of course, all of them are also located along the Houston Ship Channel, having deep water port access along with super cheap lifetime leases on huge pieces of property, including tax breaks and other perks…
I bet the first time a tanker truck of Hydrocyanatic acid rolls through your town, down your streets, or over the freeway beside your business you would scream bloody murder!
How about we ship all the LPG via freeway?
Like to have chlorine, or a tanker truck full of sulpher park at a diner in your neighborhood?
How about a great big cup of benzene or a big ole’ dose of mercapitan… (The stink in natural gas)…
Poor old chemical companies…captured and bound to the safest transportation mode for their products.
Ed
Sounds like we are on the New Jersey thread. Throw in a little sewage, mix thoroughly with acid and serve on a warm pavement.
Yes! The same way you and I are getting screwed by the oil monopoly. Any time you are stuck with a limited supply of something that you have to have you will get screwed. It’s called capitalism.
Hey Ed, just from reading what has been written before in trains magazine, I too was under the impression that UP had cornered the chemicals business, leaving BNSF to fight with KCS over the table scraps left over.
I guess you are saying that, in your neck of the woods, that isn’t the case?
Out of curiousity, what percentage of your innerchange is with UP vs BNSF?
Almost an even split…with BNSF having the grain business sewed up, and UP moving most of the coke and coal trains.
KCS(TexMex) might have 5% of our total business, paper products for the most part.
BNSF and UP both have all of the chemical traffic…BN is ahead in the plastics, but that because they built a SIT yard on the north side of Houston, Casey Yard, and courted Phillips and Solvay to use it almost exclusively.
UP has all the automobile traffic.
BN has most of the food products…tallow, molasses and corn sweetener, we even serve a butter factory and deliver bottles to the Budweiser brewery from the BN cuts.
In reality, outside of Houston, UP does have the lions share of the chemicals, but that is because SP had it before them…the Golden Triangle is one the Sunset Route, and in most of east Texas, when you said railroad, you meant the SP…
Remember, we (the PTRA) are a neutral switching association…which means if your plant is along the Houston Ship channel, you can choose BNSF, UP or TexMex, and we do the work for them…regardless of the story on short lines in the last Trains, we are not owned by UP and BNSF
They, or their predecessors did own the H B &T, and when it was dissolved, the HB&T was split between the last guys standing, UP and BNSF.
BNSF and UP are PTRA member lines, and have voting rights on our board of directors, but the actual owners of the PTRA are the Harris County Navigation District and the Port Authority Of Houston.
Our board of directors is made up of a member from BNSF, the UP and a member each from the Port Authority, the Navagation District, and the City of Houston, along with the President/CEO of the PTRA.
We do receive part of our operating budget from the member lines, but in the form of switching fees, the remainder comes from the Port Authority and the Navigation District, who owns the actual property the ROW is on.
They are also the entity that negotiat
Well, of course. It’s not even a debatable topic, except to those in denial.
Who’s really getting screwed by railroad captivity is the US industrial economy. Those chemical companies have to compete with a lot of foriegn competition, so any limits to competitive transportation options puts them behind the [8]. Remember, importers outside NA have all competitive transportation options, captive domestic producers often do not. Captivity hurts the US economy in the goods production sector, and abets the current trade deficit.
BTW, you all notice how Ed’s RR is a multiple access RR? Apparently, competitive access is not an issue in his neck of the woods…[^]
Also, for those of you using the “lol” and “flmao” acronyms…enough already.
Frankly, no matter how you answer Dave’s statement, he will have a negative to expound on…
What he fails to point out is that both BNSF and UP have formed a joint dispatching center that serves both major railroads into and out of the metroplex…as a form of survival.
Why?
Too many railroads and too many trains into too small a space.
One center to dispatch all the trains.
Centralized, managed jointly, for the benefit of all of us.
And he fails to point out that my railroad has exclusive right to serve the ship channel area, by design, all of our customers are indeed captive…UP and BNSF can’t run a train into this area, or provide a crew or locomotive for any of my customers…only the PTRA can.
So, my customers are captive, and quite happy about it…they have to deal only with us, one call and one system dedicated to serve only their needs.
Can you imagine an “open” system, where anyone can run a train into a system that deals in limited space, with a limited structure?
Can you say daily train wreck?
The idea of the low bidder running the trains on a system maintained by another low bidder?
Lovely…
Of course, the debate is moot…Dave has never set foot in a locomotive, nor has he ever thrown a switch, read a switch list or work order, nor run a train across any system…other than the games he has loaded into his computer.
FOFLMAO…
FM, FM, FM…
How can YOU be so consistently, wrong…LOL…
The cost of transportation is a minimal cost for the big chemical companies. Nowhere near as big an issue as FM would have us believe. Is competition a good thing, sure, but its not the only thing. If transportation was such a big thing many more chemical plants would be constructed with multiple road access or on short lines or terminal lines like Ed’s with multiple access…
LC
Particularly for chemical companies, RR and PTRA provide services other than transportation. Storage in transit (SIT) is very important to chemical companies – with SIT serving as a part of the manufacturing process at times. RRs are not the only one providing these services. Go to Galveston and take the auto ferry across to Port Bolivar and back some day - it’s free. While you are on your lovely cruise, count the ships at anchor just off the coast. Then, travel down the island to Surfside and watch the intercoastal waterway – chemical barge after chemical barge. Oh yes - and while you are driving the interstate to Galveston, count the tank trucks.
dd
dd
All good points, dd. And remember, those barges and truckers are operating in an environment of intramodal competition. Railroads ain’t.
Ed, your analogies get weaker by the minute. I doubt you’ve ever crawled through the access tunnels under a dam’s turbines, but you have no problem criticizing the electric utilities. Et tu, Brute?
LC - enough already. It’s just plain gay.
Ah ha…I knew it, a gnome disguised as a troll…hiding in damp tunnels…
Never critizied electric utilities, in fact, I think they got screwed over big time, along with the phone company.
I miss picking up the phone, and in seconds talking long distance to Germany…now you have to play the game of who, when, how many minutes on whose lines, so forth and so on…service from both, real service, sucks now.
Ed
I do feel bad for the chemical companies. Wait! I own Exxon Mobil stock.[:)]
Lee Raymond did ok there.
ed
When you criticize captive rail shippers (which you have done ad nauseum) you are criticizing electric utilities inclusively. No exoneration there.
Yeah, I too miss those days of not having mobile phone service, having to use a phone booth when out of the house or office, having to plunk down those dimes and quarters in a phone booth eaued in the scent of urine. Yep, I miss those old rotary dial phones and land line communications. Cursed be that broadband! Cursed be that wi-fi! Yep, them cell phones and calling cards have really made life miserble for the swamp folk.
Dave…
I think you missed your morning meds…[:D]
Yes, carload shippers are getting the shaft from the big rrs. An example is my former employer, Cargill Flour Milling in Newton,KS. This mill has been a steady provider of rail traffic to SF & BNSF for a long time. Curently all business is bulk bakery flour which is mostly shipped east of KS. Newton is the location of a flat switching yd on BNSF which operates 24/7. In 2001 the rr cut off wknd switching @ the mill. They can run Sat and get by w/no switch, but not Sun. The mill now has had to switch to trucks to handle some of the business which could be done all via rail if the rr gave a hoot and would switch wknds which would keep the mill running seven days a wk instead of having to be down most Sundays.
Hmm, lets see, if you are a Chemical producer located in say France and don’t happen to be located on the coast, you have a choice of trucks or SNCF. Not much choice there. SNCF has the monopoly. Maybe not to much longer, but then again we will see. China, maybe, how many railroads serve China, one. What about India, just one national company. Russia, just one. Germany and some other Western European countries are getting there and they do have inland navigation, like some parts of the US. All of these countries have other problems that hinder business and more than levels the playing field.
Yeah, those poor European/Asian companies and their perpetual subsidies[V]. Kinda offsets having to deal with a monopoly, doesn’t it? Especially when the monopoly itself is regulated by the government.
The truth is, most industries in other countries have an umbilical cord of help from their respective governments. It’s the citizens who end up paying the price.