BN is basically a western railroad.They have no connection to the southeast like NS does thru Southern Railway
A few points to keep in mind, here. First, the OP asked about BNSF, so what’s all this wailing about the bad effects of short-term institutional investors? Last I heard, Warren Buffet still owned BNSF. Second, in world where truckers like JB Hunt, Schneider, and Swift are your biggest customers, you hardly need to go out buy marketing data and grow some marketing cojones, you just pick up the phone and ask them if they could use a service between whatever two given endpoints are on your mind. Actually, knowing those truckers the way I do (they were all my accounts once) you don’t even need to call them - they’ll call you if they want something they think you might have. Third, does anyone know how BNSF handles PNW-Atlanta/Birmingham traffic today? An intermodal system map from 2015 which I found online suggests they either use an extremely circuitous routing on their own line via Omaha - KC - Oklahoma or else just hand off to NS or CSX at Chicago. If they are not even using the line between St. Louis and Memphis for PNW-Southeast intermodal traffic, there must be a good reason and I can’t see them opening it up for a lane like Atlanta -Twin Cities.
There is BNSF staff on the ground in Fairburn. You might call it a joint BNSF/CSX facility. BNSF originates a significant amount of UPS traffic at Fairburn, much of it bound for LA, Oakland, Seattle.
BNSF has its own tracks to Birmingham. After that ~150 miles of CSX trackage rights puts BNSF in Fairburn, GA. Why BNSF has never leveraged its Atlanta connection more fully is a head scratcher.
Five words for ya, buddy: Ship it on the Frisco.
Seems like a good “Trails to Rails” project!!
https://www.traillink.com/trail-history/silver-comet-trail.aspx
Atlanta is over flowing with intermodal damand. As posted elsewhere CSX Fairburn terminal is at capacity with BNSF, UP and CSX traffic. CSX Hulsey yard ( GaRR ) and Tilford yard ( NC&SL / L&N ) as well;
BNSF is starting a service that goes to NS’s Memphis yard and then NS MEM - Chattanooga - Avondale ( NE of Atlanta ). have to wonder how much excess capacity is left at Avondale ?
The new intermodal CSX yard at Chatsworth may or may not solve the problem but it is not is the best location for traffic from the west.
Having just read the article in question, I got the impression that the author used the Minneapolis-Chicago-Atlanta cooridor as an example because it suited the distance parameters of the the concept he was illustrating (the donut hole). Not that business demand justified it.
466lex indicates 40-50 loads per day. That doesnt cut it.
Recall that NS ran the Triple Crown into Twin Cities via the UP. I saw that train a few times crawling thru Chicago. No doubt the TCs went to Ft. Wayne where they were split up for Detroit, East Coast and the Southeast. So…there was single line intermodal service recently, in the form of Triple Crown.
Ed
If we are talking 50 containers/day - with 5-pack stack cars - that is 5 car loads or approximately 3000 feet of train. My carrier wants to run their intermodal trains with upto 14000 feet of train.
People don’t understand the recurring volume necessary for a rail line/service to be profitable. If you have between 150-200 truck/containers per day then you are starting to talk about business worth serving and making a profit from.
If BNSF ran their PNW-Southeast service through the Twin Cities, 40-50 at a time would be enough to build a profitable block on existing trains. But it’s not enough to support a new standalone train, and of course, there’s always the capacity issue, both on the trains and at the end terminals. As long as there is demand for more PNW-Atlanta service, you wouldn’t use that capacity to support a shorter-haul city pair. I like to believe that we’ll see more intermodal service on these sorts of lanes some day, but it won’t come until all opportunities for growth on longer-haul lanes are absolutely, completely tapped out.
So it appears that Twin Cities - Atlanta will probably not support an intermodal train.
This goes to prove that not every lane is going to be viable.
Ed
If the service were there, 2-3X per week it could grow. I wonder what the cost/revenue numbers actually are? It seems like the rails have boxed themselves into a shrinking niche of trainload-only services.
The only thing about this is that I think the opportunity cost of the equipment investment factors in, somewhat as it does for the airline industry.
If you’re devoting a consist to a dedicated route (which may be serving more than one lane, but explicitly doesn’t involve switching out the actual intermodal consist itself) “2x to 3x per week” you have to decide what the other use of that consist might be, or if there are better uses for the consist or some of its cars in other, more established, lower long-term risk operations. If the consists are to be used for other purposes, or made up on a kind of ad hoc basis when expected, you’ll need appropriate reserve capacity in or near specific locations to maintain expected QoS – as opposed to trains running in routings or lanes that support more of their full capacity frequently, or that for some reason involve lower cost or higher profit margin than the periodic service.
In passing, I’d say that railroads want to keep trainsets together and operating as much as possible, with as little switching of baretable or loaded consists as possible. And that translates to me into a preference for ‘trainload-only’ services, with the trainload perhaps adjusted for a given lane’s capacity or importance, but quantized at some minimum level for engine power and ruling train or route resistance. It would be nice to be able to run intermodal consists comparable to what Perlman was proposing for the Western Pacific, more likely now with better single-locomotive reliability but still governed by the effective use of the higher nominal horsepower (perhaps also evaluated per dollar capital cost of a more complex) modern locomotive. If we get to reliable one-man-crew operation, it might reduce the requirements for railroad acceptance even further. But I don’t mind predicting that service
After seeing CSX hustling eastbound through Utica with an IM train last week, though, I have to wonder.
One locomotive, one 3-pack, each with one container. Musta been hot…
Sounds like maybe the car tripped a hotbox detector or something, was set out enroute for repairs, and then something in one of those boxes got hot. It happens - often at the worst possible time!
Opportunity cost tends to get used to protect the status quo. I’m talking about a small trial (probably a small loss) with an eye on growth medium term, using existing, maybe underused equipment. If growth does not happen within X months, D/C it. If you want growth, you need to take some risks. Likely there is unused capacity on some routes, given the decline in coal and Bakken oil. Other folks with experience in railroad marketing, like Greyhounds, have had ideas.
Good Grief! Who ever suggested a “Meat Train” be dipatched on a congested railroad? Certainly not I! (This will eventually get back to the Minneapolis-Atlanta opportunity.)
The OP cited a Trains article about future mergers. Contained in this article are two important quotes:
“It’s a network business, and the larger the network the more valuable you are to customers.” – Rob Krebs
“It appears that the industry is in zero-growth mode at brest, so at some point new markets must be created.” – Jim McLellan
So we’ve got a network business (railroads) in need of traffic growth but we also have people, such as RME, who find new business “problematic” because it will add phamtom trains, trains never proposed but imagined, to a congested network. I’ll ask again, who ever proposed adding a “Meat Train” to a congested line? My experience with operating officials is that they would just make stuff up to avoid handling new business. The less there was to haul, the easier their jobs were.
What I have said is:
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There is a large and growing concentration of red meat production centered at Sioux City, IA. (also in the area are a large turkey plant and significant egg/processed egg product production)
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This food moves in large steady volumes both eastward and westward.
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The CN has a greatly underutilized line through Iowa that is well located to handle the eastbound business.
Greyhounds is right; you need to aggregate for a market as small as Minneapolis. Atlanta alone won’t cut it, but it might get interesting if the same train also served Memphis and Birmingham. That would seem to be a natural, except for one thing which I don’t understand. A glance at BNSF’s service map shows that they don’t run any intermodal trains down the river line between Galesburg and Memphis. To get into the southeast from Minneapolis on their current intermodal service routes, you have to detour way west through KS and OK. That adds too much circuity (thus time and cost) to be competitive with truck over that length of haul. I don’t know why they don’t use the river line for intermodal (clearance issues?) but that seems to me to be the whole crux of it. If that line was open for intermodal there would be many possibilities and I suspect we’d see BNSF pursue at least some of them.
Yes. And this need to aggregate markets reinforces the need to purchase the available freight movement data. (Information can’t hurt you.)
Good marketing people with this information, some vision, and a knowledge of what the railroad can do well can come up with a conceptual plan to deveop the Twin Cities markets. That’s markets, as in plural. Twin Cities-Atlanta alone won’t do it. But Twin Cities to/from the whole south just might be viable. The purchased data would give the railroad a down and dirty quick answer. (I wonder how many loads of chicken move from North Georgia to Minnesota. Georgia is the number one state for chicken production.)
IF the business is there the route looks promising. BNSF has a pretty straight shot between the Twin Cities and Centrailia, IL. There division map at least shows they have trackage rights over the CN between Centrailia and Memphis. That’s a pretty non circuitous route that avoids any St. Louis congestion. (Unless they want St. Louis on