“HILLSBORO, N.D. — American Crystal Sugar Co. says it is slowing down sugar production at three of its five factories immediately because of slow rail service. Some agricultural industry officials feel they’re losing out to oil traffic…”
[snip] "…United Sugars Corp., American Crystal’s marketing entity with two other co-ops, has been behind in shipments to customers from this region by 150 to 200 cars at a time, well above the usual zero late deliveries. United Sugars is a joint venture between Crystal Sugar, Minn-Dak Farmers Cooperative and U.S. Sugar Corp., a sugarcane co-op based in Clewiston, Fla.
Several hundred empty cars are sitting on tracks somewhere between United Sugars and its customers, Berg says. “This is completely out of bounds. We’re looking for 100 to 120 cars,” Berg says. “What do you do? Do you put the product on the ground? No.”
About three-fourths of Crystal’s 2.5 billion pounds of sugar goes out in trains, and a quarter by truck and in consumer packages. The company has increased its truck hauling as much as possible to offset the rail problem…" [snip]
With all the concentration on the Crude oil tank cars and their issues and problems, it seems th
BNSF’s side of the story would be simple: ‘We ship the product that makes the most profit for us.’
There’s also a question of whether the sugar producers requested delivery of rolling stock in a timely manner, or waited until the last minute. BNSF may be locked into a low-profit contract that was negotiated long before the oil boom and believe they should be earning more for these shipments, and are, therefore, trying to force the sugar producers to turn to trucking.
In a local (that is, N.D.-based) AP story I saw a couple of days ago, BNSF said oil, only 4 percent of traffic system-wide, is not the problem, even in N.D. The spokesman blamed the severe winter weather, which has hurt car supply and crewing over much of the system.
Can’t speak to BNSF problems, however the weather has wrecked the efficient operation of my carrier for the past month and a half…HOS trains chew up manpower quickly in multiple ways, throw in weather related switch and signal issues both on my carrier and connecting carriers and you end up with a real three dimensional puzzle to solve.
Inbound traffic to the PTRA from both BNSF and UP has been down 25% for the last 5 weeks, they can’t get the trains to us because they have a big shortage of crews due to the HOS law…crews get on trains, but can’t get them as far as they normally could because of the weather, which has a lot of lanes plugged up.