https://www.freightwaves.com/news/us-class-i-railroads-to-feds-dont-blame-us
Claim container mess is not rails fault.
Sounds about right. The BNSF may be going to charge storage fees if consignees do not pick up their loads. Driver shortage may be a significant part of the issue.
Photos of the yards confirms that BNSF took two tracks out of servoice just to store the loads they have received. Don’t have info about other RR’s.
The traditional circular finger pointing at all the other elements of the supply chain. The reality is that all those pointing fingers are right - everybody is responsible and nobody has clean hands.
Volumes seem to be dropping off now… that should help free up some capacity.
Better lay off some people!
No… much better to take on secondary business if needed…
Exactly!!! Vendors in Asia have been stop and start since Covid broke out last year. Inventories in the US were depleted as everyone sitting at home ordered on line. Container shipping companies found themselves with too many shipments and started rolling cargo. Add in a shortage of ocean containers. Ships arriving on US west coast can’t unload. Railroads can’t handle all the containers and initially don’t want to reposition empty equipment. Containers arrive rail terminals in the Midwest and customer can’t take them immediately because of a trucker shortage and, possibly, because shipments have become “bunched” and are arriving in greater volume than he or she can handle.
Balt is spot on; this is a supply chain cluster and no ones hands are clean.
CW
It’s almost as if no one has ever seen a pandemic before… most are dealing with its repercussions for the first time with no play book to follow. Lots of moving parts. No clean hands implies we are all caught of guard… I guess so.
They followed the playbook. It simply said “run as lean as operation as possible with no slack for any eventuality.”
Shortage of truck drivers: I’m glad the railroads aren’t making the same mistakes the trucking industr… hmmmmm.
Thank rampant consumerism for that… we all want low prices at the store. That’s really where it all starts. Heaven fordid we all live in smaller homes with less stuff.
I don’t buy it. Sorry.
Nonetheless consumers call the shots… at least the inital salvo. Its why those scarce hard to find drivers haul trees from Oregon to Ontario and Quebec in December…superfluous transportation demand brought to you by Joe and Jane Consumer.
Even without the stupid short term panic, they’d still be short.
I don’t think any part of the supply chain is to blame. Our Country shut down for a year and then opened back up (maybe), and so we have a surge of imports to make up for what was suppressed during the shutdown. So the surge overwhelms the supply chain. The supply chain cannot be built with enough over-capacity to handle such a large surge. It would not be cost effective to build in such large and normally unnecessary over-capacity. Shutting down the Country was a radical move, and so it produced a radical result. This is probably just the first chapter of that result.
That’s pretty much it…
In transportation you can’t cut your way to growth.
True, but these days there’s less room than ever for underutilized capacity that is held in reserve for a rainy pandemic. We all want our pots and pans from China at low low prices…pandemic or not.
So railroads implement PSR and cut the workforce, motive power and equipment being operated.
They’re simply adjusting their operations to the dollar store clientele they service. And the dollar stores themselves are trying keep up with home delivery and uber guys who live on straight commissions and no benefits.
As Ulrich noted earlier, all of us bear some responsibility because we expect lower prices. This is at least somewhat to blame for our increasing reliance on Asia as our primary sourcing point over the past decade. What I think carries more responsibility however, is companies looking to reduce costs more from the perspective of improving earnings than providing lower prices.
Too many companies who should have known better decided that “global economy” meant producing for next to nothing over “there” and selling it all “here”. Overseas production and ocean freight costs were cheap for so long that companies forgot to hedge their bets and have contingency plans available. Over reliance on computer algorithms for planning and a lack of common sense and institutional knowledge throughout companies and especially at the senior management levels are, in combination with the pandemic, what has brought us to this point.
I’m reading quite a bit of late where companies are taking another look at their sourcing and supply chain but, only time will tell if all this “looking” translates into decisions to bring production and sourcing back to North Amer