When the city doesn’t want you around, it’s pretty hard to expand your business.
That’s the way it’s been since at least the 1980s. Nylene has been the only customer on the Renfrew sub for decades, but they can’t ship caprolactam to their plant by truck. Nylene owns the line and is chartered under the name ‘Arnprior Nepean Railway’. CN is contracted to operate on their behalf.
It is a shame Ottawa can’t be like New York City, Long Island, or Northern New Jersey where industry is being encouraged to get direct rail service and intermodal capacity expanded. It is seen as relieving traffic congestion, helping the enviroment, and helping shippers save money over trucking, it also helps tax payers by saving on road damage. Hopefully a shortline can take over. I’m sure there are many business oportunities that exist that CN has no clue about or just is not interested in.
The end of CN through-freight operations on the Capreol-Ottawa-Montreal route:
https://churcher.crcml.org/Circle_Articles/Article_Farand09.html
Brent, ON is here. Pretty remote place for an AFHT:
It might be a good thing if the CN or CP addded a rate for Poliicians, in and out of Ottawa…“Boxed,Swinging or on the Hoof”
Suggest they might want to decentralize the Government… Start by movng some government agencies to British Columbia or Alberta. [:-,]
We don’t ship ‘critters’ anymore, for good reason.
Some of that stuff is already out west. One of the Canada Revenue Agency’s (CRA, just like your IRS) big processing centre is in Winnipeg. So is the Mint (their Ottawa facility now only produces special coins).
Just wanted to put an update. I found this article from about a year ago:https://infodaffaires.com/manutention-ferroviaire-le-cn-pourrait-larguer-des-soulangeois/
It is in French, so you will have to translate it. It describes the situation and illustrates the seriousness of it. It does confirm my estimate that CN was getting at least 1000 carloads per year from the operation. In fact, it confirms that CN is getting 1000 carloads from just two industries alone. Just wanted to mention that there are other industries along the line that I forgot to list earlier, and those are MacEwen Agricentre in Maxville, Ontario, IKO Roofing in Hawkesbury, Ontario as well as two agricultural product loading sites in Saint-Polycarpe, Quebec.
It is rather sad that things have ended up the way they have. There is a business case for rail in Ottawa, in fact many industries have recently invested to preserve their rail service. SynAgri in Twin Elm entirely rebuilt their siding in 2016, and Nylene has been doing quite a bit of maintenance work on the Arnprior Nepean Railway very recently as they are are not able to recieve raw materials by any other mode of transport. In my opinion, the situation with Ivaco in L’Orignal is hardest to believe. It is difficult to imagine that a steel manufacturer will be completely reliant on road transport. The number of extra trucks on the road as a result of this discontinuance is going to be rather high. Not a good thing for Ottawa and surrounding area, as well as the companies that use the rail service.
Seems like this would be a great time to replace those 1000 carloads with 4000 electric, driverless truckloads to show those railroads the future.
Of
Drones. Even better.
[quote user=“BaltACD”]
Murphy Siding
ttrraaffiicc
Just wanted to put an update. I found this article from about a year ago:https://infodaffaires.com/manutention-ferroviaire-le-cn-pourrait-larguer-des-soulangeois/
It is in French, so you will have to translate it. It describes the situation and illustrates the seriousness of it. It does confirm my estimate that CN was getting at least 1000 carloads per year from the operation. In fact, it confirms that CN is getting 1000 carloads from just two industries alone. Just wanted to mention that there are other industries along the line that I forgot to list earlier, and those are MacEwen Agricentre in Maxville, Ontario, IKO Roofing in Hawkesbury, Ontario as well as two agricultural product loading sites in Saint-Polycarpe, Quebec.
It is rather sad that things have ended up the way they have. There is a business case for rail in Ottawa, in fact many industries have recently invested to preserve their rail service. SynAgri in Twin Elm entirely rebuilt their siding in 2016, and Nylene has been doing quite a bit of maintenance work on the Arnprior Nepean Railway very recently as they are are not able to recieve raw materials by any other mode of transport. In my opinion, the situation with Ivaco in L’Orignal is hardest to believe. It is difficult to imagine that a steel manufacturer will be completely reliant on road transport. The number of extra trucks on the road as a result of this discontinuance is going to be rather high. Not a good thing for Ottawa and surrounding area, as well as the companies that use the rail service.
Seems like this would be a great time to replace those 1000 carloads with 4000 electric, driverless
Honest to god, I have an article I printed out a couple years ago that said us lumber yards were on the brink of being shut out by Amazon drones that would deliver whole house packages of materials to jobsites in under 48 hours. I’m still shaking in my boots! I did the math and a typical house in our area would take about 83,000# of building materials.
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Sounds like you’d need a fleet of drones the size of an Mi-10 or S-64 to handle that kind of job.
Those 1000 cars are from just two customers. There are nine customers for the Ottawa operation. The more likely total is probably in the range of 2000-5000 cars per year. CN maintains very little track in the area and mostly acts as an operator. The reason this discontinuance is so concerning is:
A) There is evidently enough business to maintain this operation. The CN local in Ottawa operates 7 days per week.
B) Many industries that use this service are reliant on rail service. The most famous example is Nylene in Arnprior. Since the 1980s, the industry has purchased and maintained this line because if service was discontinued, they would have no other option and would be forced to move or close.
C) It leaves an entire large city without any rail service. While Ottawa doesn’t have a lot of industry, it still does have some. A lot of freight is also transloaded here as well, so there is a lot that will be lost if freight completely discontinued.
D) If service were to cease entirely (not be transferred to a shortline or contracted out) this will represent significant amount of business in an underdeveloped market that CN just walked away from. Freight that is still there, needing to be moved, but with no other option but to go by road. It’s 2020, and this shouldn’t be happening anymore.
There is still room for optimism though. The lines were classed for discontinuance in fall of 2018. According to the process, they could have been much further down the road to cessation of service by now, but they aren’t. According to CN’s published three year plan, the only thing they have done i
[quote user=“ttrraaffiicc”]
BaltACD
Of course those 1000 carloads are spread through the 365 day year so we are talking less than 3 carloads per day so there would only be the need for an additional 12 truckloads. Don’t know of any railroad with 100 or so miles of track invested in less than 3 cars a day would continue in business.
Those 1000 cars are from just two customers. There are nine customers for the Ottawa operation. The more likely total is probably in the range of 2000-5000 cars per year. CN maintains very little track in the area and mostly acts as an operator. The reason this discontinuance is so concerning is:
A) There is evidently enough business to maintain this operation. The CN local in Ottawa operates 7 days per week.
B) Many industries that use this service are reliant on rail service. The most famous example is Nylene in Arnprior. Since the 1980s, the industry has purchased and maintained this line because if service was discontinued, they would have no other option and would be forced to move or close.
C) It leaves an entire large city without any rail service. While Ottawa doesn’t have a lot of industry, it still does have some. A lot of freight is also transloaded here as well, so there is a lot that will be lost if freight completely discontinued.
D) If service were to cease entirely (not be transferred to a shortline or contracted out) this will represent significant amount of business in an underdeveloped market that CN just walked away from. Freight that is still there, needing to be moved, but with no other option but to go by road. It’s 2020, and this shouldn’t be happening anymore.
There is still room for optimism though. The lines were classed for discontinuance in fal
I am looking forward to some sort of shortline in Ottawa. They could probably do some good work. The question is what model would it follow? Perhaps a municipal shortline like the Guelph Junction Railway, Orangeville Brampton Railway or Barrie Collingwood Railway? The other question is who? Quebec Gatineau Railway, Cando, maybe even Ontario Southland[^o)]? Either way, it would warrant a trip to Ottawa to get some nice pictures and a bit of railfanning.
If Long Bridge wasn’t the only crossing of the Chesapeake/Potomac, they probably would. There are no rail-served businesses in the District of Columbia, unless someone is doing a great job of hiding. There’s only a handful inside the Beltway in the first place, and half of those are on NS tracks.
Joseph Smith & Sons scrap yard is serviced from Benning Yard in DC. The industrial area that was the B&O’s Eckington Yard and all the customers it served in the are have been replaced by FedEx and the DC Metro facilities. Likewise the cusomers on the Georgetown Branch were ‘run off’ and the branch abandoned in the early 80’s.
Remember - CSX has been discouraging loose car railroading since its formation in 1980. The area where CSX placed their Dispatch Center in Halethorpe, MD was the site of the B&O’s Fair of the Iron Horse in 1927 - afterwards it was developed into a industrial park - when I first went to Baltimore to work in 1970, the park had about 35 businesses that had rail service including A&P Supermarkets, Carlings Brewery and a number of others - total volume was approximately 100 cars a day in and outbound and the area was served by crews headquartered at Halethorpe around the clock. When the Dispatch C
The scrap yard is across the line in Maryland. There’s an asphalt plant not far from there either. I assume that CSX would find a way to serve them without Benning if they wanted to get rid of it, as a pure conjectural.
I have been thinking about the topic of this thread lately. It has now been two years since this operation was reclassified as discontinue. It has me wondering why there has been such little activity regarding its divestment and cessation of services. Things have continued as if nothing has changed and that surprises me a bit. If things had taken a normal timeline, then all freight service in Ottawa would have ended by now, but it hasn’t. So what is CN up to, and what do they have planned? It’s a good question and I’m not sure many people know the answer to it. As CN recently announced the sale of 850 miles of track in Wisconsin, Michigan and Ontario, could this be part of that? Details of this move have been scarce, especially surrounding what moves they plan to make in Ontario. So anything is possible.