Conrail intermodal

Trains Magazine General Discussion
1

As previously noted, Conrail Commodities arrived yesterday, after a very long wait. I have three weeks to digest it before returning it to the ILL.

For those of you who are interested in freight schedules and operations, including blocking patterns, block swaps, etc, this is quite a book. When used in conjuction with Conrail Freight Schedules, one can have a decent understanding of how freight moved on Conrail.

I am already amazed at their intermodal operations, having never really understood the system in which this type of freight moved.

Ok, call me naive or perhaps unaware, but it seemed as if an intermodal train such as TV12, running from Chicago to Kearny, NJ simply loaded as many NJ/NY trailers/containers as possible and then hi-tailed it for Jersey.

Wrong. Leaving Chicago (47th Street), it also picked up in Englewood (Chicago) with blocks for 1. API/Kearny, 2. Kearny Double stacks, 3. Syracuse (including New England) 4. Croxton, 5. Kearny Trailvans and cofc.

At Syracuse, blocks 3 and 4 were set off with cars picked up for Kearny.

This was a simple train, compared to some with as many as 11 blocks, with shuffling at Harrisburg, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Toledo, Columbus, Indianapolis and other locations.

Dewitt in Syracuse seemed to be a major hub for block swapping…

Can anyone explain the high number of terminals in the Chicago and New Jersey areas? It seems as if it is due to the combination of pre-Conrail railroads terminals and the lack of real estate/money to build a major superduper terminal (such as Logistics Park).

Ok, next question…define “mail” on Conrail. There were several “mail trains” such as Mail3, Mail4, Mail8, Mail9 and Mail44, plus suffixs such as Mail8M. Were these actual mail

2

The operating plans for any of the Class I carriers are much more involved and detailed than outsiders can comprehend. With the advent of contracted service and the commitments those contracts place upon the carriers the operating plans of the carriers must satisfy all those contractural commitments. It is not simple and requires constant management on many levels of the operation.

3

Balt:

Well said. Perhaps the biggest change (from what I have read…not from my experience) the railroads have made in the past 30 - 40 years is how to market and operate in a contractual environment.

As an “outsider” the tendancy is to look at a train as a collection of cars that happen to be passing by. We seldom ask what are in those cars and why? Where are they destined and from what point did they originate? What is the value of the lading and how much is the transportation charge?

What will happen if it is a day late? or several days late.

Years ago on this forum we had a young man who went from a conductor to a dispatcher for CSX in Indianapolis and he was gracious in sharing some experiences. Perhaps he is still here, but it doesnt seem like it.

One day he told of a decision he made to put a UPS train into a siding between Indy and St. Louis. The siding actually had a higher speed than the slow order on the mainline. Within his shift he was question by the Chief as to why he had placed the UPS train in the siding. UPS had been monitoring the train and called.

That is management of information.

ed

4

It seems you are corect in your assumption. 47th = PRR ,51st Street = Erie , Englewood 63rd Street= NYC. TOFC destination determaned which Terminal, all COFC going to 63rd.

Everyone of them a dump from a Truckdrivers view.

5

It’s network business. I’ve even seen it change by the day of the week.

Santa Fe #188 was a 50 hour intermodal schedule from Chicago to LA. But such service was not needed on Wednesday and Thursday Chicago depatures. Those loads would have delivered on the weekend and generally sat around until Monday AM.

ATSF saved money by putting its Phoenix loads on #188 those days and setting them out at Williams Jct. So the train’s blocking and work changed by the day of week.

When I worked for RoadRailer (Then affiliated with Thrall Car Manufacturing in Chicago Hts.) I could not get people to understand this. The other RoadRailer folks sat around thinking the railroads were really stupid because they didn’t convert to RoadRailers. I’d ask them what ATSF would do with the Phoenix loads on Wednesday and Thursday if they converted #188 to RoadRailers. They had no answer. Niether did they have an answer for what would be done with trailers received in Chicago for #188 or what would be done with containers.

Ed now understands what the folks at RoadRailer never would accept. It’s a network.

6

Oh, boy. Which question to tackle first?

Multiple terminals in NJ and Chicago:

Mix one part history and two parts volume and a half part customer drayage. It definitely would be better to have one big terminal than a bunch of smaller ones, but there was no place available in either city that could be built out large enough on the existing land to fill the bill. Also, you’d be trading off drayage for RR convenience.

At the beginning of Conrail, there were really just two intermodal terminals in NJ. South Kearny (PRR) and North Bergen (NYC). North Bergen was adjacent to UPS’s sorting facility, so they much preferred it over Kearny. Stuff coming west from Chicago and St. Louis for them need to go there. Kearny was convenient to the port, so port traffic needed to go there. Neither place was big enough to consolidate into and consolidation would have commercial implications due to drayage costs.

As traffic grew, Conrail out grew both places. West Coast imports needed a place to land in the east and the complications of steamship container storage, chassis storage, and the need to handle customs work on bonded shipments led them to developer Croxton as a terminal to serve the steamship companies. They hired a well respected port drayage company to run the terminal and handle all the customs paperwork.

More growth and commercial requirements led to them using the “on the dock” facilities in Port Newark and developing a terminal for KLine traffic in Elizabethport. JB Hunt found the Elizabethport facility convenient, too, and moved lots of traffic in and out of there. (proximity to NJTP?)

Other locations, there was land that could be had to built or expand terminals. Harrisburg grew east toward the passenger station and west toward the rail welding plant until it was decide

7

Oh, yeah, the game of logistics is fascenating, complicated, frustrating, confusing, and mesmerizing. Crews, equipment, track capacity, yard capacity, number of customers, customers needs and demands, interchanges and the interchange carriers, weather, derailments, missed connections, customers changing needs, etc. Then come up with one schedule or one set of schedules, which will allow you to perform your service economically and effeciently, and to the speicfications if not satisfaction of your customer or customers. Daily.

I remember the EL NY99/100 UPS service Chicago to Croxton (Secaucus) NJ. Contract said use at least two SD45’s, priority trian ahead of everything and anything else on the railroad. A lot less than 20 hours Chi to NJ, beat any schedule PC offered. CR came along and put the traffic on the PRR route and had to renegotiate the contract or lose the business.

8

TVLA (started life as TV53). North Bergen to the ATSF at Chicago. 73 hour service NY to LA. Faster by a couple hours than anything else between NJ and Chicago (which made it extremely difficult to keep on time!)

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Don and others:

Thanks for the info.

I agree, not from a truckers standpoint, but from a salesman that travels Chicago that the 47th and 51st areas are dumps. No comment on Englewood…I dont go there.

The “network” aspect as described by Greyhound seems right on the money. It is obvious from looking at the Conrail schedules that these trains were very interesting operations. Drop here, pickup here, connection with TV_____, etc. Using the facilities available, as described for Harrisburg and the NJ terminal areas, plus Chicago kept their operation as very fluid. Dewitt Yard was obviously a duplicate yard and could easily be converted to intermodal.

Thanks for the term “filleting”…I couldnt figure it out, now it makes sense.

Conrail had a couple of interesting trains which actually diverged from a normal routing to serve Columbus, Ohio. Taylor mentioned (and I confirmed on the schedules) Mails 4/5 plus TV5 that dropped down from Crestline to columbus, then did a 270 degree turn and headed back northeast to Ridgeway to resume the trek on the ex NYC mainline.

That seems like an expensive divergence…

Now, were most of these “interior” routings (block swaps) in place at the time of the Conrail takeover, in other words did Penn Central develope the network, or was it a Conrail thing? Someone did a great job in figuring this all out.

The weekend modifications were interesting. Greyhound thanks for the info on the Santa Fe/Phoenix operational changes.

Last night as I went to bed the thoughts of all these block swaps and the network kept running thru my mind…leading to rather “complex” dreams.

ed

10

It’s even worse that 47th St!

11

A bit of both, I think. Most of the low volume locations were being served early on - Toledo, Cleveland, Columbus, Pittsburgh - but the network was simpler. Fewer trains and terminals. As the network grew, you couldn’t have every train stop everywhere, so you had to figure out what made sense. It grew organically rather than being the product of some network planning tool.

Those wierd Columbus trains were the result of Conrail bailing on the PRR panhandle. Mail3 used to run St. Louis to NJ via the panhandle all the way to Pittsburgh. When the panhandle and Big Four routes were rationalized mostly in favor of the Big Four route, how to serve Columbus to/from the east became a problem with wierd solutions none of which ever really worked out very well.

12

Ya gotta remember some of these routings, reroutings, and block swaps happened in order to accomodate traffic removed from the EL and LV lines plus removal of a lot of freight traffic off the PRR main east of Harrisburg in favor of the RDG to Allentown and the LV to NY harbor.

13

So, there was no interest in Conrail obtaining trackage rights across the Panhandle from Pittsburgh to Columbus? Or perhaps the line was in such lousy shape it wouldnt have mattered.

Don, or others, can you think of any line that Conrail should have kept?

Also, any idea of why the “mail” trains kept their name rather than TV’s?

ed

14

Conrail did what it had to to become a viable entity…to wish or pine over what they should have kept is futile and useless unless you want to deny its success. Success being defined as creating a viable, stable, sleek, operating railroad that would make a profit and give a return on investment.

On the other hand, there are those (moi?!) who think CR total dismantled the Erie, the DL&W, the EL, LV railroads leaving them usless and non competitive properties rather than rehabilitated railroads and therefore not a success or at least not a total success. In the process it took away the economies and hopes for furture economic development from hundreds of communities not on the succeeding CR lines. Here, we call it a dismal failure.

The answer to your question, therefore, lies in whose side you are on.

15

henry6 -

I know you’re an E-L fan, so I have to share this with you - not all traces of the CR ‘fallen flags’ are gone yet - 33-plus years after that consolidation;

A string of about a dozen black Erie-Lackawanna hoppers - all still with EL reporting marks in the 33000 series - went past me at around 1;00 PM this afternoon on the NS’ Reading line in the southwestern part of Allentown. I couldn’t tell if they were loaded or not, and I have no idea where they were coming from or going to - they were about in the middle of a general / manifest freight headed towards Reading.

  • Paul North.
16

The debate over who liked Conrail will always be a heated topic it seems. But it was my local railroad and used to provide a good show at times. Can’t say the same for CSX where the trains can be few and far between. Nothing against CSX, I am just noting that there seems to be a lot less going by on my local lines since Conrail. But I am not debating that here.

As for terminals, North Bergen and South Kearny have always been significant here, and the old Erie Croxton Yard has been converted into an NS intermodal yard, with the freight tracks on the other side. I don’t know if Oak Island does much in the way of intermodal aside from the CP trains that ran into there. The NYS&W yard is busy, but with the traffic taken off that railroad their yard is switched by them with blocks of cars assembled there, then CSX brings the trains out and right over onto the River Line. Suffice it to say there are quite a few places for intermodal trains to run. I believe that The North Bergen yard is controlled by Conrail Shared Assets and used by either road.

Conrail had quite an impressive intermodal business, I am guessing that CSX and NS have tried to keep it going but with the current economy I guess nothing is quite what it used to be.

17

trainfan:

Which leads right into my next question…

Has intermodal service improved since CSX and NS took over?

Henry, the purpose of my question was strictly operational…are there any Conrail lines gone which should have been in the system. Not for the sake of being a fan of the line, nor for the benefit of the communities or the local economies, but strictly for the Conrail operational system.

Not to say that I am cold hearted about local economies, but the mission of the USRA and Conrail at the time was to rationalize the system.

ed

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Wish I could answer that for you at this point, but I hope they are at least keeping it at the same level. Maybe someone else with a little more info can help us out.

19

First, Paul, I am a DL&W fan, and then maybe EL and then…lots.

But Trainman, I have answered your question in the most objective way anyone could. If you wanna know what I really feel, based on your quesiton, here is the subjective answer:

CR should have kept the NJ Cut Off and the Erie main west of Hornell, NY and had an intermodal terminal at Port Morris and ran the hell out of the first 50 flats loaded till they reached Ohio followed b;y the next 50, etc. till all were gone…then they should have kept the LV from Allentown all the way to Buffalo,certainly the best road with the least grades of any heading for Lake Erie…

And if Port MOrris was not to be, then Maybrook should have been an Eastern REgion Intermodal yard and the first 50 from there head west hell bent for Ohio…

But those are subjective, not objective, views.

20

The reason for Conrail giving up the cut-off, according to them, was that they didn’t need the two parallel routes, and the Erie side was easier with the grades and clearances. This issue had been going on since the EL days. The DL&W side had more potential for online traffic with its branches, but Conrail could access them from the other end instead of the cut-off line. The reason I have always heard that CR made sure the cut-off was abandoned and sold so as not to be reused was to eliminate any possible competition using it as a through line. I guess they were thinking more in that respect rather than anything else. Would have liked to see more EL lines survive too.