On the UP channel (AAR25) today the I heard a CP crew talking to the UP crew at the Pleasant Prairie power plant. Both crews were there to pull empties. I do not know when this started, but it must be recently. Unfortunately, I did not hear which way the CP train was headed after leaving PP. The CP had 3 big motors for the job, but only one of them was a CP unit. I couldn’t get close enough to see what the other 2 units were.
Not to get too OT, but isn’t that the power plant snuggled up right near the Illinois border? You know, Excelon, for all its nukes, gets about 35% of its power from “other sources.”
Yes, it’s about 5 or 6 miles north of the state line. On clear cold days we can see the steam condensation over the plant in Antioch, IL.
Make that the CP is now delivering coal to Pleasant Prairie, WI. The UP lost the contract. Since then, the only symbols for Pleasant Prairie have been empty hoppers heading west. I haven’t seen a loaded train on the line up since the 1st.
Seems like a lot of other coal trains are gone too. The rumor before Christmas was that we were going to lose 20 coal or empty hopper trains a day across Iowa. Watching the line up for the east pool the last couple of days, I can almost believe it. The line ups go about 36 hours into the future and only have 20 to 25 trains on them. Of these, only about 8 to 10 are coal symbols.
Jeff
That might explain why I saw a string of UP aluminum hoppers headed up to Pleasant Prairie for storage yesterday.
How is the coal routed from the mines to CP? They might want to build that extension after all!
If true, this means the UP lost over 1,000 lucrative loads per day. That’s a lot of gone business at any time, but it’s especially bad to loose in a recession. I wonder if the UP made its renewal bids before the recession hit. If so, they’ve got to be looking for a new crystal ball. Somebody’s got some "splainin’: to do.
I’d also like to know where the coal went. Did BNSF pick up 10 loaded coal trains per day?
I heard that the CN also lost the haulage to Westin Power Plant near Wausau to the CP Ral. That was supposed to switch over on the first. As of 1-6-09 I visually saw a northbound load thru Neenah and 1-7-09 heard an empty heading down (not the same train, the first one was held somewhere between Point and Wausau). The CN still hauls the coal to Green Bay.
Paul
Greyhounds, I don’t know if that rumor is true, but I do know there isn’t as much coal traffic as there used to be. A North Platte guy out at Fremont said they heard they were going to be down 50 plus trains. I guess that would be our 20 plus 30 or so that go via Gibbon Jct and Marysville.
This morning, the east line up looked a bit better. Still, in the past two days they have cut a total of 20 engineer jobs between the east and west pools.
And the other day the UP released a statement about record coal movements out of the Powder River Basin for 2008. I guess we’ll wait and see how 2009 compares.
Jeff
CN still has Green Bay, but that’s because Green Bay is captive. The Green Bay coal however used to come from the PRB to Chicago on UP. As of last summer, that changed to BNSF.
Going back 5 yrs or more, the UP interchanged w/ Wis. Central over the Twin Cities to get to Green Bay. That required a reverse move in Neenah to GB.
The Weston (Wausau area) part is intersting. I’ll probably mess this up, but it seems it went something like this… Built by the Milwaukee Rd. Became part of Soo Line post-Milw Rd. That was spun to WC, but CP retained access to Weston ( ? ) coming from the South at New Lisbon. I’m guessing that this coal was routed UP to Twin Cities to CP. So CN buys WC leaving CN and CP with access to Weston - CP from the South and CN from the north over Jct City. Bit of a tangled web there.
Minor correction. Junction City is also south of the Weston plant.
In 1996 (and I don’t know how long before) CP/Soo received Weston coal from both BN (#886-887) and UP (# 884-885) at St Paul. In aprox 1998 UP was the only road bringing it.
The disadvantage of at UP/CN routing thru the Twin Cities is getting coal trains over the hill from Hoffman Ave (BN Midway Sub) to the Minnesota Commercial to the CN. The first hill requires a three unit helper and another crew in addition to the UP yard crew delivering the train…
To get to the CP, UP brings the trains via Roberts St drawbridge. The UP road crew (if they haven’t expired on the hours of service) changes with the CP road crew at SPUD. The CP road crew takes the train to New Lisbon and either changes with another CP “Valley Crew” or parks the train at MP 3.2 crossing north of New Lisbon. If another train is on the Valley the CP will park the train on Camp Douglas siding.
The numbers in this and some of the other posts don’t look right. I’m not personally familiar with the Pleasant Prairie business, but I seriously doubt that it represents 1,000 carloads per day or 10 trains a day as stated in these posts or as much as 50 trains per days as suggested in some of the other posts. That’s a huge volume of traffic for one power plant. I suspect that the sources of this information were talking about the total traffic decline from all causes, not just the loss of the Pleasant Prairie business. Even then, the higher figures don’t look right. I suspect the sources may have been talking about a loss of 50 trains a week, not 50 trains a day.
Pleasant Prairie consists of two 616 MW units (nameplate capacity) designed to burn sub-bituminous coal. Comparable power plants burning comparable coal have coal consumption rates of 345-400 tons per hour at an 85% load factor for the same number of megawatts. That equates to 16,560-19,200 tons per day. (WE Energies website says that Pleasant Prairie is consuming 13,000-13,600 tons/day, which indicates either a load factor substantially less than 85%, or coal substantially hotter than typical PRB 8,450 BTU/lb. I don’t think Pleasant Prairie is blending PRB with hotter Illinois Basin or Appalachian coal, so it is more likely that it has a lower load factor than 85%).
Using a standard 122-ton (net) 286K rotary-dump aluminum gon, and WE Energies coal burn number, that equates to 107-111 carloads/day, or assuming 135-car trains, thats 0.79-0.82 trains/day, or 288-299 trains/year. I don’t know if Pleasant Prairie also transfers coal to barge for other lakeshore power plants, which is a fairly common practice in the Midwest.
n.b. – losing a coal contract to another railway can be a good thing for the railway that lost it, if the price is noncompensatory or there are higher and better prices being offered by other shippers for the same track slot. There are some legacy coal contracts out there between specific coal consumers and specific railroads that other coal consumers are piggybacking onto, to obtain rates that no railway would offer today.
RWM
If I remember correctly, Pleasant Prairie received around 6-10 loads a week (about 5 years ago, I was once told). I don’t know what the turnaround time is for those trains but the Green Bay trains, when the UP had the contract, was around 8 days (according to a trace I did for a month). The same trainset used by BNSF is around 6 days. I used these cars, ironically all in the same trainset, WPSX 444, 555, 666, 777. I don’t know any of the PP cars. Weston, as of Saturday is still receiving coal delivered by the CN from Chicago. I’m guesstimating about 6 loads a week, with DPU’s (finally, about 6 weeks now).
With the Valley Line from Wis Rapids, I don’t beleive that the CP held any ownership or trackage rights to serve Weston. I could be wrong. If the trains were to use the CP, the interchange would be at Pig’s Eyes yard and then down the River Sub to Lisbon then north.
The numbers weren’t meant to mean one power plant, but a total of all the contracts UP supposedly lost. Across Iowa, it seemed like we usually had about 2 loads and 2 mty Pleasant Prairie trains a day.
The North Platte numbers also may have included other non-coal/mty hopper trains, too. Someone on one of my Yahoo group lists posted that he had seen current numbers of 85 to 90 trains a day between North Platte and Gibbon Jct, the triple track area. This was down from 140 a day during the rush of 2007.
The other day, a friend of my wife’s asked if everything was OK on the railroad. She had noticed that there have been less trains going thru town. Her rational was that it was becoming rare to have to wait for a train at a crossing where it had been rare not to.
Jeff
Can’t put a finger on what else has gone, but our inbound lineup of coal trains looks pretty bare today–maybe one every six hours. It looks like we still have the WEPX trains going to Oak Creek, though.
RWM, Pleasant Prairie is landlocked–no barge-transfer facilities would be possible.
What concerns me is what the added traffic on CP is going to do to Amtrak’s Hiawatha Service. Can CP handle the daily train or two without interfering with those trains? That’s a bit of why I’m interested in how the trains are being routed.
What you and Jeff are seeing in coal train routings is an interim state of affairs due to certain contracts most of which will expire in 1-2 years. After the old contracts are replaced with new, more logical routings will likely return to being the norm.
RWM
Were these “certain contracts” attempts by one railroad (CP?) to steal some coal business from another railroad ? Is there any standard length for coal hauling, or for that matter anything hauling contracts? I would think it would take a pretty good crystal ball, to write really long term contracts.
You’re looking at this through the wrong lens. Put yourself in the customer’s shoes, especially a customer with access to more than one serving railroad (either all-rail, or rail-barge). His goal is to get the lowest possible price. He will not be passive or unambitious in his efforts.
Now put yourself in the railroad’s shoes. His goal is to get the highest possible price. Sometimes his goal is to fill up empty track and keep an asset busy and share fixed costs among as many shippers as possible, but that state of affairs has been in decline for some time, and for many line segments and terminal approaches is long, long gone. He won’t be passive either. He will be culling through the old contracts written back when capacity was flush and figuring out what the “traffic will bear” when the contract expires.
So compare the two points of view. The customer would very much like someone to “steal his business” because that implies he’ll get a lower price. The railroad couldn’t care less if someone steals his business, because Railroad B is going to perform the same amount of work to move the train (and probably more work because their routing isn’t as good), and he can either refill the track slot with higher-paying freight, or not fill it
You’re right, in that I probably tend to view things through the lens of my familiarity- that of selling lumber to housebuilders. A lot of the same principles seem to apply. It sounds like the railroads must do a lot of hard number crunching, in order to set rates and attract more business (or more profitable business). Is the industry too hi-stakes for somebody at a railroad to just offer a crazy, low rate, just to fill up the tracks?