With some of the Ford and General Motors assymbly plants closing everyone’s thoughts turn to the loss of many many jobs in the plants but I was wondering how much do you think it will effect the railroads. There is probably a crew on most RR’s that just switch the plants plus the revenue of hauling the vehicles so… what is your opinon? How much will the effect the railroads?
Since at this point most railroads have more traffic than they can handle, in the short term at least, it should not hurt them very much.
Bert
On the whole, it’ll probably be mostly a matter of losing traffic here, gaining it there. On a local level, though, it will mean that switch jobs will disappear and the people who work them will have to go elsewhere. That may mean hardship, uprooted families, people who decide that it’s time for a career change.
The loss will be mininal because in my humble opinion Honda and Toyota are replacing (slowly but surely) GM and Ford in the market…so in a nutshell the jobs will go from G&F to H&T and the trains will have more H&T cars and less G&F cars.
In the case of the Oklahoma City GM plant, I think switching there was done by A-OK, a small short line that also operates some of the old RI Choctaw route in SE Oklahoma. It will be hard for them to make up for this loss as the do not have the opportunities of a larger main line road. Also, I think UP (I may not have the right Class1) had just spent a lot of money to build a new classification yard to serve that GM plant that is now closed.
Walter Boatner