The Florida Times-Union - Florida / March 3, 2007
Railroad relieves log trucks in experiment### It may be implemented some day, depending on the assessment of the costs.YULEE - An experiment by a local short-line railroad to transport logs to an Amelia Island mill ended quietly Wednesday, two weeks after it began.
Railroad officials and log truckers said they hope the test aimed at reducing log-truck traffic on Florida A1A passes muster and the practice becomes a part of the way commerce works in Nassau County.
Between Feb. 12 and Wednesday, loads from as many as 18 log trucks a day were shipped 18 miles from a railside yard 6 miles north of downtown Yulee to one of Amelia Island’s two mills, said Murray Benz, First Coast Railroad project coordinator.
Under an agreement between the railroad and the mill, First Coast Railroad cannot identify the mill, Benz said.
As part of the test, the railroad operated between 6 a.m. and 1 p.m. weekdays, using its own equipment to unload log trucks and load the logs onto specialized rail cars leased from CSX, Benz said.
“We have a very reasonable cost to them [the mill] to handle cars from Manley [the transfer site] to the mill and to take the empty cars back,” Benz said. “But we’re trying to determine whether it’s ever going to be economically feasible. They have to pay us an additional cost to move these rail cars, and we don’t know whether the economics will work out to the point where they can afford to do this.”
Full story here