I think we are safe from a googleopoly.
Warning: Math ahead!
The term “google” was originally created many years ago by the son of a mathmetician who was looking for a word to describe a very large number. Officially, a ‘google’ is the number ten, raised to the power of 100. For a detailed description of very large numbers, see:
http://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/~susan/cyc/g/googol.htm
I understood google to be a 1, followed by 1,000,000 zeros. That may be the same as 10 raised to the power of 100. I’d figure it out, but,I’m a little low on scratch paper.[;)] Speaking of math, did you know that 5 out 4 people don’t understand fractions?[:)]
(insert Santa Claus smilie here-ho ho ho ) You kind of remind of a kid in high school that used to call everybody an “ignorant swine”. Randy Groves-is that you?[(-D]
Nice thing about trucks. They are very flexible. We don’t know this for sure, but if Goose Island no longers has a water to rail transfer facility, that would mean the cars would be loaded the same way as the trucks-with an endloader. Guess what? That makes the truck cheaper to load. It is pretty hard to move a rail car right next to the pile at the point the endloader is working.
No matter where the cars come from, new, used, large or small, they will be in use when there is coal to haul and sit if there is no coal to move off the dock. However, for the truck move-no coal, no problem. There will be other bulk material to haul around the neighborhood.
At WEPCO coal in cars go through their dump facility. Trucks back up to the storage pile, dump and go.
Insignificant elements to the move? Perhaps. But just maybe there is more than duopolistic greed or management stupidity at play. But, until we have the inevitable good outcome of open access, we will never know. Of course, open access might not work out well, but that would be the result of unintended consequences.
Hmmm, I was going to say the same thing about you!
Very large? Those numbers are huge!!!
Oh good Grief !
Thanks for derailing the thread.
P**cks…
Kurt
kurtconi: Do you know where those big piles of coal on the dock at Superior ship to?
Thanks
If you google googol you get:
1 googol = 1.0 × 10^100
which is 1 followed by 100 zeros.
Now that’s a big number, but if you want a really big number use a googolplex which is
1 googolplex = 1.0 × 10 ^ (10 ^ 100)
which is 1 followed by a googol of zeros.
M.S.
About 25% goes to Detroit Edison at St Clair MI .(Port Huron area)
25% to Monroe MI.(Lake Erie).
15% to Ontario Power Generation Nanticoke ON… (Lake Eire)
less than 5% to Lambton ON. (Sarnia ON.)… Was scheduled to close next year, but not now.
The rest goes to Consumers Power, WE, MN.Power and local industry.
We only ship out about 20 million tons per year.
All of the customers we ship to blend the PRB coal with Eastern//Southern Coal to get the best burn. The Eastern Coal tonage is about 5 to 1.
If this thread is going to go wacky on us…let it die.
Kurt.
If you’re going to quote me then you should have the common decency to capitalize “Greyhounds”. They’re a breed apart, the hounds of royalty. And on this forum, they’re my assumed name. A more magnificent animal has never trod This Earth. And, like a train, they run on a track. So let’s have some respect here.
I don’t accept your definition of captive. It’s silly. My civilian start in transportation was over 30 years ago working in a
So either UPRR or BNSF lost a hugh chunk of biz. If either RR felt that the biz was super profitable they would have taken steps to retain it so it must have been marginal biz at best[:o)][:)]
[quote]
Originally posted by zardoz
I suspect that coal is moving by rail since I have never heard of canals or rivers that are navigable in Wyoming. If I were to bet it is coming into Chicago at the old Rail to Water Transfer company now owned by Koch Industries on 106th St. and barged to many places on the lake. Koch is a broker and it is their resposnibility to get the coal to the plant the cheapest way possible. So before anybody gets their shorts in a knot it’s business guys and the idea is to make money and there is nothnig wrong with that or else we should all be turning down our paychecks.
As Paul mentioned a page or so ago, it doesn’t take too many trains to carry 800,000 tons of coal to the plant. He figured 80 trains, based on a 10,000 ton net payload (100 cars carrying 100 tons each). Well, try 135 cars carrying 120 tons each, and you’re getting about 16,000 tons net. That’s down to 50 trains now. One train a week, for a year.
As we speak, there are two trains headed toward Pleasant Prairie on the former CNW east-west main.
Greyhounds - I will copy and paste your name as it appears in the upper lefthand corner:
greyhounds
Hmmm, not capitalized. If capitalizing the first letter of your forum name is that important, you might want to make some changes on your profile page.
On to more important issues. I did not quote you, rather I took the gist of your first post in this thread and commented on it.
Again, the definition of “captive shipper” is of a rail shipper that only has direct rail access (rates and services) to one Class I. This is the accepted definition by both shippers and the railroads. Only you a a few others on this forum have contrived a new definition that better fits your narrow (dare I say closed access?) view of the railroading world. My definition is based on the generally accepted terms used by both the rail industry and rail shippers. What’s your definition based on? Clearly, it is you who cannot argue OA in any kind of honest fashion.
30 years ago the railroads were still regulated, and multi-carrier line hauls were governed by a set of rules that prohibited paper barriers and bottlenecking, e.g. each railroad’s rates were based on actual percentage of miles each hauled the item. That’s why you could utilize rail carriers other than only the one with the physical connection to your facility. Do you really think in this day and age that BNSF would offer a mileage based rate from your plant to CP or UP? Of course not, what BNSF will do is offer a bottleneck rate whose total charge for a few miles is probably more than the long haul charge of the connecting Class I. Oh well, more business for the trucking industry, more cheap imports to replace shut down domestic production!
Granted, intermodalism has changed the definition of captive for certain commodities in certain areas. These days, those multimodal supply chain combinations allow those select commodities to be drayed short distances to an alternate railroad, if any altern
Well, FM I suggest that if you ever get a dog you don’t get a Greyhound. They make wonderful pets but you need something else. You need a bloodhound that can snif out your sense of humor - you really need to find that.
To quote the great, imortal Longhorn Leghorn: “It’s a Joke Son”.
To get on to your argument, there was little, if any, regulation of divisions of revenue between rail carriers. Sometimes railroads had to agree to establish rates over “gateways” in order to get approval for other actions. (The infamous Milwaukee Road “gateways” granted as a condition of the BN merger come to mind.) But generally the revenue splits were unregulated and left to carrier’s discretion and negotiation.
This made “Plan 1” piggyback a lot of fun. This was a common carrier truckline using TOFC. Technically, we, the railroad, were taking a “division” of the trucker’s revenue. We could do anything without regulatory interferance as long as it was a common carrier truckline. We’d haul the freight, then negotiate the charge, do all kinds of fun things. Shoot, we hauled air freight. If the airplane couldn’t fly because of weather they’d give it to a trucker, then the trucker would give it to us because the trucker also couldn’t move because of the weather. We’d work out the money after the fact. Despite what you say, divisions of revenue between carriers were pretty much free from regulation.
In general, no sane management would undercut its long haul business by establishing a shuttle to facilitate a competing mode’s movement. At the ICG we hauled grain over the Ohio River and on down to the Gulf. We weren’t about to establish rates that made barge movement more economical. Now there may be a special case that justifies such a thing - but generally, it ain’t gonna’ happen.
Now you may say that under OA a train operator would establi***hose rates to the barges on the Ohio. But that’s all you’d be doing, you’d just be saying it. What you do not unde
Greyhounds(or greyhounds): Since we’re in a corrective mood, it’s Foghorn Leghorn [:)]. Coincidentally, my kids call passing gas at our house “doing a foghorn”.[;)] futuremodal(or Futuremodal) has a sense of humor. I’ve seen it. He does need to excercise it a little more.[;)]
Foghorn Leghorn is a hero of mine.[^] “I say…Isay…son…”[:-^]
greyhounds - go the the Open Access thread, there you will find all the papers you need. And like we’ve also discussed, under OA you are more likely to see trains operated in the “shorter, faster” model, because track owners not only want as many revenue units as possible, they also want expedite those revenue movements so more capacity is available for more revenue units. Secondly, there is no law against transportation companies acting as multimodal transportation companies. UPS and FedEx understand this, why not J.B. Hunt, Tidewater, and Kansas City Southern? Don’t be just a trucking company or a railroad company, instead be a transportation company with trucking, barging, and railroad divisions.
We vacation on the northshore every year, and always take a boat trip around the Duluth Harbor.(Well, this year we took 4 boat trips around the harbor, but that’s just because my wife likes boat rides!) I’m always impressed with the BIG piles of coal and everything else on the docks at Duluth. Are you saying that the coal on the docks from the Powder River Basin in Wyoming, that gets shipped out of the twin ports gets mixed 1 part to 5 parts eastern coal? That’s weird.
Alot of threads get wacky. Sometimes they drift back, and sometimes they ride off into the sunset.[:)]
Being an engineer that delivers trains to Pleasant Prairie, I can tell you they run with 135 cars at 143 tons each. They are just over 19,000 tons a train.
Has anyone thought that the dumper at P-4 was broke and their stockpile was getting low. Wisconsin Electric didn’t have the spare equipment (about 8 sets between P-4 and Oak Creek), and the UP with major track going on the Geneva sub, maybe it decided this was the best way to repleni***he stockpile was to truck it in. Also note that all empty hopper trains from Pleasant Prairie, Oak Creek, and Sheboygan are going north via the twin cities, which adds a couple days to a cycle.
Or maybe not.