It seems as though there are at least three people on here who deal with railroads in shipping their company’s products, etc. They are easy to spot, because when they are not cussing, they have low grumble about them–not to say I blame them for this.
Anyway, much is made about how bad service is, etc. I am curious, for those of you with experience (or have known someone who deals with this well enough to offer an opinion), please rate the following railroads from best to worst IN TERMS OF OFFERING THE BEST SERVICE:
UP, CSX, NS, CP, CN(IC, WC), BNSF, KCS, and any regional/shortline of your chosing.
I realize no one will be able to give an opinion on the service of all of these railroads, so just include the ones you know about in your rankings.
Please include any commentary you see fit.
Thank you,
Gabe Hawkins
P.S. If there is a railroad that was bought up/consolidated that used to offer good service and you miss, could you say as much?
I don’t really know who is the best or worst so I will comment on the services that the railroad offers that seem good.
CN-they do operate on a schedule and is quite consistant about it with all of their trains. Kudos to E. Hunter Harrison for this. They also offer some service with the roadrailer via Triple Crown. They run a really cool intermodal hot shot that runs between Toronto and Vancouver and back. It runs non-stop and is favoured by companies that ship parishables-alot of reefers on this train. I wi***hey would expand their roadrailer for they do have options other than just service between Toronto and Montreal. They do seem to have potential still.
CP-the Expressway which operates between Montreal, Toronto and Windsor and Detroit. This had great potential but needs to extended to Chicago. Otherwise it is a pretty good service. As long as you plan to ship domestically by container, CP is quite good about service between Toronto and Vancouver.
NS-the roadrailer king as I call them. They run quite a few Triple Crown trains. They seem to always like to ship coal and seem to favour dimensionals more than CSX.
CSX-big coal and intermodal operators, they have a joint domestic service with UP (stax), the Tropicana Express services so they seem to be interested in shipping customers with large unit trains no matter what commodity.
BNSF-the premium service for intermodal with other options of intermodal service-quite diverse. They also run roadrailers-Interfresh I believe.
UP-Stax service, APL, and EMP. They seem interested in operating coal and other unit trains when they can. They are short crews right now but they will be good again for intermodal UPS.
KCS-they have connections into Mexico and have agreements with CN so you have the option of shipping cars from Canada to Mexico. If you live in Kansas and anywhere else that that they cover, you have an option other than UP and BNSF. They are very parti
BEst comes in a number of measurements. Some shippers have opinions 180 degrees opposite of ours on SOME carriers. This can be influenced on the lanes your traffic travels in, or origin/destination locales that can have ggod, poor or mediocre service, what commodittees you ship influences what market managers you deal with and thier markets and pricing philiosophies, how good a rep you have to deal with, if you have good customer service people to help get resolution, or if you get stuck with slackers and on and on. Most shippers will universally agree though that UP service is approaching the meltdown of 98, that CSXT is difficult to deal with and has poor service and that BNSF is an arrogant outfit that is very hard to deal with or communicate with.
In our experience…
NS is about tops. Wants your business, communicates, is agressive in getting your business but does so in a manner that allows them to make a reasonable profit. Is vry reponsive and has effective customer service and operating people to resolve issues, both long and short term. The only bad point with them is a very unworkable and nasty accounts receivable dept. This is a complaint I hear from most other shippers as well. We can deal with that as we pay comparatively well, and work to improve ourselves to try and be a good partner to NS. The benefits theybring to the table far outweight the challenge of working on the bill collection side.
CSXT…worst. Service is very unpredictable, problem resolution is very poor, coomunication less than optimal, car supply is a joke, billing very inaccurate. Solving billing errors is never permenant, I am relookin at bills I worked out in 2001 that they neveer fixed and are after us again. Very uncompetitive rate wise, respond to us on service issues that we have to understand they are having problems and to stop pestering them. Try to get double digit percentage rate increases in lanes they can’t serve worth a damnn, try to quote you privae rates that a
One other question. I notice that you didn’t mention short lines or regionals in your comments. Have you found that short lines are generally helpful in assisting you in dealing with their Class 1 connections?
Building materials, we use mined minerals, various chemicals and Intermodal and some boxcar outbound. Probably 1000 cars on the US railraods either empty or load and any given time, about 30 plants in the US and Canada.
Most Shortline are good to work with, they listen, communicate clearly and look to work out a mutually agreeable situation no matter what the issue is. VEry responsive and flexible. Other than Conrail I can’t think of ANY problems with other shortlines we deal with, in fact, they are eager to business partne up and settle deals or problems so we all come away pleased and rewarded.
Shortlines are captive to class ones for the most part and do their best to assist in resloving problems with class ones, which normall involve service issues, but there is litttle they can do either, until they have the car. Once they get it they will move the sun and moon to deliver and attempt to make up whatever they can for the class one’s failings. I have had shortlines offer up special deals using thier cars or reduce their swithc charges to help pave teh way for new rail business, and it happened after a few calls, no prolonged market studies, red tape and perado (SP?) charts like with a class one.
Thanks you so much, you were one of the people my post was aimed at and you have answered my question most completely.
I was wondering though, it seems another advantage to the shortline/regional is that they would have more leverage with the Class 1s. They give the Class 1 sometimes as much as 100,000 carloads per year, they can use that leverage to help cut throught the red tape.
Thanks for answering my questions. It certainly sounds as though your company is sizable enough to command respect among the Class 1 railroads. Glad to hear your experience with short lines has been positive. Would your company consider locating a new plant along a short line? What pros and cons do you see from your point of view for such a decision?
WHOA THERE Gabe! I doubt there are many individual short lines that can throw that much weight around. I would guess that most bring between 500 and 25,000 loads to the table. Of course, groups like Rail America, G&W, Rail management and others move more cars, but this is fragmented over several different class 1s.
BNSF Intermodal…we use them but many times with Third patries with contract agreements, folsk like Schnieder, JB hunt etc. Bulk material does not work that way though.
We work with shortlines, I have at least a half dozen of my plants located on them, proabbly more. Suppliers unfortunately are mostly captive on class one’s and purchasing drives the decision on where we originate from…for the most part. There is product chemistry, price, freight nd many other issues to settle before an origin can be established.
Shortlines unfortuneately do not always give you the leverage you might think. What class one’s have done for some time, si that when they spin a branch off to a shortline operator, they set up the interchange or the contractual agreements so that only the class one involved can work with the shortline and thus dictates rates. Even though a shortline could physically connect to a competitor, the contract will not allow it.
CSXT I hate to say is at the bottom of our list and has been the past 3 years. They continue to do things that make or blood boil. A few snipits…
Billing…right now it is pretty decent, but they go through spells where their system goes haywie and you have to go through weeks of trying to recorrect piles of bills, attempt to help themn identify and resolve THERI problem and at the same time deal with nasty collections people who don’t understand the bills or balance dues they tactlessly call you on are in dispute or invalid.
Demurrage…bunch cars so badly you are trucking product one week and can’t unload the piles of cars that arrive the next. They send you a demurrage bil and are helll on wheels to try and get them busted.
Business…they wanted more of our volume a few years ago at a plant in the Southeast. We told them that we were constrained by track and loadout capacity and could not switch the business to them from truck as the demurrage would kill the economics. They begrudgi
I have noticed that on CP Expressway trains heading toward Detroit, there those covered hopper trailers of Laidlaw on it. Does anybody else put trailers like that on trains?
The CP Expressway is unique that it can piggy-back virtualy any trailer that is alowed on the roads. This is not so with by far most TOFC sevices in North America and the world.
So those Laidlaw covered hopper trucks are probably not often able to use intermodal trains.
I wonder why the Tofc services don’t use that. For a bit of interest, I have come up with an interesting new kind of car for a new kind of service. The service is called “Truck Mover”. It is like a ferry service in between ports. It uses modified automax cars that are all linked up using a diaphram at the couplers (like a passenger car). Thease automax cars carry both the trailer and the truck.
It work in that trucks go up a ramp and actually drive into the automax cars and get out of the vehicles and get into a coach / diner car at the front of the train. After the trucks are loaded and the truck drivers are in the passenger car, the train departs and heads to its destination. When the train arrives at the terminal, the engines and passenger car are uncoupled and use a run-around track to pu***he automax cars into the ramp. Soon as the automax cars are in place, the truck drivers get into the trucks and drive away and than the train prepares for the next load for the return.
Roll-on roll-off. An interesting idea that might work for short haul in areas of very high traffic congestion and/or high tolls. Something like Trenton NJ to Long Island might work - but you’re looking at a pretty small niche, overall. The problem is you have a very high cost TOFC service. You’ve added cost to the service - your diner and coach, the trucker has an unproductive asset - the tractor going along for the ride and you also have an unproductive truck driver the time he’s not driving. So, if this is going to work, you’re going to have to have some very high costs avoided - and traffic delay and highway/bridge tolls are the only ones that come to mind.
The target of the “truck mover” would be Detroit-Buffalo, LA-Seatle (or at least those directions), Montreal-Detroit, Chicago-Dallas, New York-Philadelphia, Chicago-Cleveland,…any major routes where trucks have difficulties wading through the traffic on the highways. Ideal speed would be 65 to 70mph. AC powered engines would be best for this train too.