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Trains News Wire EXCLUSIVE: BNSF fights gridlock in Midwest
And then, throw Amtrak into the mix and guess who come’s out as the red-headed stepchild. I’ve been informed that Amtrak has stopped offering bus service from Minneapolis to Chicago for the MSP passengers when the Empire Builder runs late which it now does on a daily basis. If you want to go to Chicago on Amtrak to connect with an east-bound train the same day, either fly there or expect to stay the night in the windy city.
The winter is not only affecting BNSF, but others east of Chicago around the Great Lakes. CSXT had 14 tied down between Collinwood and Buffalo Frontier on the old NYC. NS had it’s share too. Winter railroading should have some winter railroaders that have dealt with it before as I know many have.
Cliche alert:
When a crew district passes a “tipping point” crew dispatchers are on a slope with a grade “double down” in per cent of grade.
A pool-freight district has enough crews, resting, working, personal business, sick, vacation to supply the trains they expect to run in any given time period. More than just enough doesn’t work to management or Labor’s advantage.
Thus, when a crew dies on the law (in east Texas it was termed “the hogs are overtakin’ us”) “double down” applies. Now the “just enough” becomes “just enough minus 1” crews, (the minus 1 is the other crew going out to bring in the tied down “dead train”) If that one train kills a follower, it’s just enough minus 2 crews, 2 crews, “patching” or, Texas talk, dog-catching, multiply the amount of tied down trains, or dead crews being relieved and resting, and soon there won’t be any crews available for the next UPS “shooter” at the district’s home- or away-from-home terminals.
And other districts crew’s…no help: remember there’s “just enough” of them for their district, and the engineers, not being qualified for the crew-short district, would need a pilot engineer, and it is already out of engineers.
In '79 and '80, it was called “meltdown” affecting hundreds of miles around Houston and Louisiana. Likewise, I guess in the bow waves of the takeovers of SP and CR in the '90’s.
The BNSF story reminds me of UP’s meltdown a few years ago that took a very long time to actually fix because mgmt. had lost control of the railroad. BNSF has been driving more traffic than they have capacity to handle after all the years of abandoning/selling secondary lines. I think Warren Buffet is asleep at the wheel on this one and doesn’t realize what a total mess BNSF has become.
I wonder how many trains would have been taken off the main if the Keystone pipeline would have been approved 5 years or so back.
The point of the matter is with secondary routes non of these capacity issues exist . I can think of two or three routes abandoned by BN itself that could have handled the excess freight. The solution to capacity issues is to lay track . Trains bottleneck in areas easily fixable mostly with mothballed routes.
Cities and Nimby’s fight any attempt to try to fix anything ,any attempt return rail service is fought . With a growing population , the USA is only going to move more commodities.
The railroads double track and triple track and that adds capacity but just as if we only had one interstate highway running across the center of the country , utilizing alternate routes brings customers from areas not located near the “Super Main Lines” .
Long story short start rebuilding routes , and have the governments Federal and local start to understand the need to have rail service in there area.
For years there were so many abandonments and capacity reduction projects, now we are paying the price. I wonder how long it will be before the single tracked ex-milw main to Chicago is re-double tracked?
The problem is terminal throughput more than lack of mainline capacity. The only through route abandonments I can think of in the affected territory are the ex-GN route between Minneapolis and Fargo via St Cloud, and the ex-Q Denrock-Zearing route. Only the latter would help the oversubscribed Savanna-Aurora route. Could BNSF use the CN East Dubuque-Chicago to relieve that line?
The ICE would be a good overflow route for BNSF for some of the less time sensitive stuff. Either from savanna east or all the down from st paul. I would assume that maybe they are already bypassing chicago by running some stuff down to Galesburg then up to streator to the NS for Eastern traffic? If not maybe they should.
The BNSF is still paying for the short sighted Frisco managers from the early 1980s. Ripping up and selling off lines didn’t work very well.
I guess now BNSF regrets the abandonment of the former GN trunk line across the state of Minnesota. Not only was it 9 miles shorter but provided much additional capacity. The trend of cutting employees in general with the railroad industry hasn’t helped cough cough Hunter Harrison cough cough, as I see CP is struggling as well.
In the eighties and nineties, the big railroads abandoned and dismantled a lot of trackage. Now, like a line from a Trains story some years ago, “The big mainline railroads have cut their own throats, and now they demand a seat at the table.”
I’m with the this is a terminal/road crew issue. The reality is that it is a lot easier to do things at 70 degrees then at minus 10. To counter cold you need to plan more man hours to cover the same movements. If you don’t have the man hours your SOL. As far as capacity, BNSF across Minnesota, Dakota and Montana has secondary line capacity for traffic, going through Wilmar in Minnesota, via Grand Forks on the rebuilt Devils Lake line and increasing moves across Montana Rail Link.
Some of these abandonments could have been avoided if the railroads didn’t have to pay property taxes on their tracks. This while trucking uses public infrastructure at less than cost!
Also BNSF could route through traffic via Galesburg and Lincoln to avoid the area. They still have to go through Chicago though. Maybe some trains can go to NS via Streeter or Peoria or to CSX via TP&W.
Posters here seem oblivious to the fact that the economic conditions of railroading in the 2010s are somewhat different, and improved, compared to the situation in the '70s to '90s. Yes, most major railroads were shedding track at the time. They didn’t have a lot of choice in the matter - they didn’t have the funds necessary to overhaul themselves, the lines were loss making, frequently redundant, and the railroads themselves were seeing lighter, rather than heavier traffic.
The cuts, sell offs, and so on that happened during that time turned things around and resulted in a healthy railroad industry. That’s resulted in three things:
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The major Class 1s now are cash rich enough to be able to turn around lines they previously would have abandoned, or actually did abandon.
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The entire industry has seen a reversal of fortunes, now moving more freight and lacking capacity to do so.
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Some disposals, with hindsight, were mistakes, and that’s obvious now.
Expecting a Santa Fe manager in the 1980s to be able to predict which lines would be necessary in 2014 given actual growth rather than expected shrinkage, is a little much.
What actually should have happened is that our beloved governments, who always do the right thing ( 
), should have been more willing to step in and save struggling lines. State governments in particular should have passed their own versions of Staggers, eliminating property taxes as a part of the process.
But that wasn’t the case. Railroads had to continue fighting hostile pro-road governments and worked with the hand they were dealt. I don’t blame them for their decisions, and I think the criticism here is misplaced.
Does this explain why a saw a BNSF train on the CP tracks in Wauwatosa, WI? Never saw one there before.