Wonder how much of this problem can be attributed to UP’s decision to close Global 3 and to move all international boxes out of Global 2, etc. The company was supposed to expand Global 4 and 2, but have they?
- Ed Kyle
“This business will get out of control”
Anyone have info, or a guess, about how many boxes will be delayed; or perhaps routed to bNSF.
Right now the BNSF is trying to dig out of a major problem itself. They lost a bridge on the Chicago to Kansas City mainline but luckily not the other bridge for the second mainline. However when the first one went it took out the other main for 2 days due to flooding and washout. They are just now getting close to normal operations train wise after clearing the backlog.
I saw the number 40,000 TEUs bandied about.
If you read the article, it says BNSF and NS have also at times used temporary embargoes when some terminals became congested.
Somewhere packed away I have a few copies of embargoes that were sent to the RI agent at Marengo IA, where I used tospend free time many years ago. Most were due to track conditions or pending abandonments and specified railroad stations rather than specific customers. A few however were for specific customers because of traffic congestion.
Jeff
Latest info is this embargo applies only to 20 and 40 foot containers; and not to 53 foot containers.
All carriers use Embargo’s for various reasons to cover various locations and/or various commodities and situations.
Back when Export Coal was approaching its peak in the late 70’s and early 80’s Chessie System Embargoed the unrestricted loading of coal destined to the export coal piers at Curtis Bay and Newport News. Chessie implemented a ‘Permitting System’ that authorized specific mines to load X number of cars in a Y time frame. The Permits were granted based upon the ETA’s of colliers arriving at the port locations and their intended loading classes and tonnage. The system was designed so that the coal necessary to load vessel A was active in the pipeline to the port when vessel A docked. The port yard would have dumped all the coal necessry for the prior vessel as vessel A docks and the coal for it is arriving into the export yard and will dump on vessel A on a continuing basis until the ship is loaded - rinse and repeat for vessel B and on and on.
Before implementing the system the 1600 car capacity of Curtis Bay ‘could’ have 1200 cars of ‘dead’ coal that was not for the vessel currently at dock - creating congestion issues as vessels would normally take between 750 and 900 cars to load. Getting ‘active’ coal in w
Balt, you don’t mention this, but were different ranks of coal involved here, either for separate shipments or being mixed to give particular characteristics? That would further affect a pre-planning system.
That story is a classical example for How To Do Precision Scheduling Well in railroading. (It is a pity I can’t use the term ‘Precision Scheduled Railroading done right’.)
Each mine mined coal of specific grades based on the metalurgical contents of the coal - just because it is black, not all coal is the same.
Vessels would take anywhere from 4 to 8 grades of coal that were to be dumped in a specific rotation. B&O at Curtis Bay named the classes of coa. C&O at Newport News used numbers for their coal classes.
The Transhipper for the vessel would provide a loading diagram for the vessel, that would include class dumping rotation as well as the tonnage to be loaded into the holds in rotation - holds have to be loaded in part on a rotation basis so as to not put undue stresses on the keel and break the ship in two.
A loading sequence might be something like '4 Apple, 2 Cherry, 6 Apple, 1 Grape and repeat the sequence for 3400 tons in Hold 1 and potentially specifc tonnages for each hold in rotation until the vessel is loaded to its specified tonnage. Different Transhippers had different mines as their custom
The article stated clearly it was about international containers.
So they are also saying that a good deal of the problem is due to a scarcity of wheeled chassis.
Looks like we are once again back to consideration of the wisdom of wheeled drayage of containers headed for eastern railroads?
Now the same problem for BNSF.
And the logjam may be spreading east, possibly to CSX.
When there are more boxes to move than there are chassis to mount them on there will be issues.
Perhaps this is what happens when the rails rely on trucking companies for endpoint connections? I still say true vertical integration of transportation is more efficient.
It is the problem in the USA (at least) - the shortage of chassis apply at the ports as well as inland destination. Part of the lack of chassis is the lack of drivers to move existing chassis to a point where they are needed.
The problems with Just In Time global logistics is that it doesn’t take that big of a issue to put the entire system into chaos.
Vessels have been waiting to dock on the West Coast for weeks to discharge their cargo’s and take on traffic. Terminal areas on the West Coast are clogged with boxes - loaded and empty. The Ever Given getting stuck in the Suez Canal did not help the situation. Every little hiccup sends out rings of disruption like thowing a stone into a still body of water. With virtually every form of transportation involved in world commerce having ‘right sized’ their resources to the 2020 Covid depressed level of business they are now faced with a post Covid surge of business and they don’t have the resources - hardware, software and manpower to handle the business.
In the original story link, part of the blame for the shortage of chassis sounds like boxes are sitting longer at customer’s facilities waiting to be loaded or unloaded due to worker shortages. While that reasoning might have a level of “passing the buck” to conditions beyond the railroad’s control, there probably is some truth to it.
Everywhere you go there are help wanted signs. Even higher paying industrial/warehousing jobs are not being filled. Twice I’ve seen local commercials for some warehouse jobs for a couple of firms. That’s not unusual. What’s unusual is that they both announced their pay rates. Usually if the say anything, it’s that their pay is “competitive.”
Jeff
This is what happens when the JIT inventory system breaks apart. The stress marks where there long before it blew up this year. Now that people are seeing just how dumb it is to have no real inventory in warehouses or in the backrooms. It makes the bottom line look good if you don’t have any inventory however if that delivery is late or never happens you’re going to want it.