Over the past year, the lumber company I work for built a new lumberyard in the bedroom community town of Harrisburg, S.D., on the BNSF Sioux Falls to Sioux City line. We moved in the last week of October. Today, we got our first carload- a centerbeam car of studs from the west coast.
We LCL ‘studs’ are pleased to see your company using rail.
That’s cool. Assuming you are refering to framing lumber, no doubt the next trick will be to get them sold to builders.
Our rail served Stock Building Supply (a Wolseley, PLC unit) store and truss plant closed this summer as part of their bankruptcy proceedings. I miss the sound of the local blowing for the crossings in town in the middle of the night.
Sincerely, I do wish you and your company all the best.
Where did the lumber come from?
Will your new office be warmer this winter?
It would also be interesting to find out the actual routing of that carload from the producer to your yard.
What - no ceremony of the ‘break-through-the-banner’ / ‘cut-the-red-ribbon’ / christen it with a bottle of Champagne sort ? Where has our sense of history gone ?
Anyway, best wishes for many more, and of all of the many other lumber products, too.
- Paul North.
I know I’ve mentioned this before, but I am reminded of the days when the local lumber yard got their stock in box cars, which were unloaded one board at a time down the rollers and into the warehouse, where someone presumably stacked them in the proper place.
Well , Congratulations!
Did those studs from the West Coast bring their surf boards?[%-)]
It’ll give those carpenters in SD a lesson in Hangin’ Ten![wow][yeah]
The lumber came from Seneca Sawmills, Eugene, Oregon. They’re douglas fir studs, but I’m not sure which specific mill they shipped from. Best guess on routing would be BNSF northern line to Minnesota, then down through Wilmar.
My new office will definately be warmer. Old office was a ‘temporary office’ built into the corner of a temporay. 30 year old ‘lumber storage additon’, built onto a former chicken plucking facility. ( The lumberyard purchased the building from the chicken pluckers some time in the 50’s)
Now, if we could just get a certain country to stop sending us Alberta Clippers…[}:)]
Good wood.
Perhaps they should be called Alaskan Clippers?
We send you the Alberta Clippers because the U.S. won’t let us sell our lumber to you. (so much for free trade eh?
I understand your frustration, but that’s not exactly how it is. In fact, most of the small dimension framing lumber we purchase is Canadian spruce-pine-fir. The catch is, there is a tricky 30% tariff (with a lot of strings attatched) tacked onto the Canadian wood.
If I could get the tariff dropped, can you get the weather straightened out? [:P]
I’ve heard almost nothing on the softwood lumber trade dispute for several months. Perhaps with our dollar at 95 cents US, American producers are not at much of a disadvantage?
Murph, do you guys deal with Seneca Sawmills often, or was this carload available at the right price?
In the world of today’s carriers PNW to S. Dakota would most likely be BNSF direct, unless a short line originated the car load.
In the days of the Fallen Flag carriers and for lumber going to points East of Chicago it was common practice for lumber shippers to ship the car loads to themselves at Chicago or even a more Easterly points and specify the most circuitous route possible for the car load to get there. The car load was not sold to any end user when it was shipped. The circuitous routing gave the shipper time to find a end user to sell the car load to. Once the car load was sold to a end user, the shipper would initiate a ‘Reconsignment & Diversion’ order, for a nominal fee, with the carrier in possession of the car changing the route and the consignee of the car load to the destination city of the buyer.
This was a quirk I’m sure. I’ve never heard of Seneca Sawmills before, and we rarely deal in douglas fir studs. Most all of our studs are spf This must have been a carload that someone was trying hard to move.
I’m reminded of my first summer job in a sash and door plant in Northern WI. (Just a few years ago.) The plant bought planks straight from the saw mill, mostly Doug Fir, I believe, and everything moved in and out of the plant in box cars. The two guys that ran the rip for the two inch stock probably ran 5’8" and 145lbs soaking wet. It was something to see them take a 12 foot board 3-4 feet wide from a 6 foot high stack on a cart, and get it down on rollers. They would flip the plank, figure out the best cuts by eye and run the plank through the single saw until it was cut up. The next station was the cross cut to get the lengths to meet the material required for production. For a few days I had the job to sort and stack the various sizes on carts ready to move to the next step in the line.
At age 17, I worked in just about every section of the plant, including the warehouse and loading dock where I had the great “fun” of helping load boxcars. Lifting 50-75 pound stacks of glazed sash on a pile up to the roof of a boxcar sure gets one motivated to get a career in another field.
Nothing went to waste, except the noise. The company put the clear stock into their product, knots were left in small blocks sold and ship buy rail accross town to a plant that made solid core wood doors and the sawdust was burned to heat the plant and generate steam for the stationary engines that powered air compressors.
These days the whole process of converting logs to dimensional lumber and wood products is highly automated. It starts with computers that analyze the log, determine the most productive cuts and controls the equipment that positions the log on the saw. And it goes from there.
Today I would be surprised to learn of any lumber or wood products moving in box cars.
You mean, other than studs, plywood, particle board, OSB, millwork, etc?
RWM
In box cars? I thought they’d wrap it and ship it on center beams, or use T/COFC. Guess I should get out more.
I’ve never seen millwork in a boxcar, but that’s probably because we’re not in that big of a market. Plywood and particle board comes to us in boxcars.
[:O] I really should get out more!