I don't suppose many of you are members of R&LHS so I thought I would forward this news item from their website. The northern tier of the BNSF appears to be in total meltdown. I don't see the solution to this as rocket science. It could be the funds needed are not available and/or a management problem. With the huge demand for service I cannot believe funds cannot be borrowed.
These delays are also crippling Amtrak's Empire Builder. A recent trip was 12 hours late into Whitefish and 16 hours late on return to Chicago.
If you think fruits and vegetable are over priced today just wait till this business goes to higher cost trucks.
Cold Train, a provider of refrigerated intermodal transport from Washington state throughout the rest of the country, has ended service, citing poor BNSF Railway performance.
Cold Train said it was forced to suspend its service from Quincy to 24 U.S. states and Ontario because of BNSF’s decreased on-time reliability, reduction in train services, and the nearly doubling of transit times. Cold Train said it has no plans to restore the service at this time.
The shuttering of the service, hurting Cold Train’s perishable producers and their customers, is the latest blow to shippers caused by major congestion on BNSF’s Northern Corridor. Rising volume tied to domestic energy production in the nearby Bakken Shale, growing grain exports and building intermodal traffic has created a major chokepoint for the railroad despite the addition of locomotives and train crews.
Falling on-time rail reliability — which went from more than 90 percent in November to less than 5 percent in April —was further exacerbated by BNSF’s April 24 announcement that it would reduce intermodal service from Washington state, Cold Train said. BNSF cut daily intermodal service from Washington down to one train and transit from Seattle/Quincy to Chicago became two to three days slower, Cold Train said.
The company’s service was dependent on three-day rail service to and from Chicago. The extra costs of equipment, refrigeration fuels costs and operating expenses accrued through the near doubling of transit times made operations economically unfeasible, Cold Train said. BNSF was not immediately available for comment.
“BNSF’s business decision to direct its resources away from Cold Train resulted in millions of dollars in operating losses and millions of dollars in capital investment losses, both of which are simply unsustainable,” Cold Train said in a statement. “For the past three months we have worked with BNSF and our customers to accommodate these service changes. Our efforts have been unsuccessful.”
Since November, Cold Train said, the BNSF service issues have cost it more than 70 percent of its business, which was primarily hauling refrigerated apples, onions, pears, potatoes, carrots and cherries. With many of its past customers rushing to find new transportation options, Cold Train fears perishable shippers will face competitive disadvantages and could lose out on the eastern U.S. Markets.
The end of service marks a sharp turn of fate for Cold Train, as the company had recently added 400 more containers to its fleet to serve rising demand and added new East Coast destinations. The company, which handled only about 100 containers monthly in 2005, originally expected to hit a monthly haul of 1,000 loads by the end of 2014, reflecting shippers’ growing interest in shifting refrigerated loads from the highway to the rails.
This kind of ties in with the recent thread about railroads increasing locomotive rosters and re activating mothballed locos.
Don
