Paper Related Traffic and Cars

A few trips to Leeds Jct and Waterville the last week or so have led to a couple questions.

1, What happened to the ENGElHARD tanks that used to mark any train to Rumford?
2, Pulpwood cars have returned to central Maine. A cut of 7 or 8 CN (AC and WC) pulpwood filled bulkheads was the second block of cars on todays PORU, right behind Decoster's Grain loads. Thats the first time in 5+ I've seen a loaded bulkhead bound for a paper mill. Any idea where they came from and if this is a returning trend or a fluke move? Either way it was a nice treat to see pulpwood on the rails.

Edit*
3, Some recent GMRC box car sighting show excess height cars with the standard height peaked roof structure and a line around the car about 1 from the roof line. Does anyone know if GMRC/VRS is rebuilding standard 50' cars into excess height cars? I know thats what the mills like and the line looks like a weld line...

Engelhard cars havent been around in numbers for quite a while now. BASF bought Engelhard around 2006.

The slurry is now coming in OMYA cars from the VRS or UTLX (or other leasers) tanks from the NS.

KSmitty wrote:2, Pulpwood cars have returned to central Maine. A cut of 7 or 8 CN (AC and WC) pulpwood filled bulkheads was the second block of cars on todays PORU, right behind Decoster's Grain loads. Thats the first time in 5+ I've seen a loaded bulkhead bound for a paper mill. Any idea where they came from and if this is a returning trend or a fluke move?

That is odd.

I have no idea but honestly in all our discussions here all the references I've seen to pulp cars on the MEC are from the '70's.

If it really has been that long I'll treat this as further evidence that the new management is trying to rebuild incremental traffic.

Very interesting.

Still saw pulpwood on trains in 90's-early 2000's, then none, then some, then none, then some more, ya never know. The big clay slurry uber-conglomerate now is IMERYS, JM HUBER is still around but because of some legal thing they don't put the logos on the cars anymore, also many paper co.'s have switched to limestone slurry, which comes from OMYA.
Any boxcar with GMRC reporting marks is actually owned by GE Capital, they switch around reporting marks on cars all the time for legal reasons, some get changed to EEC, MSDR, NOKL, YKR, etc., but it is all legal mumbo-jumbo by uber-super-huge-multi-billon-dollar corporations that own most railcars now.

Mick,

Could you tell if the pulpwood cars were coming from anywhere in particular?

At least if it was from one place that might help explain things a little further.

All the old MEC boxes with GMRC marks are actually GE capital owned? Interesting, and thanks for the info.

news to me...

STB Filings appear to support this contention.

How many of the Maine paper mills are owned by Mellon?

NRGeep wrote:How many of the Maine paper mills are owned by Mellon?

At least to my knowledge none.

gokeefe wrote:

NRGeep wrote:How many of the Maine paper mills are owned by Mellon?

At least to my knowledge none.

Has that always been the case?

gokeefe wrote:

NRGeep wrote:How many of the Maine paper mills are owned by Mellon?

At least to my knowledge none.

Has that always been the case?

Yeps, thats always been the case.

NRGeep wrote:

gokeefe wrote:

NRGeep wrote:How many of the Maine paper mills are owned by Mellon?

At least to my knowledge none.

Has that always been the case?

Speaking strictly from my own, not so deep, knowledge of Maine industrial history, yes.

For the better part of the 20th century most of the major mills were owned by large publicly traded companies to include, Georgia-Pacific, International Paper, Meade and others. Many of the mid-size mills, such as Eastern Fine Paper in Brewer were privately held entities that eventually got taken over by private equity companies or foreign business interests. Small mills, which worked with forest products, but didn't necessarily produce paper were and still are often owned by locally run family owned businesses, such as Hammond Lumber.

Perhaps Mr. NRGeep remembers that a major reason why the Mellon organization was interested in buying the Maine Central thirty years ago was because of its substantial traffic in outbound paper as well as pulpwood and inbound supplies for the paper industry, which at the time looked like business that would be around forever. But as far as I know Mellon never proposed to acquire the mills themselves.