CSX Intermodal Service - Worcester, MA

Posting this here vs. the CSX forum since it pertains to New England
For those not accustom to trucking, rates are at an all time high right now with the ELD's. A lot of brokers have chosen rail in favor because rates are cheaper, however effective at 0000 hours on 1/16 CSX is placing an embargo on freight coming in and out of Worcester until further notice. The reason being, is that they no longer have the room to handle the volume of freight passing through.
Any word on Pan Am's operations in Ayer or even Mechanicsville, NY for that matter?

I just found out the embargo will last until Sunday 1/21

b&m 1566 wrote:Posting this here vs. the CSX forum since it pertains to New England
For those not accustom to trucking, rates are at an all time high right now with the ELD's. A lot of brokers have chosen rail in favor because rates are cheaper, however effective at 0000 hours on 1/16 CSX is placing an embargo on freight coming in and out of Worcester until further notice. The reason being, is that they no longer have the room to handle the volume of freight passing through.
Any word on Pan Am's operations in Ayer or even Mechanicsville, NY for that matter?

Check the NS intermodal web site to see if there is an embargo notice for Ayer. As I’ve been told that a 22K intermodal arrived Ayer early this AM and another left Binghamton this AM arriving Ayer tomorrow. I’m guessing it’s business as usual for NS/PAS at Ayer.

Could P&W capitalize on this as well? IIRC their yard certainly has some space in it, but i don't recall what intermodal facilities they had there.

The IM/autorack yard is further south of Southbridge St. World Headquarters, spanning the area next to InTransit Container facility and the city dump. They don't have a whole ton of slack space left, either...and are almost certainly dealing with a little bit of post-blizzard backlog of their own. P&W chose that newish site because the yard can be expanded very easily by buying up another strip of land from the city dump and fanning out a little bit onto that otherwise development-useless parcel. They have room to grow, but not a lot of current room to share.


Chances are this is weather-related more than anything else and not a trend of constant over-capacity. CSX routinely stuffs empty IM well cars at otherwise unused Framingham CP Yard and shuttles them to and fro on any number of daily yard-to-yard moves between Framingham and Worcester. It's very unlikely they bothered to dig out CP Yard after the blizzard as other priorities would've taken major precedence, so that would've created a short-term storage bottleneck where the only place to cycle empties was on very limited space on the B&A 3rd iron in downtown. If it were a longer-term trend stretching over weeks instead of a few days, you'd already be seeing some interim load-shifting to West Springfield for the trucks bound for Central CT (i.e. pickups bound for I-91 South instead of I-84 West). The fact that they haven't taken those steps indicates the disruption is not expected to recur after the embargo gets lifted. And the likeliest explanation for the one-and-done nature of the crunch is weather.

A lot of intermodal yards in the east were reuses of former Express yard trackage,was enough space for the 35-40 ft trailers back in the
early years of "TOFC" service,for today's 48-53 ft trailers the yards became too small,and in most cases,NO ROOM to expand!
That's the problem at CSX(ex-CR/PC) yard and the P&W yard in Worcester.

F-line to Dudley via Park wrote:

Komarovsky wrote:Could P&W capitalize on this as well? IIRC their yard certainly has some space in it, but i don't recall what intermodal facilities they had there.

The IM/autorack yard is further south of Southbridge St. World Headquarters, spanning the area next to InTransit Container facility and the city dump. They don't have a whole ton of slack space left, either...and are almost certainly dealing with a little bit of post-blizzard backlog of their own. P&W chose that newish site because the yard can be expanded very easily by buying up another strip of land from the city dump and fanning out a little bit onto that otherwise development-useless parcel. They have room to grow, but not a lot of current room to share.

Not sure what land your referring to at the former Greenwood Street Landfill. It's being converted into a solar farm(or has already finished, I haven't kept up) and I seriously doubt the city would sell a revenue generating parcel for a price low enough to be attractive. The east side of the site is hard up against the Blackstone, so no room to move there.

IMHO I'm surprised they haven't decided to carve out a small yard along the trackage they own along 290(where there used to be a yard before 290 came through IIRC). Its waste land at the moment, flat and just covered in vegetation. Would make a nice place to store your excess cars...or trailers.

P&W has indeed casually inquired about lanfill property. It's no huge net gain because of the elevation of the nearby landfill caps...just an approx. 2000 ft. x 100 ft. linear strip of buffer between the tracks and the start of the hill where they can squeeze a couple more tracks' worth of long lash-ups spanning between the north extent of the water treatment plant property to the Rand Whitney siding. Relocating the power lines sitting on that buffer to further up the hill ended up being the buzzkill to making the offer because the utility was going to play hardball.

The solar panel installation is way up on top of the landfill cap, not anywhere near the tracks, to catch optimal sun angle. >350 ft. away. Turn off 3D View on Google to get the most recent imagery and you can see the progress on site prep.


The yard next to 290 is ex-B&M/Guilford Barbers Yard. Pan Am still has a residual finger in that site, so there's some degree of right-of-first-refusal red tape with cleanly reactivating that for P&W expansion despite P&W owning the Gardner Branch through downtown. When Pan Am is partitioned between NS and whoever scoops up the PAR side that yard's probably going to be needed by them to offset the loss of unlimited access to Ayer (PAS-->NS property) and the sharply increased importance of the Worcester Main in a post-partion PAR system as they play NS-Ayer and CSX-Worcester interchanges off each other. It could actually revert back to its B&M roots before P&W gets a word in edgewise if Tim Mellon gets any itchier for collecting his golden parachute.

Embargo has been lifted. I could never find out if it was volume related or weather related, going by previous post it appears it was weather related.