Hamlet, North Carolina operations

Made my first trip to Hamlet and had a few questions. I know this was the SAL's main classification yard and also know that the old SAL main line has been truncated. I was told that there are only local operations (and Amtrak) on the old main line. The hump yard appeared active with two sets of hump power and lots of freight cars. Where does this traffic come from ? How does Hamlet figure in the "big picture" on CSX? I would have thought that operations there would be greatly curtailed, but that doesen't appear to be the case. Thanks for any info....

Bill Root

Funny you should ask, as I've wondered the same thing myself and have done a little research. Now I am by no means an expert on Hamlet, but from what I can gather, while it's not on the busy North-South I-95 corridor Mainline, it's still a hub for some other pretty important lines like the Wilmington to Atalanta main and some secondary mainlines heading South into SC and Northwest up into former Clinchfield country. There's also a ton of local business in that NC/SC region and alot of it ends up moving to Hamlet for classification and movement to places like Selkirk, NY, Waycross, GA, Cumberland, MD, etc. So again, it both serves as somewhat of a hub (as in hub and spoke) for some fairly important lines and is a major gathering point for the huge amount of local freight that is generated within probably a 200 mile radius of the yard. Put the two traffic sources together and you have a prett busy place! Hope that helps.

roberttosh wrote:Put the two traffic sources together and you have a prett busy place! Hope that helps.

It does indeed, thank you very much. I was told that North of Hamlet there are two locals up towards Raleigh, but I saw one of them and it was a healthy train with three units. Also noticed how many short lines in the area (Laurinburg Southern, Aberdeen and Rockfish, Atlantic and Western) seem to be doing big business, as well.

It's funny, up here in New England, a local freight ususally boasts one engine and 5-10 cars in tow, while down South, where there is ALOT more industry, locals can look more like through trains with 3-4 engines and 50+ cars. All those big Paper & Pulp mills down that way, as well as the huge Feed mills, Fertilizer plants and Steel mills put out lots and lots of cars. Texas is the same way. I think there are more cars shipped out of the Houston area in one day than there are out of New England all year!!

You can blam the down fall in Boxcar loads and Business in NEW ENGLAND to the CONRAIL down sizing right about the time the Double track got Ripped-up...

CSX Engineer 98 wrote:You can blam the down fall in Boxcar loads and Business in NEW ENGLAND to the CONRAIL down sizing right about the time the Double track got Ripped-up...

This might be part of the situation but a bigger reason is simply the loss of
much of the heavy industry that is no longer located in Connecticut,
Massachusetts and Rhode Island. The business kept going and going until
it became more expensive and less attractive for any railroad to serve the
remaining business that was available. Unfortunately a vicious cycle just
continued over the years in the 70's, 80's and 90's. I do agree that for the
most part, the railroad(s) did not help the situation one bit.
Noel Weaver

Just want to open this back up to see if any members on here know the work load that come outta this yard. Any down time or is work were you would never worry about being laid off

There is nowhere on the CSX system where you will never have to be worried about being laid off. It seems to be upper management's sole purpose in life. There's always a conventional job which can be made remote. There's always a switchman who can be cut off. There's always 2 smaller trains that can be combined (thus cutting one off) to make one larger train. There's always a ladder with manual switches that can be replaced with power switches. That's what we're facing in Rocky Mount right now - remote switches and having 100% one-man crews by early next year.

I think Hamlet usually has pretty steady business. They get a lot of trains from a lot of larger areas. When given a choice of switching a car through a hump yard like Ham, or switching in a flat yard like RMT, their gonna choose the hump if possible. But, yes, even the mighty Hamlet has to worry about furloughs.