Grafton & Upton Railroad (G&U) Discussion

KEN PATRICK wrote: plastics feed stock air transferred from railcar to truck. obtain private rates from csxt. the current plastics captive shipper stb proceeding would work to gain private rates from csxt who is currently losing the battle. g&u could act like a straw to set up really competitive rates in this corridor.
-

I may be (and most likely am) wrong here, but geographically, isn't the region's plastics industry somewhat more densely concentrated in PAR/PAS & P&W territory, which would be a strong competitive advantage over the G&U? Again, I'm probably wrong.

Milford News had an article tonight ( http://www.milforddailynews.com/article ... /140318992" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false; ) about the State Senate transportation bond bill - which passed last week - features funding for several local projects, including one that could expand commuter rail into the Milford area.

I thought it was interesting that the quoted representative Moore stating ""The $2 million is an authorization to spend - it's not tying up money," he said. "If the MBTA and Grafton & Upton Railroad agree to do something, this would allow for that."

Not that I think the T would be interested, but it sounds like a good deal for the G&U. Sure those commuter trains are pesky if you're a freight operator, but hey, it's a capital investment on someone else's dime! It's like someone building you a mansion so long as you let them sleep in a room.

KEN PATRICK wrote:b&m et al. need to utilize weight and volume strengths. divisible palletized loads of bagged product. scotts, calcium carbonate etc. product that can be fork-lifted from the railcar to a truck... (O)f course they would need to scrap the pellet bagging operation. ken patrick
-

KEN, on the one hand you promote leveraging rail's weight and volume strengths, but, then on the other hand go on to contradict yourself. Shipping bagged and palletized pellets with the most modern and available equipment does not offer any volume or weight advantge over shipping bulk in covered hoppers while increasing exposure to rail's weakness with damage risk and mitigation costs. For those products dense enough to erase the advantages of bulk over packaged/palletized shipping, you better believe there's already plenty of competition and the G&U has claimed a stake in this market by bringing in the transload operator from Beacon Park to Hopedale.

qb52 you need to consider the costs of transfer. compare the rail vehicles, then cost out the transfer/delivery options. many folks have fallen on their fiscal swords by minimizing the end costs. the final delivery is where you get nailed by the disparity of road weights. in my argument that we should increase road gvw, i cite tofc and cofc rail limitations imposed by road. unfortunately, rail folk seem unable to get beyond a knee-jerk reaction to increasing gvw. if only someone would think about it.
ken patrick

KEN PATRICK wrote: in my argument that we should increase road gvw, i cite tofc and cofc rail limitations ken patrick

Er, excuse me, maybe I'm a bit dense but could you please help me out here with a pointer to your "argument"? Perhaps I am also trying a bit too hard to relate this to the "preemption" issues in the case of the wood pellet transload facility?

KEN PATRICK wrote:qb52 you need to consider the costs of transfer. compare the rail vehicles, then cost out the transfer/delivery options. many folks have fallen on their fiscal swords by minimizing the end costs. the final delivery is where you get nailed by the disparity of road weights. in my argument that we should increase road gvw, i cite tofc and cofc rail limitations imposed by road. unfortunately, rail folk seem unable to get beyond a knee-jerk reaction to increasing gvw. if only someone would think about it.
ken patrick

I'm sorry, but unless there is a greater disparity in my perception of pricing-per-carload by railroads when handling TOFC/COFC, then your argument is logic-backward.
Any given railroad handling TOFC/COFC for a trucking company is charging per-car by-move, and therefore GVW restrictions imposed by road systems would create a higher volume of carloads by limiting how much each container would weigh- no? Simple logic dictates that limiting the GVW to only so many lbs/tons/vehicle would meanmore vehicles, and therefore more loads carried by TOFC/COFC rail-moves.
Ok, somebody feel free to independently fact-check me here. I've been spending a LOT of time doing Star Trek role-play, so my mind may, logically, be trapped in the 5th dimension (and I aint talkin' Motown!)
Anyway, I'm having trouble making sense of the argument at hand.

Why are we still doing this? Back to the G&U!

CRail wrote:Why are we still doing this? Back to the G&U!

Why? Who knows? The speculation continues.

KEN PATRICK wrote:qb52 you need to consider the costs of transfer. compare the rail vehicles, then cost out the transfer/delivery options. many folks have fallen on their fiscal swords by minimizing the end costs. the final delivery is where you get nailed by the disparity of road weights. in my argument that we should increase road gvw, i cite tofc and cofc rail limitations imposed by road. unfortunately, rail folk seem unable to get beyond a knee-jerk reaction to increasing gvw. if only someone would think about it.
ken patrick

I am sure the folks who are using G&U's wood pellet bagging operation have done just what you suggest and have selected the option of shipping in bulk and bagging close to consumption for its advantages. If it weren't a viable option then you wouldn't see it being used. I would suggest that the cost of bagging near the end-users is essentially neutral to bagging at the production point.

When it comes to your pont about GVW, again you contradict yourself. You want the G&U, et al. to leverage their weight advantage but then want to erode that by increasing highway GVW. GVW, when it comes to intermodal, has no bearing: intermodal simply is replacing over-the-road linehaul with rail and, really, that segment of transportation is lighter-loading lower-density consumer commodities that are cubing-out before weighing-out in the vehicle. If you want to apply the KEN PATRICK anti-logic to intermodal then you should be advocating for increased vehicle SIZE, not weight capacity.

qb thanks for the post. you need to look at container reload numbers and tofc rail loads. i did an analysis on why heavier trucks are good for railroads. i got the usual knee-jerk reaction from my audience. simply, cofc and tofc fail to properly use rail weight and volume advantages. sadly, cofc and tofc retain rail slowness. hence the fallacy of 'putting trucks on trains'. this mistake led to a series of equipment decisions that diminishes intermodal profitability. i got lucky. i learned that a 220 flat was able to gross at 286 with a simple changeout of wheels , axles and a 12' piece of steel welded to the underbody. the rest is history.
the move to increasing truck gvw is supported by an additional trailer axle. railroads should embrace this. ken patrick

Ken, allow me to explain something that you're missing in your quest to rid the world of the evils of intermodal.

As QB explained, the intermodal market is more cube- than weight-driven. Will you agree with that? If you're a railroader in that market, you're going to want to move that traffic as efficiently as possible. And a primary driver of rail efficiency is maximizing the amount of freight per track-foot, because you're gonna have limits on your train length, you wanna minimize crew-starts, etc. You'll agree with that as well, correct? Getting out my trusty pen and soggy cocktail napkin: Without illustrating the math, stack cars (with hi-cube 53-ft containers) can handle 115 cubic feet of product per track-foot (CFTF). (A hi-cube boxcar is comparable.) By comparison, a typical 6,250 286K resin car can only get 92 CFTF. (Sand CH's dip below 80 CFTF.)

Now granted, if you're hauling heavy product, the covered hopper, at 4,200 lbs per track-foot (LTF), is much, much more efficient on a train length-basis than multi-unit stack cars (but that gap narrows dramatically against single-unit stacks).

Before damning the rail product, consider the target commodity(ies).

QB 52.32 wrote:

KEN PATRICK wrote:qb52 you need to consider the costs of transfer. compare the rail vehicles, then cost out the transfer/delivery options. many folks have fallen on their fiscal swords by minimizing the end costs. the final delivery is where you get nailed by the disparity of road weights. in my argument that we should increase road gvw, i cite tofc and cofc rail limitations imposed by road. unfortunately, rail folk seem unable to get beyond a knee-jerk reaction to increasing gvw. if only someone would think about it.
ken patrick

I am sure the folks who are using G&U's wood pellet bagging operation have done just what you suggest and have selected the option of shipping in bulk and bagging close to consumption for its advantages. If it weren't a viable option then you wouldn't see it being used. I would suggest that the cost of bagging near the end-users is essentially neutral to bagging at the production point.

When it comes to your pont about GVW, again you contradict yourself. You want the G&U, et al. to leverage their weight advantage but then want to erode that by increasing highway GVW. GVW, when it comes to intermodal, has no bearing: intermodal simply is replacing over-the-road linehaul with rail and, really, that segment of transportation is lighter-loading lower-density consumer commodities that are cubing-out before weighing-out in the vehicle. If you want to apply the KEN PATRICK anti-logic to intermodal then you should be advocating for increased vehicle SIZE, not weight capacity.

Qb, thank you for putting my point across even more clearly than I thought was possible.
Ken, since G&U does not seem to be going after the TOFC/COFC market at this point, I believe the GVW et all arguments are moot.
I get that you are speaking mostly about the broader world of transportation at large and bemoaning thee industry standards that you think are inadequate or need to be changed, but this is a railfan forum and a railroad specific thread. I think your interests would be better served by a more broad-topic, industry-wide thread as could be found in a different forum on this site.
As for the G&U itself (to bring this back home to the actual subject,) what makes you so certain that G&U's marketing people haven't thought all of this out before hand? You speak as if they are strangers to basic research. The fact that they are increasing carload business overall in the time since the Priscoli takeover would, to me at least, seem to indicate that G&U's marketing people are far more competent than you would appear to be giving them credit for.
To everyone else: Hurrah for the underdog! Long live the G&U!

Cosmo wrote:

QB 52.32 wrote:

KEN PATRICK wrote:qb52 you need to consider the costs of transfer. compare the rail vehicles, then cost out the transfer/delivery options. many folks have fallen on their fiscal swords by minimizing the end costs. the final delivery is where you get nailed by the disparity of road weights. in my argument that we should increase road gvw, i cite tofc and cofc rail limitations imposed by road. unfortunately, rail folk seem unable to get beyond a knee-jerk reaction to increasing gvw. if only someone would think about it.
ken patrick

I am sure the folks who are using G&U's wood pellet bagging operation have done just what you suggest and have selected the option of shipping in bulk and bagging close to consumption for its advantages. If it weren't a viable option then you wouldn't see it being used. I would suggest that the cost of bagging near the end-users is essentially neutral to bagging at the production point.

When it comes to your pont about GVW, again you contradict yourself. You want the G&U, et al. to leverage their weight advantage but then want to erode that by increasing highway GVW. GVW, when it comes to intermodal, has no bearing: intermodal simply is replacing over-the-road linehaul with rail and, really, that segment of transportation is lighter-loading lower-density consumer commodities that are cubing-out before weighing-out in the vehicle. If you want to apply the KEN PATRICK anti-logic to intermodal then you should be advocating for increased vehicle SIZE, not weight capacity.

Qb, thank you for putting my point across even more clearly than I thought was possible.
Ken, since G&U does not seem to be going after the TOFC/COFC market at this point, I believe the GVW et all arguments are moot.
I get that you are speaking mostly about the broader world of transportation at large and bemoaning thee industry standards that you think are inadequate or need to be changed, but this is a railfan forum and a railroad specific thread. I think your interests would be better served by a more broad-topic, industry-wide thread as could be found in a different forum on this site.
As for the G&U itself (to bring this back home to the actual subject,) what makes you so certain that G&U's marketing people haven't thought all of this out before hand? You speak as if they are strangers to basic research. The fact that they are increasing carload business overall in the time since the Priscoli takeover would, to me at least, seem to indicate that G&U's marketing people are far more competent than you would appear to be giving them credit for.
To everyone else: Hurrah for the underdog! Long live the G&U!

Just a thought, Ken. Perhaps starting a thread on the TOFC/COFC issue in the Railroad Operations, Facilities, Maps and Resources forum might be an idea?

papabarn wrote:
Just a thought, Ken. Perhaps starting a thread on the TOFC/COFC issue in the Railroad Operations, Facilities, Maps and Resources forum might be an idea?

Good idea PB.
Now,... back to the G&U again,...
...has anyone been able to tell if there's been any more work done the past couple weeks now that (most) of the snow is gone?
Pics?