"Up North" Gawking (District 1 sightings)

Could be some of that too. All I heard was for crew qualifications mixing between the PAR and B&A territory with the goal of adding a second train pair as "intermodal" and running faster speeds in D2.

Sprague in Portland still receives clay slurry. The ship that delivers is most of the time is the Tanja. I believe she was last in sometime in early March.

johnpbarlow wrote: ↑Sun Apr 14, 2024 7:35 am From what I read on-line, Maine is having a trash disposal/recycling crisis - perhaps it will join other New England states and start shipping municipal waste to out-of-state landfill facilities?

Thats not entirely true. Maine landfills were bringing in out of state C&D debris and trash, which that was paying the bills. The legislature passed a law banning that practice last year, which is why so many facilities closed such as PERC. The main issue with the landfills right now is they used cement and other C&D materials as structural fill. Prior to taking my current job, I worked for Casella at Juniper Ridge as a manager. You can't just dump trash and cover it with dirt, if there is a big rain it could cause a landslide. So they spread the trash out in a lift, compact it, and then cover it in several feet of C&D debris which is then compacted as structural fill to stabilize the pile. The exterior of the fill is also layered and compacted with C&D debris after a subsurface drainage system is installed. After that it is covered with pit run gravel, sand, and finally a layer of loam which is hydroseeded, and covered with a straw mat.

The issue right now is Maine doesn't produce enough C&D materials to fill the landfills need, which the public who cried out about out of state material being brought in, didn't realize that, and the lawmakers who passed the laws never looked for the other side of the story. So now we are where we are today. I imagine in the near future the C&D law will be repealed or amended to fix this issue, since the biggest landfills in the state are refusing trash because of it. As for the trash to energy plants, I have a feeling those will get subsidies to get back running again.

I will believe the dedicated intermodal trains when I see them. I have a hard time believing there is enough traffic to warrant a dedicated train out of Rigby or wherever the ramp CSX supposedly wants to build, is going to be. There might be a handful of cars per day, but nothing on that scale.

What about when containers start coming down from Saint John?

CN9634 wrote:Could be some of that too. All I heard was for crew qualifications mixing between the PAR and B&A territory with the goal of adding a second train pair as "intermodal" and running faster speeds in D2.

Up to this point CSX has publicly stated that they didn't plan for a big intermodal franchise when making the acquisition, is planning a second road train pair over the ex-Barbers gateway, is not planning to build any new intermodal facilities this year, and is strategically planning to grow their intermodal volume by filling unused capacity.

So, if this rumor has 2024 legs good chance it'll be driven by Port Saint John international intermodal traffic with its bigger potential than Waterville and including without requiring a new intermodal terminal like at Rigby in filling existing unused intermodal train capacity originating/terminating at the Worcester intermodal facility.

CSX also publicly stated their plans to expand and develop carload markets when making the acquisition, so good chance whenever intermodal traffic develops it'll move in train service over the ex-Barbers gateway mixed with carload traffic.

"What to do with trash?" is definitely going to be a hot topic for the foreseeable future.

Front page of today's Portland Press Herald:

Portland Press Herald wrote:Some of Maine’s defunct landfills are leaking harmful "forever chemicals" into the drinking water supplies of nearby homes at levels that are up to 100 times higher than what Maine deems safe to drink.

Data released to the Press Herald show 23 closed landfills from Kittery to Corinna are responsible for contaminating 51 drinking wells. However, that total may grow because Maine has only tested 95 of its more than 400 shuttered landfills.
. . .
Federal regulators say that even trace amounts of two of the six PFAS chemicals Maine tracks are too dangerous to ingest and have been linked to premature deaths, cancer, liver and heart impacts in adults, and immune and developmental impacts to infants and children.

That is why federal regulators set new national drinking water standards for PFAS just last week. Those standards are significantly stricter than Maine’s limits. Maine plans to adjust its standards to match, but state officials say it will take time to change the law and know how it affects Maine’s PFAS response.

The number of contaminated wells would likely be higher if Maine began using the new federal limits.
. . .
There is no evidence the leachate that forms when rain trickles through an active landfill is escaping from the holding tanks, ponds or lagoons when it is stored in landfills with collection systems, but then again, no one is looking – the monitoring wells set up to detect leaks are not looking for PFAS.

https://www.pressherald.com/2024/04/15/ ... chemicals/

bostontrainguy wrote: ↑Mon Apr 15, 2024 8:18 am What about when containers start coming down from Saint John?

It will be a long time before its even feasible. CSX needs much higher track speeds and double stack clearances to compete with CPKC and CN. At least for the Chicago traffic, but CSX's grand plan for Saint John seems to have a different objective every time the foamer braintrust brings up the subject. But at a minimum I would say probably another 4-5 years before there is any major increase in containers. (Thats accounting for the duration of infrastructure work, and marketing to potentially get container traffic).

If the current container levels CPKC is transporting continue, there isn't a whole lot of meat on the bone for CSX at this point in time. 4 years ago CP was anticipated 3 train pairs a day to and from Saint John. Fast forward to today, they are still running a single train pair 6-7 days a week. If CSX were smart they would continue the infrastructure upgrades for when (if ever) the container traffic materializes, while continuing to attack CPKC's carload traffic business. Which that is the most stabile traffic CPKC has currently, and CSX could make a good dent in CPKC's bottom line by offering lower rates and better service than what CPKC is offering. To an extent they are already starting to do just that with an increase in lumber traffic.

Its also worth noting that Irving had anticipated several more container contracts for this year which fell through. It was stated in the company newsletters that there is no further expansion with the container business in the foreseeable future. CP/KC has pretty much lost most of the container contracts they have got since 2022, which I am surprised they have managed to hold onto the current ones for this long. The domestic business has died off dramatically too. Midland used to ship a lot of containers west, and at one point it wasn't uncommon to see 20-30 of them on the head end of 121. I haven't seen those in over a year, the only domestics I have seen over the last year are a handful of those pink CP containers and a few refrigerated containers per day. When I have gone to Saint John, I have mainly seen the CP containers going to Irving Pulp & Paper. I know they used to have some Canadian Tire traffic, but last time I saw one of those containers was probably mid-2021 early 2022.

No idea what the csx long term plan is for sj. Short and medium term sure seems to be to grab as much irving traffic as possible. The keag interchange is already bumping into capacity constraints

Container and other port traffic are highly dependent on global trade patterns, which seem to shift. I believe the port expansion is still underway. Who knows what difference that will make

Don’t how this will work out. I note that when container traffic briefly spiked a couple years ago, both the port and the RR got quickly overwhelmed, which caused delays and reports of dissatisfied customers. Related to this or not, Ship calls declined shortly thereafter and to my knowledge never recovered.

CP had two instances where they lost the container traffic.

The first time in the Spring/Summer of 2022, neither railroad was prepared for the demand. They were only expecting two train pairs per day and it ended up being more like 5-6 trains a day on Irving. That made Irving so power short they were even using the MP15's on the road jobs. Likewise, CP which had just lost most of the former CMQ guys, was also struggling to retain crews (a problem which continues to this day). And the very few new hires (out of the comical amount of trainees they started with), who managed to last through training weren't necessarily the most competent. That lead to frequent derailments at Brownville Jct, which ate up CP's entire supply of spare switch panels, east of Montreal to the point where they were ripped out the south wye switch at BVJ, so they could fix the CP Main crossover which was being torn out almost weekly.
BVJ ended up being a major bottleneck, since EMR had crews enough to run 5-6 trains a day, which they had to do, so there would be enough motive power available. Meanwhile CP was unable to run anything beyond one train pair, sometimes less than that if someone called out. Normally once they got every siding from BVJ to Saint John plugged with cars as well as the yards at Oakfield and Millinocket on Irving, they would cancel the jobs on the Bangor Sub and use the crews to clear out the backlog.

The second go around CP and Irving were running 4 trains a day and things worked sort of smoothly, however CP was still struggling with chronic crew shortages. And thats when the cutbacks at US Customs (discussed in the CPKC forum) and delays on CP killed off those contracts (despite some people calling it a "seasonal slump"). That ended up causing a headache for EMR, since for the east bounds CP would give them a two hour call to get crews on duty at BVJ as soon as the train hit the international border at Boundary. Mind you the train still would have a 2-4 hour trip to get to BVJ along with having to go through customs at Jackman, before switching for a few hours. For the west bounds on EMR, CP would hold them for hours, until they were almost out of time, while the BVJ switcher made moves which could have been done once EMR finished what they had to do. It got to the point where EMR refused to recrew trains that CP let sit until they timed out.

Another issue was CP got after Irving if trains left more than an hour late coming out of Saint John or McAdam, which would be one thing, but CP let the traffic sit at BVJ for 10-12 hours every day, so the sales pitch of getting cars from the port to Montreal in 24 hours was doomed from the start. Add in the issues with customs and how many times they cut back hours, and it got to the point where Saint John wasn't as attractive as CP made it seem, and the contracts began to drop.

At this point pretty much all of the class 1's are cut from the same fabric, at least in CSX's case they will probably do better than CP/KC since they don't have multiple border crossings and they seem to play better with Irving than CP/KC has (Which has historically been the case between Irving and Pan Am), so they might be able to steal what intermodal traffic CPKC currently has once the infrastructure is improved. The only thing I can see which could cripple CSX in the long run is the mass exodus of train crews. In the vote for the new contract, I think the union said they only had 30 members (Conductors/Engineers) on the former Pan Am network. I am old enough where I was around when there was that many just on District 1. And it doesn't seem like CSX has had any luck in filling the vacancies. Its worth mentioning pretty much every department on the former Pan Am system is a ghost town these days, but I think the transportation department has been gutted the most.

There is around double that in T&E on the former ST/PAR.

Just passing on what I heard from some crews... everyones getting a bit stirred up.

Not a bad idea to consider that the feasibility for CSX starting to offer service in the Port Saint John container market begins once they can reliably move those containers to/from the port and their intermodal trains originating and terminating in Worcester 2nd/3rd day transit time (clock starts on day "0"). They don't necessarily need to wait for the expensive overhead clearances with the existing (possibly growing?) unused capacity on those intermodal trains providing motivation to start offering service single-stack mixed with carload traffic sooner than later within the gap.

newpylong wrote:There is around double that in T&E on the former ST/PAR.

https://www.railwayage.com/news/blet-ra ... agreement/

"According to BLET, the agreement covers approximately 30 union members and addresses changes in operations and the merging of workforces following the acquisition."