Truck rate vs Train rate

Trains don't run thru salt or calcium chloride.

 

How about rain......?

 

Rains clean. Plus the lumber you get now a days is full of water.

 

Neither do trucks in the summer time.

And trains run through rain and snow.

 

The main issue with trucks is road spray and grime. The end user and what they’re doing with it also matters. Most of the time with wrapped lumber all you have to do is actually call the customer and say “do you want it tarped or just keep the paper on it?” and in the summer most of the time you just have to keep the paper on. That does require the extra effort of a phone call and stapling the paper on the front of the units if it starts to come off so most people just tarp like the lumber broker says to.

We used to haul into a beam plant and it didn’t matter if it was 100 degrees and sunshine we were tarping paper wrapped lumber. If there was anything on the wood at all it could create a void when they’re making the beams. I got to see a few loads of lam stock get turned away over the 10 years I was going in there.

 

Yep, I see it every day with the way they maintain intermodal equipment, "Sorry driver, we can't replace that tire, UP policy, yeah, we know the cap is ready to fall off, but it's not 1/2" deep, sorry" 3 miles down the road, BOOM, tire blows, now it sits in our yard for 2 days while the railroad and road service debate who is responsible for the repair, ultimately billing the trucker for pulling it.

 

Yeah that sounds like all major Class 1 RR's! Everything is run off of metrics and they make such large annual profits that they don't care about anything else. Probably someone gets a bonus if they can keep something like tire maintenance from causing a minute of delay for any train in their yard so they would rather have the tire fail anywhere else but there.

Yardmasters get bonuses for trains not being delayed in their yard and managers get promoted by Power Point slides showing how efficient their terminal is. This is a game they play that costs them dearly. I would often have a four and a half hour trip from one terminal to another terminal and I would not be given a light into the yard until just before our 12 hours of legal service were up. We would sit there looking at eight empty tracks that we could go into, but would not be allowed in.

They play this game so the train can go across the system without sitting in a yard and accumulating dwell time which only looks bad on a Power Point slide. They would rather pay an engineer and conductor overtime and not have us available to run trains for an extra seven and a half hours since that is how long we sat at the entrance to a yard. Meanwhile trains are piling up behind us starting a traffic jam at the rate of about one an hour. This happened all the time.

 

L

Anything from Sierra Pacific going anywhere has always been cheap.

Mr. Emmerson knows how to maximize his profits.

 

SPI, also known as Sierra Pathetic.

 

If the railroads ever got truly serious about efficiency of freight movement long haul trucking would no longer exist. It would be virtually all intermodal. Fortunately for us your absolutely correct about how much of a mess the railroads are.

I remember back in the late 90’s or so reading an article in Forbes where they stated the BNSF continues to make money in spite of itself. In my short time with the bn in the early 00’s it was not at all uncommon to get called out on a dog catch to change crews and never actually pull out of the siding we got on the train at.

 

Just wait, next they’ll be wanting to up the gross weight again like when they went from 73280 to 80k with no extra pay