Eastern Railroad Discussion > Hot empty

Now tell me this gon was so hot they HAD to put it on K651 :-)

Have seen loaded before, but ...



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/09/12 20:26 by ddavies.

Might be "protection" for the tanker ??? Sure are a lot of empty mill gons floating around now.

... have been running a lot on NS's Sandusky District lately and in both directions. Wonder what is up or going on with these gon trains?

Adding cars to the rear of the Juice Train is CSX's way of saving money. But it also makes a 60 MPH train a 50 MPH train. It's just one hand in this company doesn't know what the other hand is doing. This crap goes on daily. We are told not to serve a customer because we might go into overtime. Wonder why we are loosing customer !

I think it's there to hold up the FRED. ;^)

Watch for a bunch of hooligans trying to sell a load of stolen steel beams on e-bay.

Either that or this is a load of potholes being moved from an urban area to a mine or something where holes are in demand...

CSX really isn't loosing any customers these days...

Actually, this is a hig priority shipment for the Federal Government.......

The are removing the brains of some Congressmen, this is the first load being hauled to a toxic waste site.......then again, if the gon can carry 50 tons, maybe a 100 ton hopper can be used to carry the BS with it!

Couldnt resist.....

Randy

vasouthern wrote:

> Actually, this is a hig priority shipment for the Federal
> Government.......
>

Despite several phone calls, the federal government will "neither confirm nor deny the existance or non-existance of a secret load in the aforementioned gondola"

On NS we run solid trains of gons with them most of the time carrying steel slabs. The one on my line is 69J (loads) and 68J (empties). Most of the time this train consists of 65 to 80 gons. It is sort of like the slab trains CSX runs except we use the gons instead of the custom built cars.

If I had a daily train to Tampa, Florida and had other "stuff" that was going there too, I'd probably stick that extra stuff on there as well. Perhaps a scrap iron dealer in the Tampa area ordered an empty gon from a customer up north and since the empty Juice Train is going right by there, CSX just added it to the rear. That's a practical reason it would be there.

Now as for customer satisfaction, I must completely agree with the posting above that it makes a train normally going 60 mph become restricted to 50. That is the worst thing CSX does these days: their right hands truly don't know what their left hands are doing, and that practice will potentially damage their credibility again and again.

Another point: CSX places the Intermodal traffic formerly running as Q175 at the head end of Empty Juice Train K651. Didn't their CEO John Snow PROMISE America he'd take thousands of trucks OFF the interstates if we let him have his portion of Conrail? Shippers are using trucks because companies like CSX cannot handle their shipments at the sames speeds as highways can right now, nor can CSX do what predecessor companies like SCL and RF&P used to do. CSX hates to hear that, but it's true: they've down-sized so much of their infrastructure that it makes it obvious that the predecessor companies did it all a LOT better, and with more people and older technology. That's saying something.

On the other hand, the federal government doesn't help at all, with BILLIONS going to highways and airlines, and only 7.5 million last year going to all freight railroads AND THE F.R.A. combined (according to AAR reports).

Those mixed freight cars on the rear of the combined K651/Q175 train, in the long run, will only cause CSX to loose even more trailers back to the highways---unless someone acts FAST!

I'm praying they will.

"Shippers are using trucks because companies like CSX cannot handle their shipments at the sames speeds as highways can right now, nor can CSX do what predecessor companies like SCL and RF&P used to do. CSX hates to hear that, but it's true: they've down-sized so much of their infrastructure that it makes it obvious that the predecessor companies did it all a LOT better, and with more people and older technology. That's saying something."

Total BS.

B.S. not at all, in fact I've heard more than one CSX company official admit it, in a regretful sort of way that they did "take up more track than perhaps they should have." But then, that's all water under the bridge. OLD NEWS.

As far as the empty Juice cars are concerned, this isn't so bad, as they used to be hauled on the rear of Q409. That's a "been-there-done-that" item. But the INTERMODAL (former Q175) portion is what has some concerned about the train's schedule. Mixed cars on CSX in this region, when empty, restrict a train to 50 mph. That's a bit slower than what intermodal used to run, when TOFC trains between Jacksonville, FL and points north had to contend with SCL, RF&P, Chessie (and presumably Conrail) to get there. That is what my above posting really refered to, that CSX does have some difficulty. Not that they aren't making progress these days, but...

Thursday, April 11, 2002. There were THREE mixed freight cars on the rear of the K651 train, seen arriving in Richmond, Va.'s Acca Yard at 1:30 p.m.:

CN 624677 -- Center Beam Flat with LUMBER LOAD
CSXT 196961 -- Insulated Boxcar, unknown load
CSXT 198292 -- Insulated Boxcar, unknown load

These might have been going all the way into the Bradenton/Palmetto area on CSX, so they would be right at home on this train.

I do not have any problem with what CSX is doing; it is, after all, their company. I simply scratch my head at promises made that have not yet been kept. Here's hoping they'll be able to reverse the TOFC-to-highway trend this time around, but I won't hold my breath. Current economics are apparently dictating otherwise at the present time.