CHARLESTON, W.Va. — Seldom-used rail sidings and excess segments of double track are under review in coal country as CSX Transportation assesses its needs to handle coal traffic. In the past few months, the railroad’s engineering forces have taken a close look at infrastructure in the central Appalachian coalfields served by its former Chesapeake & Ohio lines.
Multiple sections of double-track main line are out of service between Russell, Ky., and Hinton, W.Va., on the railroad’s Kanawha and New River subdivisions. Dispatchers schedule train meets at double-track control points as if the railroad was single track. In the famed New River Gorge, both eastbound and westbound trains use only one track, rather than operating on both the north and south tracks. On coal branches, crews have physically removed sidings, and surplus yard tracks are also being torn up with rail and materials going elsewhere for reuse or scrap.
Simply put, infrastructure in coal country is overbuilt for the needs of today’s coal business. Maintaining sidings at locations where trains meet infrequently costs labor and materials, and sidings built for shorter trains have less use as CSX focuses on fewer but longer trains, one of the basic tenets of Precision Scheduled Railroading. And with overall train counts down, there is no longer a need for hundreds of miles of double track.
Maintaining that capacity is difficult to justify with coal volumes continuing to fall. CSX reported 180,000 coal carloads in the third quarter of 2021. That’s an average of 2,000 carloads per day, a drop of more than 50% since the third quarter of 2011, when the railroad handled more than 386,000 carloads of coal, or more than 4,200 per day. With coal’s future centered primarily around the metallurgical market, those volumes will continue to fall as additional coal-fired power plants close or convert to natural gas.
For the first time since coal’s initial decline, railroads like CSX are making relatively permanent decisions to reduce their network in response to long-term trends. Arguably, the decision to trim assets isn’t shortsighted, but a well-thought out strategic decision that could have happened pre-PSR without any real impact to velocities.
Expect more thoroughly examined changes as CSX, Norfolk Southern, and other coal-dependent railroads figure out what they need to serve the coal business.
Share this article
