CHICAGO — If Union Pacific wanted to show the media how trains can sit around in the nation’s rail capital, it was mission accomplished last week aboard its executive train.
As the six-car train headed west at 10 mph on Wednesday — rolling between the Belt Railway of Chicago’s Clearing Yard to the north and CSX’s Bedford Park intermodal terminal to the south — UP CEO Jim Vena did not like what he was seeing from the Fox River theater car.
“There’s nothing freaking moving … There’s another one sitting there … There’s another one,” Vena exclaimed. “Is that us over there?”
The stopped trains belonged to the BRC and CSX. But then Vena spotted a lone UP locomotive in the Bedford Park terminal — and he wanted to know how long it had been sitting there.
John Turner, senior vice president of operations for UP’s Northern Division, said the six-axle Wabtec unit delivered interchange cars to CSX around 8 p.m. on Tuesday.
“And it’s still here?” Vena asked at around 1:35 p.m. “I’m telling you guys,” he said, shaking his head.
The parked trains illustrated why Vena says UP’s $85 billion transcontinental merger with Norfolk Southern is necessary. “If you wanna ship something across the country, from one end to the other, you need to hand it off to somebody else,” Vena says. “And that gets complicated.”
UP contends that eliminating interchanges in Chicago and elsewhere will shave 24 to 48 hours off transit times for carload traffic, which Eric Gehringer, executive vice president of operations, says is an improvement of 15% to 25% based on last year’s average cycle time.
“And we won’t have the eight- to 24-hour touch while you hand off an intermodal train,” Vena says. “That’ll come off. We just go right across.”
A high-priority UP Z-train will be able to shoot from the West Coast to the East Coast in as little as 74 hours, he says. The merger also will eliminate the need for 1,000 or so daily crosstown rubber-tire moves between UP terminals and those operated by CSX and NS in Chicago.
“Is it good for America that we put more trucks on the road for no reason at all? No,” Vena says. “Is it good for America that you can’t ship copper from Arizona across the country seamlessly so that customers can handle it more efficiently? No.”
Kenny Rocker, UP’s executive vice president of marketing and sales, says the railroad plans to design steel-wheel intermodal service that will deliver containers and trailers as close as possible to their ultimate destinations.
Currently some loads leave a UP ramp in Chicago and hit the highway bound for Detroit, Toledo, and points in the Ohio Valley. “How do you penetrate those markets? We see becoming one railroad as a strong way to do that,” Rocker says.
It’s not the only way, however, as BNSF Railway and CSX have shown with their expanding interline intermodal partnership. Announced in August, the joint service links the Southwest and Southeast as well as Los Angeles with points in the Midwest and Northeast via Chicago. CSX also has reached an international intermodal partnership with Canadian National for traffic moving from Memphis to Nashville.
Vena says interline agreements never last, particularly for carload traffic. “It’s pretty hard to find a partner that wants to do exactly the same thing. We’ve made these deals that say, ‘we’ll build a block for you out of Houston that’s going to go to your yard and not be handled, and you need to build me a block.’ Those things have never worked,” he says. “As soon as somebody has any issues with their own railroad, they go back to their own way of operating.”
The UP media day train made its way from Chicago to UP’s Global 4 intermodal terminal in Joliet, Ill., without a hitch. It departed from the Ogilvie Transportation Center on UP’s Geneva Subdivision, veered south onto UP’s Rockwell Sub, then rolled onto the B&OCT, the BRC’s Kenton Line, and then the Indiana Harbor Belt to Argo, where it used CN’s Joliet Sub to reach Global 4.
“Our team’s been working on this trip now … to get what we hope will be a very seamless transition and handoffs through the city,” Turner said. “But it isn’t always that way when we’re talking about freight. It’s complex. You don’t have as much visibility, and it’s largely driven off of communication and handoffs. In fact, my last communication this morning was with either my peers or other CEOs of the railroads to get us through here and make sure that they knew that we were going to be coming through here, what we were doing, what we were trying to achieve today. So lots and lots of coordination.”
The six-car train, led by C44ACM No. 6017 and the railroad’s Abraham Lincoln unit, SD70M No. 1616, included a power car, business car St. Louis, sleeping car Lake Mead, dining car City of Denver, dome car City of San Francisco, and inspection car Fox River.
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Well using the BRC is a poor example as it’s a jointly owned terminal road.. Trains perhaps were waiting on crew changes? Perhaps trains not ready to be accepted for interchange? Maybe that “lone” UP engine needed to help repay horsepower hours?..