The near inevitable transcontinental duopoly is only going to make branches less and less attractive. It’s all going to be high volume trunking and trans loading for the last mile.
Yep. CSX has already put out to bid third-party shortline operators for the extremely marginal Waterville-Augusta and Bangor-Bucksport branches, with 1 interested party filing a proposal and some new transload business planned for the formerly out-of-service Bucksport Branch. It's an extra handoff, yes, but it gets them out of needing to hustle their Sales Dept. for very small carload counts. They're likely to do more of that, particularly in New Hampshire where the Nashua-Concord and Nashua-Wilton locals can easily be bid out to Vermont Rail System which already operates Concord-Tilton leaving only the reliably daily Lawrence-Nashua yard-stocker job under CSX auspices. The Portland locals are almost perfectly load-balanced...one set of crews, one daily weekday RT operating slot, but different destinations by day (some days it's south on the Western Route, some days it's to the customers by Deering Jct., once a week it's to Brunswick to pick up what scraps are left from the Rockland Branch's new shortline operator, once a week or less it's to Rock Row for the last Mountain customer). There's no way they'd be willing to add extra trains to that schedule to pick up interchange sand in Westbrook multiple days a week...it would either be once a week max. like when they serve the Rock Row propane dealer (which isn't likely to work for sand/concrete logistics), or pick up on the substantial-size daily West Springfield-Palmer interchange train with a couple other legs on the trip to other carriers. They choose the latter every time. And, like I said, cutting a check to the Rock Row propane dealer to relocate to a mainline location is a small price for them to pay for getting out from under the Mountain Division entirely and further streamlining their locals schedule to ever tighter bang-for-buck.
3 years ago Pan Am was running three daily Massachusetts-Portland train pairs: one from East Deerfield to Portland, one from Ayer to Portland, and one (joint-venture with CSX) from Selkirk, NY to Portland. Today CSX runs
one pair: Selkirk-Portland with dropoffs/pickups in Ayer. Carloads are up quite a bit since the Pan Am days, too. It's just an absolute monster of a single train...routinely 100-140 cars each direction instead of being split up into more frequent intermediate-length trains. They'll keep growing it until it scrapes the car count limit of the B&A over the Berkshire grades, and then they'll open the checkbook for double-stacking Ayer-Portland to keep it one train but denser. CSX is absolutely maniacal about applying PSR ops to their system in this manner. Streamlining, streamlining, streamlining...and max bang-for-buck on the slots they choose to run. Sometimes it unfolds in nonlinear fashion...like the fact that that monster Selkirk-Portland train then has to spawn a separate Portland-Lawrence yard-stocker job instead of having the Portland train drop/pick up a cut of cars in Lawrence as it's passing thru (PSR logically means running
fast to the largest-carload destination and worrying about secondary destinations later, even when the results look a little illogical like ^that^). They're being aggressive about chasing new business, but it's going to be on mainlines (or like the NH Main where their locals roam for free without maintenance costs in MBTA territory) not self-operated branches...and with
liberal partnering with interested shortlines templating what they did previously in Massachusetts outsourcing lower-margin branches to the likes of Mass Coastal and Grafton & Upton. It's ultimately a bright future for
overall New England freight to be muscling that much more mainline carloads, but it's a different kind of beast than running the straightest lines on a map on-demand whenever there's a handful of cars to be had. Those days are over.
