I don't think that was what F-Line said. My understanding is that the transloading capabilities at West Springfield are so poor, that rail traffic come on into Worcester instead, and then trucks have to backtrack (on the Pike, on I-84) to destinations that should have been served by trucks out of West Springfield (on I-91, etc.).
Correct. Worcester serves the lion's share of the whole Southern New England market because West Springfield is only running at a fraction of its native transloading capacity.
West Springfield runs at a fraction because the easy highway access (via US 5 expressway) is all on the south (general freight) side of the yard, but the truck access is all on the north side and the low Union St. (12'1") and River St. (12'4") overpasses prevent any direct access from one half to the other. Instead of taking the most direct route I-91==>US 5==>MA 147 and only passing a few city blocks of shopping mall to get there, the trucks have to come from way up north via 91 or Pike on the non-expressway portion of 5 from more miles out, get off on Park St. in West Springfield town center, go several blocks down Park, and take Western Ave. at considerable detriment to the surrounding residential. CSX has to curtail trucking on the overnight because of the residential, play keep-away from rush hour to avoid paralyzing downtown, and damp-down their rush hour activity on the turnpike portion of US 5 that has traffic lights.
Then, because of the Worcester overload, Pike between 290 & 84 is singularly crushed with big rigs 24/7 and I-84 carries the lion's share of Connecticut-bound traffic. It's one of the hilliest portions of Pike anywhere out outside of the face of the Berkshires, so those big rigs downshift frequently in the center and right lanes to create major traffic jams at anything resembling peakish loading (including if you've had the indignity of driving there on a Sunday night when the weekenders are coming home). That would not be the case if West Springfield were more than a trace contributor to Central CT loads, because the Pike/84 loads would be much lower and nowhere near as liable for causing the traffic jams. I-91 is also mercifully free of hills and would be spared similar traffic swells from the downshifting hell if it ran under the equivalent truck volumes. Fixing the WS truck access is thus a thing that really needs to happen soon for the good of everyone.
Compared with
Worcester, the truck area @ WS is as large or larger. But because they have to slow-walk it to manage city traffic, West Springfield processes trailer cubes at only a fraction of the breakneck
density and speed of Worcester. Worcester has automated robot cranes for dealing with stacks, high-throughput automated truck scales at the egresses, idealized workflow for fetching trailers from parking areas and getting in/out, computerized queuing for the manifests (both rail and truck), and more switching tracks dedicated to quickly swapping out strings of cars from the crane tracks. West Springfield does plodding low-tech side-loading of trailers (like Beacon Park used to), processes many times slower, and is less dense and way more space inefficient in spite of its far bigger acreage. CSX's profit margins @ WS are sub-ideal because of its relative sluggishness, but until they have a truck route into it that can actually support crush-load volumes on 24/7 shifts there's no point in them making the profit-minded efficiency/density upgrades.
CSX and MassDOT talked lots about fixing this when all the Beacon Park/Worcester/double-stacks/line sales Make-A-Deal was being consumated 13-14 years ago, but the MassHighway project for improving Union St. clearances is pricey. A whole lot needs to be hollowed out to get that underpass from a shoulderless 12'1" to suitable state for big rig traffic. That's the Make-A-Deal vector for East-West/NNEIRI; CSX would willingly trade some passenger slotting flex for the state's help on West Springfield truck access. They would then in turn build a private access driveway
right on the other side of that cleared underpass so the trucks came clean off the street after passing a mere 2 or 3 total houses, and do all their in-house modernizations of the IM yard so it could rake at a rate comparable to Worcester. Since Worcester is now more or less tapped-out on capacity, now is sort of the time to be revisiting the Make-A-Deal here. Especially while the state's going to be sitting down with CSX a lot in the next couple years dealing with Pan Am merger entrails (which upgrading WS also helps a ton).
