OMAHA, Neb. — Are hump yards making an unlikely comeback?
Probably not, although three mothballed humps are once again using gravity to classify freight cars.
Union Pacific has reactivated the hump at Davidson Yard in Fort Worth, Texas, to ease the burden on the classification yard at West Colton, Calif., where UP is expanding the small “pop-up” intermodal terminal it opened in the summer of 2021.
“We recently began operating the Fort Worth hump as part of a strategic plan to reduce manifest switching operations at West Colton,” spokeswoman Robynn Tysver says. “The move facilitates expansion of our intermodal ramp serving the Inland Empire intermodal market. Humping operations will continue at West Colton but at a reduced level as the next phase of intermodal construction begins.”
Norfolk Southern announced last week that it is running cars over the hump at Brosnan Yard in Macon, Ga., and will soon resume hump operations at Moorman Yard in Bellevue, Ohio, after maintenance work is completed.
What Davidson, Brosnan, and Moorman yards have in common is that they were idled as part of each railroad’s shift to an operating model based on the principles of Precision Scheduled Railroading. CSX Transportation, NS, and UP have idled or completely shut down a combined 19 hump yards since March 2017.
Some of the shutdowns were relatively short-lived, such as at Radnor Yard in Nashville on CSX and DeButts Yard in Chattanooga on NS.
UP idled the hump at Davidson Yard in January 2020. It was the fifth hump shut down since UP adopted PSR in late 2018. UP also canceled the completion of its proposed Brazos Yard that was being built near Hearne, Texas.
Yet the hump yard trend at UP has not been all downhill: The railroad has improved and expanded Englewood Yard in Houston. The hump received a new master retarder in December 2020. UP subsequently added a new hump control system at Englewood, along with new signals, new switches and ties, and extended bowl tracks so the railroad could assemble longer trains. UP also replaced three bridges in the yard.
UP and NS declined to say whether the reopening of the humps would be temporary measures or more long-term operational changes.
The conversion of hump yards to flat-switching facilities — or shutting them down outright — has been among the most visible moves of the late E. Hunter Harrison’s PSR operating model.
“Is this a retreat from PSR? Absolutely not,” says independent analyst Anthony B. Hatch.
The idling of humps was an outcome of PSR and was not among its goals, Hatch says.
Operational changes — such as pre-blocking cars at origin, block-swapping cars en route, and pushing switching to smaller yards — starved humps of the volume they needed to remain open.
Humps remain the most efficient way to classify high volumes of traffic, but before PSR many railroads ran cars out of route simply to reach a hump yard or ran cars through more humps than necessary on their journey across the railroad. That inflated hump yard volumes while slowing service.
It takes cars 24 hours or more to make their way through a hump, versus 6 to 8 hours in a block swap, railroad operating officials say.
Since adopting PSR, UP’s switching volume is down by nearly a third, CEO Lance Fritz has said, because the railroad touches cars fewer times en route.
When UP converted Davidson Yard to a flat-switching facility, about half of its volume was parceled out among nine smaller terminals in the Texoma Service Unit in Texas and Oklahoma.
During its earnings call last week, NS officials said they once again needed the switching capacity that Macon and Bellevue provide.
“We reactivated these humps to give ourselves some additional capacity that we need in two areas served by Macon and Bellevue. The way switching demand has evolved since 2020, there’s enough critical mass to justify returning them to service as hump yards,” Chief Operating Officer Cindy Sanborn said. The move also was made to concentrate traffic at Macon and Bellevue in order to free up yard crews elsewhere for use in local service amid ongoing crew shortages.
“Flat switching is slower — and harder — and when combined with inexperienced crews is a fluidity problem,” Hatch says, pointing to a KBX Rail presentation from the North American Rail Shippers conference this year.
I was a firefighter from 1973 to 2010, in a profession that proudly states “we are 150 years of tradition unimpeded by progress”. Railroads seem to be the same way, they’ve spent almost 200 years perfecting a massive transportation system, and though there are certain drawbacks that have bedeviled them, especially in the last 70 years as the competition with trucks and interstate system have upset their “apple cart” by providing cheaper alternatives for both passenger or freight traffic. Being fat and happy with government regulation protecting them from other railroads poaching their lucrative routes and cargo, they couldn’t stop trucks from peeling off the most profitable routes and cargo. None of what railroads have done in this century hasn’t been tried before, just under different tag lines. PSR is one of those “new ideas”. However, it worked a century or more before with commodities like coal (black diamonds), livestock, products in and out of factories, etc. because they were specially built to profit off those industries that sprang up near their main lines. They also had a captive customer, one reason Henry Ford built his own steel mills, owned the sources of his raw materials and the plants that created his needed finished products (like steel, glass, upholstery, lumber, and even tried to construct a rubber farm in South America) and built his own railroad to transport it all. The ultimate in PSR. However, PSR, like it did for Henry Ford is doomed to fail (like the massive trolley systems built to serve our industrial plants and “suburbs” where their workers wanted to live. However, railroads also suffer from the inability to be flexible, as those old multi story factories became too expensive to run, and moved out of town where land was cheap and plentiful, acquiring right of way and constructing the necessary infrastructure became too expensive and regulations too burdensome for the railroads. As places like Pittsburgh, Gary, Detroit, Buffalo lost their plants and tax bases, the railroads lost their profit bases. Worse yet, they didn’t have the capital to dieselize their systems or expand or maintain them to Class A standards. Giving trucks yet another benefit over them. Unfortunately for railroads that had passenger service as an extra service to generate revenue, as the US Mail paid for the costs of running the train, there is no government service/ subsidy that is required to go by rail and instead that subsidy now goes to another competitor, airlines.
Brazos Yard. A engineer told me UP is ballasting several more tracks in the yard so they can store more cars in it but, at this time, no plans to open it for regular use.
Certainly not an expert on this subject, but if eliminating hump yards was a PSR idea, wouldn’t it seem by the NS and UP reopening these yards mean that they are slowly coming to their senses? Now if we could find a way to make ORs more reasonable.
If UP ever restarts the Brazos construction then we will know that a come to realization that a perceived solution didwork with PSR.
Any rail car should never go thru more than one hump. That is unless routing is very strange.
Have always thought that most hump yards should somehow double the number of separate classification tracks. Maybe by cutting at least some in half that do not receive a lot of cars? That could reduce the number of second hump or trim tracks.
In the case of Davidson Yard, paying switch crews at NINE other yards and closing the hump just might have been the most important reason for re-opening the hump again along with the relief of Colton. I never believed paying all those crews made sense.
“””It takes cars 24 hours or more to make their way through a hump, versus 6 to 8 hours in a block swap, railroad operating officials say.””””
^^^ That’s a fault of the train plan, not the hump. If you “launched” a train every 8hrs from A to B, the car wouldn’t have to wait 24 hours to catch the next train going to B. Do people actually believe this crap the RRs put out?
They want the humps to operate at a congested level, beyond maximum capacity for some reason. Those yards were built to classify cars efficiently, because someone figured out a long time ago how stUPid it was to do all that flat switching at small, outdated yards.
Ha, I drive by Davidson every day; the crews had certainly been using the hump for gravity sorting over the last year or so.
There may have been some nuance unseen publicly that classified that on a spreadsheet as “flat-switching,” but the volume was noticeably smaller – maybe half the available capacity was used. Some yard tracks right off the hump are storing locomotives for Uncle Pete.
This is likely just PR (to try) to tell shippers that they have capacity to more efficiently handle their merchandise and not choke the exasperated yards at or near the shipping ports, etc.
I doubt PSR goes away anytime soon, but we will likely see it evolve as the railroads see non-unit train carload numbers continue to decline to a point that their profit lessens. You can only squeeze so much until the only way to make more money is to expand business.