UP now has about 90 contractors working on the yard, down from 300. Crews were aiming to open the yard as early as December, UP officials said last year, but now the railroad does not have an opening date scheduled.
“We have slowed the pace a little bit, but we continue to work on things like grading and drainage and trackwork,” UP spokeswoman Kristen South told Texas radio station WTAW last week.
UP is reviewing how to use the yard and how it will best fit into the system under its new operating plan, which UP launched in October, about eight months after construction began.
“Right now, we are evaluating what our customers need and how this yard plays into our overall system,” South says.
Last month, CEO Lance Fritz told an investor conference that Brazos would remain important to UP but that it would use the yard differently than originally envisioned.
“We continue to evaluate exactly how are we going to use it,” Fritz said. “We had a game plan when we first designed it and started the build. It still looks like a valuable asset so there’s no reason to think that it’s not. But it’s going to be used differently than the original design.”
It was unclear if that meant the yard would ultimately become a flat-switching facility where through trains would swap blocks. The yard is being built at the strategic junction of seven UP routes.
It was not immediately clear if the slowdown in Brazos construction — which would curtail spending at the site — was related to an expected shuffling of UP’s capital budget.
UP Chief Operating Officer Jim Vena said in January that the railroad this year aims to quickly begin running longer trains in single-track territory and that it was identifying where to build longer passing sidings.
Executives said they would fund the siding extensions by shifting money around in this year’s $3.2-billion capital budget.
Running longer trains — which reduces train starts and locomotive and crew requirements — is a key element of the Precision Scheduled Railroading operating model UP began implementing in October.
The Unified Plan 2020, based on the late E. Hunter Harrison’s principles of Precision Scheduled Railroading, also calls for a reduced emphasis on major terminals as cars are pre-blocked at origin and sent further into the network before being switched.
