NORFOLK, Va. — Changes are afoot at Norfolk Southern’s Moorman Yard in Bellevue, Ohio, the largest hump yard in the East.
In a letter to customers this week, Chief Marketing Officer Alan Shaw said the railroad will modify service at Bellevue this month.
“We are now in the process of reviewing individual yards to enable more efficient operations. Our first major enhancement involved our Linwood yard in North Carolina last month,” Shaw wrote. “After a thorough review, we completely redesigned our train operations and work activity. Today, our service in the region is more fluid. We recently completed a similar review of Bellevue yard in northern Ohio, which will result in a series of service modifications later this month.”
It was not immediately clear if the hump would be idled and the yard converted to a flat-switching facility. NS did not respond to a Trains News Wire request for more information on Thursday morning.
Shaw said customers would be kept in the loop about operational changes.
“We are reaching out to affected customers directly over the next two weeks to discuss the planned changes. We are especially mindful of first- and last-mile changes, and we plan on working closely with you as we implement these steps,” Shaw wrote.
Bellevue is the second-largest classification yard in North America, trailing only Union Pacific’s Bailey Yard in North Platte, Neb.
The yard, opened by Norfolk & Western in 1967 following its acquisition of the Nickel Plate and Wabash three years earlier, in 2014 underwent a $160 million expansion that doubled its capacity. The project involved adding a second hump track and a classification bowl with 38 tracks, boosting its maximum daily classification to 3,600 cars from 1,800.
NS main lines converge on Bellevue from five directions, making it the perfect spot to classify merchandise traffic bound to every corner of the NS system. The facility was renamed Moorman Yard in 2015, when CEO Wick Moorman retired.
Last month NS mothballed the hump at Linwood Yard in North Carolina, resulting in the furlough of 85 workers. The move will save the company $10 million to $15 million annually, Chief Financial Officer Mark George told an investor conference on May 20.
The railroad’s merchandise traffic volume is down 33% in the second quarter to date due to the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. That’s a deepest drop in the industry, but NS executives have noted that NS is more closely tied to the hardest-hit sectors of the industrial economy. NS serves more auto assembly plants and steel mills than any other railroad.
On the railroad’s earnings call in April, executives said they were analyzing where they could close yards but they did not provide specifics.
“We are taking hard looks at our yard and terminal network, testing what we can live without,” Chief Operating Officer Mike Wheeler said.
NS has idled five other humps since the Great Recession, Wheeler noted, including two last year as part of its shift to Precision Scheduled Railroading. Those humps were in Sheffield, Ala., and Allentown, Pa., whose volume fell after the TOP21 operating plan reduced their switching volumes.
“We are continuing to look at that and those are long-term structural cost reductions and you will see more of that as we go forward,” Wheeler said.
