KCS and NS have petitioned the Surface Transportation Board to allow NS to use 156 miles of KCS trackage between Kansas City and Mexico, Mo., and for KCS to use 105 miles of NS trackage from Mexico to St. Louis. The two railroads have been using such routing on an emergency basis since, according to their STB petition “neither carrier is continuously able to directly traverse between the Kansas City and St. Louis areas solely via its own routing.”
They are seeking STB permission to continue the practice until August 31 because “after a record-setting month of rainfall in May, the state of Missouri is dealing with significant river flooding, breaching levees and flooding [of] many surrounding communities. The flooding is ongoing and additional rainfall may cause additional impacts.”
The only trackage UP reported closed as of June 10 was the River Subdivision between Kansas City and Jefferson City, Mo., and the Pinckneyville Subdivision near Chester, Mo. Meanwhile, UP says it continues to closely monitor service on its Sedalia Subdivision, another Kansas City-Jefferson City route, where Amtrak reports its River Runner service remains suspended until June 12.
BNSF Railway says flood-caused service outages continue south of Omaha and in several places along the Mississippi River. In addition, a semi-truck striking a railroad bridge June 10 near Drace, Ark., 35 miles northwest of Memphis, has halted trains on the Thayer Subdivision.
Why do they need STB permission?
All of NS’ KC traffic is running via STL right now because the Springfield-Hannibal District is flooded out at Hannibal. The KC District is also flooded out west of Moberly, which blocks both the Decatur-KC AND the Louisville-KC traffic flows. Traffic density is roughly even between the Springfield-Hannibal District and the St. Louis District east of Moberly. Only trains 20T and 21T run to/from Decatur via St. Louis on a regular basis and that is only on the days early each week when intermodal volumes are low enough to warrant consolidating traffic between STL and KC. Later in the week 20A and 21A take care of the STL traffic.
KCS is in the same “boat” (pardon the pun) at Louisiana, MO. Hence, the temporary trackage right agreement to tie together the east end of the NS STL-KC line and the west end of the KCS STL-KC line. They are extending this temporary agreement out to August, because it won’t take much more rain to keep things flooded out indefinitely, ala 1993. NS has been shutdown 3 times already this Spring at Hannibal.
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Makes sense for the most part. But I expect most of the NS traffic (including the new UP trackage rights traffic) is to/from Decatur (Joliet for the UPs) and those don’t want to have to dip down to StL in one direction.
Why don’t the 2 railroads cooperate to operate directionally between KC, STL, and Springfield, IL? They could eliminate a lot of meets and move a lot more traffic more quickly.
This needs to happen. I live in Jefferson City and train traffic on the UP is like one long parade here.