Sources close to the railroad confirm with Trains News Wire that CSX will begin phasing out hump yard operations at Stanley this week with several train schedules changing in the next couple of weeks. The yard will be converted to flat switching only and will use existing tracks near the hump bowl.
CSX spokeswoman Laura Phelps tells Trains News Wire that Stanley’s closure is part of an ongoing effort to be more efficient and reduce operating costs.
Phelps says that 34 union positions are being eliminated at the yard and approximately 40 employees will remain.
“The decision to make these reductions follows a review of Toledo-area operations,” Phelps says. “CSX has determined that by changing the way railcars are sorted at Stanley Yard, it will be able to process trains more efficiently, which will result in better service to our customers.”
Those familiar with rail operations in the area say Stanley’s hump closure was inevitable under Harrison’s leadershi, due its proximity to another hump yard in Willard, less than 70 miles away.
Several freight trains originate in Stanley each day, including Q319 to Indianapolis, Ind., Q322 to Flint, Mich., Q392 to Detroit, Q394 to Cumberland, Md., via Willard, Ohio, Q507 to Cincinnati, Q509 to Chicago, and Q511 to Louisville, Ky. It is not yet clear if Willard will handle the additional trains or if they will continue to be flat switched in Stanley.
It is not the first time CSX has closed down its Stanley Yard. In the spring of 2004, almost thirteen years ago to the week, CSX temporarily shut down yard operations at Stanley, only to reopen a few months later in July due to freight congestion in neighboring rail yards.
Stanley is a former Toledo & Ohio Central Railway yard that opened in the early 1900s. It would later become part of the New York Central and Penn Central before Conrail assumed operations in the late 1970s. CSX acquired Stanley and other Toledo & Ohio Central trackage after the Conrail breakup.
Stanley Yard also gained notoriety in May 2001 when CSX SD40-2 No. 8888 escaped the yard unmanned with more than 40 freight cars in tow. The locomotive, later dubbed as “crazy eights,” operated more than two hours through northern Ohio before another train was able to stop the runaway consist.
I’m glad I sold my RR stocks, but the bump that my CSX stock would have had with EHH coming in would have been nice.
If flat switching so good why they built a hump yard in Memphis Tennessee and name it after him hum
If the idea is to keep cars moving , as against pure cost cutting , I think it will work . The days of sorting each car into a track , until there is a trainload to the destination, are over. Sorting to a block of cars moving in the right general direction is the idea , I believe. It will take living document style planning though.
Nibbling around the edges… Closing a big hump or two will likely follow. It’s harder to do. I’d guess Frontier in Buffalo and Queensgate in Cincy could be targets with work going to Willard, Avon and Selkirk.
I’m surprised he hasn’t pulled the plug on CSX’s participation in the AAR reporting measures. I’m guessing the STB mandate is still in place and it’s either continue to publish on AAR site or do it on the CSX site.
CP is still not reporting.
Old B&O north of Deshler has more traffic than the NYC north of Galatea. The NYC is between the C&O and B&O to Toledo so could easily give its traffic to the others. Don’t forget more freight moves by rail in the modern times than at any time during the heydays with all those freight yards in and around cities.
Roger Keay, thank you.
David Benton, thank you.
Don Oltmann, I believe Frontier was whacked by CSX a few years back. Had sharp curves entering into class tracks that were, shall we say…problematic. Buffalo isn’t what it used to be industry wise anymore either.
Paul Lockman, Wally World (Walbridge) was pretty much shut years ago. When I hired out in 77 it was a bustleing place. The yard tracks that are left, last time I was in the place, were storing cars. They did also use a few of the tracks for block swapping. This was before the Conrail merger and traffic moved over there. I stopped going to Toledo because the motel and the long trip from GRP was a major PIA. Chicago was way more interesting so I went west out of Grand Rapids.
Retired from Wyoming Yard. Miss the work but when its raining and snowing and blowing I laugh and laugh…and pour another toddy.
P.S. I remember the state of the art fuel facility that the C&O/Chessie built in Walbridge Yard. They opened it and closed it in about a month or so….so EHH has no corner on shutting down things. And Michigan was pretty much whacked back in the early to mid 80’s and I didn’t hear much whimpering about that.
Go with the flow…buy the ticket, take the ride.
Investors put EHH in control of CSX because they believe he will make it more profitable. He has a track record of doing just that at three major railroads; IC, CN and CP. He shut down most of the hump yards on CP in Canada. Hump yards only make sense where the railroad handles enough individual carloads to justify the expense of maintaining the retarders and other equipment.
Railroads reflect the past because their facilities were built to handle the traffic at an earlier time with shorter trains and smaller cars pulled by less powerful locomotives. Back in the 1950s and 1960s, container traffic didn’t exist. US railroads are now collections of routes built by different managements at different times for different reasons. The rail networks have been rationalized as much as possible by abandoning duplicate routes. Many factories that used rail no longer exist so branches and the switching yards that served them are no longer required. If you don’t believe it, take a look at rail maps of a major city from the 1940s and the present. The industrial trackage is gone and with it the need to sort thousands of boxcars, flats and gondolas.
Today, manufacturers operate from industrial parks and put their products into containers. Some of the containers make it to a railroad container yard where it gets put on a well car. If the yard is properly managed, containers for the same destination yard will end up on a block of cars. Other blocks of containers going in the same direction but to different end points will end up together too. The railroad doesn’t need a hump yard to assemble a container train.
CSX looks like a challenge for EHH. The railroad was already making strides to improve profitability before he arrived. Coal traffic will probably continue to decline because cheap, abundant, natural gas is eating its lunch. The biggest task at CSX may well be finding new customers and traffic flows to replace coal. If a railroad already has the traffic then making it more efficient will produce greater profit. But, if the problem is loss of traffic for reasons outside the railroad’s control then different medicine is required.
No mention here of operations at the old C&O Walbridge yard less than three miles away from Stanley?
Figure on the ex B&O north of Deshler,OH. to go also!
When EHH was at CN, he tried to close Symington yard in Winnipeg twice, only to reopen it a few weeks later to prevent the resulting operating chaos from spreading systemwide. This is one busy yard and the railroad could not function without it.
A hump yard that is not continually humping cars is not really efficient; this is why EHH does not favor them. The pattern he implemented at CN and CP is running several long-distance mixed-traffic trains a day that will work at many yards en route to pick up, drop or swap blocks of cars. Very few cars ride the train from its origin to destination; most get shuffled along the way. Intermodal, automotive and manifest traffic often ride on the same train.
Hump yards generally do not fit this pattern because they generally build solid manifest trains for a single destination. Building trains with multiple blocks with a hump yard may require humping each car twice, which is not really efficient.
EHH’s methods somewhat worked well for CN and CP’s simple route structure; it remains to be seen if they can work at CSX. I have my doubts, but I fear that what may really hurt CSX in the coming months is that most yard and local assignments will likely be cut or cancelled, and many shipper contracts will not be renewed, leading to large losses of traffic to NS or truckers.
Aside from hump yards, two other items that do not fit EHH’s vision of railroading are unit trains and intermodal trains (which he likens to unit trains anyway).
You can probably kiss goodbye to about half that intermodal traffic that is supposed to be the railroad’s future. As for this Tropicana juice traffic, why doesn’t it ride the regular manifest train that works in Jacksonville, Waycross, Atlanta, Rocky Mount, Richmond and Philadelphia, like all other carloads?
To answer Mr. Benson’s post below, “wouldn’t it make EHH look bad?”…depends. EHH doesn’t care. HIs compensation package is 33 mil for his wanton wrecklessness. Got to pay for that compensation somehow.
Just a thought,
20 years ago or so someone took over a railroad then tried to run it their way. Result, kaos, confusion and mayhem over the US railroad network. Anybody remember what happened with the UP takeover of the SP, especially in Houston. Is CSX potentially that fragile?
It helps to get rid of those ” unprofitable” carloads that require “too much” switching. Isn’t that Hunters goal??
Decades ago, when the hump concept was developed, the originators would never believe that one day some idiot would prefer flat switching.
I don’t understand this. It would seem to me that sorting cars with a hump would be more efficient than flat switching them. Also, what is EHH doing to make sure the congestion talked about in the above article doesn’t happen again? Won’t EHH look bad if it does?