WASHINGTON – The trade group representing sugar shippers has told federal regulators that rail service problems have forced some of its members to stop or curtail production of food and beverages.
The Sweetener Users Association, which wrote to the Surface Transportation Board on Wednesday, is the latest trade group to complain about poor rail service as the Class I systems face a shortage of crews and locomotives.
“Issues with switching have forced companies to reduce production in key product lines and shut down manufacturing facilities,” Richard Pasco, president of the Sweetener Users Association, wrote in his letter to the board.
Shippers and the nation’s largest food and beverage producers rely on railroads for bulk movements of sugar.
“Intermittent switches at the plants are not only causing it to take twice as long to get the bulk rail cars, but even when companies get them, they are not consistently switching them into the manufacturing plants,” Pasco wrote. “For example, a manufacturer may have 50 rail cars of sugar close to their facilities and still run out because the railroad is not switching them into the plants due to a lack of labor.”
The group also told the board its members are experiencing delayed shipments, increased dwell times, and bunched deliveries of carloads.
“Actual and threatened embargoes at customer destinations routinely hinder shipping cars,” Pasco wrote.
The trade group urged the STB to help solve ongoing rail service problems.
In the past few weeks the STB also has received complaints from shippers of ethanol and grain and feed. The mounting complaints from individual shippers, along with a deterioration of railroad performance metrics, has prompted the board to schedule a rail service hearing on April 26 and 27, with executives from BNSF Railway, CSX Transportation, Norfolk Southern, and Union Pacific ordered to attend.
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