NWP is *not* "screwed" as other commenters have stated, but must continue to do a little dance with the LPG cars at Lombard whenever other cars arrive for interchange, using a Cal Northern siding. I agree with the commissioner who points out that this carries far more potential for an incident than just parking them at Schellville, pending a decision on the bigger issue (whether SMART can prohibit those cars from being on the line, period).

This decision is really quite piddly and essentially says NWP needs no injunction because if figured out a workaround, regardless of how goofy it might be. So life will go one, the cars at Schellville are still there, the (apparently loaded) cars at Lombard are still there and will remain there indefinitely, and some other cars that are bound for NWP are parked out there somewhere waiting for things to be resolved. Not a particularly pleasant decisions for NWP, but not necessarily pointing toward a final resolution either.

Valid question might be: who is NWP storing the cars for? If it's a local oil company, presumably the NWP contract with them could be broken somehow, and the cars "returned to sender." Is car storage other than while in transit to/from an on-line customer part of common carriage? If the cars have to be sent back, NWP would lose money on the storage fees, which would affect them financially, but so far I haven't hear that this is a break-the-bank proposition. Is it? Anyway, the 10/20 decision was on a side issue, not the main one, so don't get SMART-happy or -angry yet.