A big problem, perhaps one of the biggest, with the trucking industry today is driver turnover. One article I came across dated July 2017 said that driver turnover at the largest carriers in the first quarter 2017 had been a "historically low" 74%, and the only reason that can be considered low is because the turnover rate had been 15 points higher in the first quarter of 2016. Smaller carriers only had driver turnover rates in the middle 60 percent range. Let that sink in for a minute- the trucking industry as a whole is replacing 3 out of every 4, or 4 our of every 4, and sometimes 5 out of every 4 of its key employees every year. The days of a single guy driving a million and a half miles in a career are, for the most part, gone. And this is happening when the demand for trucking has almost never been higher, to the point most trucking firms are turning business away for lack of equipment and drivers. Given that background, is it any wonder the quality of individual drivers has gone way down?

I found the following map on the Humboldt Redwood Lumber Company website. It's interesting in as much as it shows the general outline of the redwood forest region, identifies landownership, and shows location of all remaining redwood mills, though the map is a little out of date in as much as it still has the SPI mill west of Arcata and the Korbel mill under its former name. It should be noted a couple of the northern mills shown, specifically Arcata Forest Products and Mad River, are both small operations- Arcata Forest Products in a millwork facility specializing in Victorian patterns and the like, while Mad River is a very small mill that never cut enough to be a rail shipper when that was an option. Link to map is:

[www.hrcllc.com]

A look at this map will show that a lot of the timberlands are distantly located from a sawmill, that a lot of the landowners are not otherwise in the manufacturing end of the business, and that those companies who have both mills and timberlands have a lot of distance to cover.

To get to the original question, could railroads compete for the raw log traffic...under the right circumstances, maybe, but highly doubtful. In order for rail to make sense you'd need to have enough volume of logs moving from roughly the same source to roughly the same destination to support the expense of the railroad. Trucks have almost universally won that battle now, and I seriously doubt hauling logs would give a NWP enough traffic to make for a viable railroad anyway.

Jeff Moore
Elko, NV