Re: DRGW/SP Intermodal prior to Phil Anschutz?
Author: Surf
Date: 12-04-2023 - 13:25

John Wrote:
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> A better question might be. Where did all that
> traffic go?


Being a total ignoramus on the industry, I’m also curious why the carrier stopping routing trains via the Coast. Wasn’t it the fastest route from Oakland to Los Angeles?


Paul Dyson told me that he'd worked on some kind of plan for Coast traffic in the early 90's before the merger that identified as many as 400 additonal potential carloads off of the Coast, and some fairly good couple of train size number of "lifts" of TOFC/COFC with a ramp in the Salinas Valley, or Guadalupe...

UP has strangled customers like Port Hueneme which has lost a lot of traffic due to poor "monopoly" services as "captives" of the UP. It was so bad in the 2000's already, that several elected's in Ventura County asked the VCTC to look into going to the STB... VCTC has been trying LOSSAN improvement now for 30 years, and even back then, it was decided not to piss the UP off, which would jeopardize those improvements.

Monopolies can do this, use predatory pricing, and discriminate if they don't feel the traffic is profitable enough for them. This had occurred to the point by the mid 2000's that a lot of the remaining high value auto traffic that Port Hueneme did have was "trucked" across the congested LA basin by truck for transloading in the IE to the BNSF, because the UP local would only haul every other day.

In contrast, BNSF runs as many trains as it needs to San Diego for the auto traffic, both from the port and from the "maquiladora" in Tiajuana.

Public ownership of the Coastline, with a private contracted freight operator, when Phil Anschutz offered to CA for only 400 million dollars, would probably generate a lot of traffic, with proper service and marketing. California not buying the Coastline from Phil Anschutz for $400 million, for both open access freight use and the full passenger potential of the line, is still the among the dumbest blunders and biggest missed opportunity I've witnessed in my second career in transportation planning...