Railcar repair

[Murphy Siding]

     Another thread suggests that railcar repair businesses don't have a long life span. Locally, we have one, Midwest Railcar Repair, https://www.google.com/maps/@43.6181891,-96.5760326,16.75z that has been going strong for a lot of years. I thought maybe it was because they repaired a lot of cars owned by non-railroad entities, but the majority of the cars they have awaiting repair are from Class 1 railroads, heavy to BNSF.

     I would presume that most Class 1 railroads have their own car repair shops  where they could repair them at wholesale prices. What advantage is there to having the repairs outsourced?

[mudchicken]

Location-Location-Location....Being in an area frequented by a certain type of railcar. (Especially if the car belongs to someone a long way from home)

Special moves, especially empty cars, to a home shop for repairs can be costly and slow. (especially for seasonal cars like grain hoppers - the longer you are laid - up, the less revenue you generate.)

Your home shop may not be set up for certain special repairs (Look at a pocket guide in the vendor section sometime to see what a certain shop does)

Home shops can get overwhelmed.

Could it be that some of those online shops just have cars piling-up waiting on authority to be repaired? Hospital trains are known to start out of these places or these places also may have some cars scrapped on the spot if the local R-I-P tracks cannot get them moving home.

[PNWRMNM]

Labor rates. Railroad wages tend to be higher than other wages in most locations. Railroad fringes are also higher, especially railroad retirement compared to social security.

Tank cars are virtually privately owned and tank repair is subject to a host of qualification issues that your average railroad shop is not, so there is a specialization issue with tank cars.

[charlesb]

Union Tank converted the EL diesel shop in Marion Ohio for repairs to there cars.  As you can imagine it’s very busy.

[Juniata Man]

Railcar repair shops are like any other business.  If the shop does a quality job insofar as addressing mechanical issues and linings and exterior coatings last the expected period of time given the product service; the shop can expect repeat business.

When I was still working; we had about a half dozen shops we regularly used depending on the car type or nature of the work being performed.  We had been using these half dozen shops for upwards of 20 years.

In years when we had an unusually large number of cars requiring regulatory qualification; we would bring on additional shop facilities to get the work done within the time available.  Some of these did such a good job we gave them repeat business and one or two others I wouldn’t have gone back to even if they worked for free.

[Paul_D_North_Jr]

A few years back there were some scandals involving shops that billed for work not done or not necessary, parts thrown in rivers, etc.  As I recall there were some articles in the WSJ about it, and I believe some prosecutions resulted.

- PDN.