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[quote]QUOTE: Originally posted by PNWRMNM Dave, Had to attend to life for a couple of days so could not respond to yours of 29th until now. As I read that post you conclude that BNSF wants an exhorbitant rate over Stampede Pass because you could not get a low enough rate to do intermodal from Yakima to the ports of Seattle and Tacoma. I do not think the facts support your conclusion, and here is why. I assume you are looking at import-export traffic, which would be mostly export from Yakima. That is a one way load. Yakima to Seattle and Tacoma is about 150 one way highway miles, 300 round trip. I suspect truckers would do this move for $1.25 per mile or $375 per round trip. You have to offer shippers two discounts, one for slower service, and one to use you versus somebody else. I can not imagine that less than 20% would do it, so your maximum rate becomes $300 per box round trip. You have two drays, one at the port and one in Yakima. If you got them for $75 each, round trip I would be surprised. That is $150 per box. Terminals are not free either. If you gould get on and off for $50 per lift you have $200 in terminal costs. Considering there is no terminal in Yakima, I guess you figured to build your own and recover the operating and capital costs at $100 per box. If so, you are a braver man than I. The problem is we are to $350 in costs before we get to linehaul issues. There are some minor complications here. First you have to use single stack equipment because double will not fit thru Stampede. That makes your business a lot less attractive in the terminals at Seattle and Tacoma because your equipment takes twice as much track space as double stack equipment. Another issue is that your traffic is split between the ports so you go to them on differend days or have two small blocks each day. How you would get to the intermodal terminals is also a puzzle as the trains now being operated do not go to SIG nor the Tacoma dock yards which are on the Muni. Implies either very small, hence expensive, dedicated trains or set out blocks and a lot of switch engine hours to get from the setout points to the intermodal yards. Switching to and from the dock yards adds cost, transit time and unreliability to your system. My point is that even if BNSF was willing to do the linehaul for free, the teminal costs and issues kill you. Open access is not the solution to your problem. BNSF was simply smart enough not do do something that does not make economic sense. Mac [/quote] Mac, All I can tell you is the 3PL that I was working with came up with a per box price that beat the current trucking rate, paid the equipment lease rate, and still made good money for BNSF, well over and above the cost of a crew, locomotives, etc. Don't forget, the trucking outfits are looking for ways to move their loads in a constant climate of driver shortages. Anytime someone comes up with a way to take trucks off the roads to their benefit, they are more than willing to participate. The technology we were using was a combination of spine cars and RailRunner bi-modal chassis. We also were going to use DPU's to max up the number of boxes to up to 175 per trip. The use of bimodal and spine cars allowed us to access rail on dock facilities, cutting back on demurage costs. The point is, if a 3PL was willing to take this risk, then it is apparent that if we had open access the project would have gone forward. But because of BNSF's unwillingness to try out this project because they did not have the patience to work out the kinks, that was the turning point in my former opposition to open access. I firmly believe the current monopoly climate in the rail industry is the cause of this lack of aggresiveness and innovation, and only some action that forces competitiveness onto the rail industry will break this attitude. Maybe it's time the feds started taxing railroads every time trucks are forced onto the highways when they don't want to be bothered with business opportunities or when they decide to abandon more trackage. I don't know. But the current railroad monopoly climate is keeping the nation from maximizing the opportunities to take trucks off the highways. If you have a better solution than open access for maximizing the use of non-highway movement of trucks, I'm all ears.
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