Union Pacific dropping Refrigeration line.

[CMStPnP]

I am surprised as well.  I thought this was to be a new revenue source for the railroad and recapture revenue producing perishable frieght.   They already have a 1-2 day shipping advantage over trucks due to recent changes in truck log requirements by the Feds.    Why not invest a little more money so the trains move faster through Chicago or route around Chicago?     Seems to be rather foolish to completely abandon the concept that had so much potential after only a short period of bad returns caused by the pandemic.    If it was me I would have at least attempted expansion to other cities first.

[daveklepper]

1.  Is BNSF doing anything in this market?

2.  Of all seven Class Ones:  When a new freight customer calls, which give the customer a live voice to talk to and which a series of numbers to push to reach just the right recorded message?

[Overmod]

CMStPnP

I am surprised as well.  I thought this was to be a new revenue source for the railroad and recapture revenue producing perishable frieght

The problem is (as greyhounds or others could explain) that the Cold Connect model relies on proprietary traffic-accumulation points both for origin volume and destination convenience -- think of Rotterdam like a really nice resort built at Lorton or Sanford -- and for people with the Loup Logistics mentality this means if the critical volume of actual paying traffic drops below the costs to run the facility pairs for part of that service they will abandon it just like the chase in THX1138.

Now, if we extend an iron-ocean mentality only slightly, it follows that sharing the (considerable!) costs of a modern controlled-environment facility offering UP's touted 'never break the chain' guarantee across multiple providers both limits the risk and increases prospective intermodal share dramatically.  In fact it brings us much closer to a workable version of ttrraaffiicc's paradigm for the future, in which expensive autonomous (or wage-slave) tractors work close to home with reasonable guaranteed traffic, but the long-range running is done largely with relatively simple purpose-built equipment with low and easily-connected energy sources, whether in part via 'road trains' of very different "truck" type or by aggregation for rail.

I think there is still considerable advantage in systems that use relatively-low-tare vehicles handled without damage or shock and easily stripped/stuffed either in full CA or with reasonable customer assurance of payload quality assurance.  That this is TOFC, not COFC has been reasonably proven over lo! these many years in just about every proprietary intermodal scheme that does not involve either marine shipping or really, really cheap ISO containers left over as a by-product of Asian cheap-market dominance.  With the advent of slimline reefers that can be run off a hybrid battery or connected-power source to "reduce carbon footprint" or whatever in a world increasingly poised to reward or subsidize that stuff as 'beneficial' in some public sense, the general applicability of TOFC (vs. say the stranded capital involved in purpose-built Cryo-Trans style CA reefers that have to be run expediently in lanes to offer comparable fungible and scalable capacity) becomes still more obvious.