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[quote user="John WR"] [quote user="Murphy Siding"]However, there is an interseting backstory to this.  The rail spur, and the lumberyard are only 4 years old.  We've probably received about a dozen cars total on it.  The owner of the company, my boss, made the decision to put in the rail spur.  Had he asked me,  I would have said it was not a good investment, as we'd never save enough freight to cover the investment.  He didn't ask me.  He asked the BNSF what they thought of the idea.  ' Turns out, they thought it was a great idea!  In fact, they've used our spur more times as a parking spot than we have.[/quote] Murphy,   Your backstory is fascinating.  It sounds to me like BNSF top management values your siding and wants to keep it.  After all, any business executive knows that some business is more profitable than other business but overall the most profitable tactic is to keep all business.  That means that you can prioritize but you cannot let your service deteriorate to the point where you drive customers away.   However, local management many have a hidden agenda.  They want to make their life a little easier and if they can claim there is no demand for your kind of business their life will be made easier.  They allow the service to deteriorate so you will walk away and count on the rigidity of the organization to cover up their actions which tend to diminish profits.   I'm sure your boss and you have thought about how you can deal with the problem but have not had much success.  Clearly, the truck delivery solution is there if you want it.  However, you boss could have had that without paying for the rail siding.  Since he has brought and paid for rail deliveries I see no reason why he should now walk away from his purchase.  I would pursue seeking rail deliveries although it might be necessary to use truck deliveries also.   In any case, I hope your boss is able to find the right person to give him the service that he was promised and that he has brought and paid for.   John <div style="clear:both;"></div> [/quote] The railroad may have just encouraged the new siding because they would rather run on a new siding than an old one. I would guess that with small shippers, the railroad simply does not know whether they make money on the service or not because the question is so close to the threshold.  They probably make money one month and lose money another month, so there is no way to know what the annual result will be until it is tallied.  I expect that nobody in management wants to take the risk of showing that the railroad lost money for a year on serving a small customer. The only solution I can see is for Murphy’s lumberyard to convert to trucks.  Maybe there is some value in recouping the value of the land used by the siding.  Other than that, the railroads would need to come up with a new way of getting the freight off of their trains and into the customer’s plant.  Perhaps something along the lines of that idea using explosives mentioned earlier would work.  What is needed is a method of containerizing the lumber and getting it off the train and into the customer’s plant without spurs and switches.  But maybe the railroad would not even like the financial risk of running the peddler train, so the container would have to move from the freight yard to the lumberyard by truck.
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