dailyimpact | It’s a picture that’s worth a
thousand choruses of “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.” Here in the Seventh
Straight Successful Year of the Recovery from the Great Recession,
tucked into a corner of the Arizona Desert, is a line of parked Union
Pacific locomotives. It was discovered on Google Earth, so it is, as
they say, visible from space. There are 292 of them, baking in the sun
like so many dinosaur skeletons, in a line stretching almost five miles.
They, and the people who used to run them, are now “excess capacity”
for one of the country’s largest freight haulers. In this, the Seventh
Straight Successful Year of the Great Recovery.
No one should be surprised. But even
when you know that trade — the buying and selling of stuff — has been
slowing down all over the world for years, it is startling to see such
stark, graphic evidence that we are all in deep trouble.
billingsgazette | GILLETTE —
Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad officials say they are keeping
about 150 locomotives and rail engines stored near Gillette because of
decreased demand.
BNSF
spokesman Matt Jones said the rail engines and two sets of box cars
remain at the railroad's yard in the Donkey Creek area because of a
downturn in rail shipping.
The problems can be attributed to
the decline in the coal sector. The passage of the federal Clean Power
Plan has pushed power plants away from coal and toward natural gas.
The impact can be seen in
the Powder River Basin, as nearby coal companies Alpha Natural Resources
and Arch Coal have filed for bankruptcy.
Jones said the declining demand for transportation has hit several sectors, not just coal.
inforum | FARGO -
An economic downturn involving a variety of commodities across various
parts of the United States has resulted in BNSF Railway parking about 45
of its train locomotives at the railroad’s train yard just off 12th
Avenue North west of the North Dakota State University campus.
“Customers’ volumes across a broad spectrum of commodities
have come down somewhat from their prior estimates,” said Amy McBeth, a
spokeswoman for BNSF. “As a result, we are strategically storing
locomotives in some yard locations across our network.”
McBeth said the locomotives will remain stored until traffic volumes warrant returning them to service.
Quarterly
profits for Forth Worth-based BNSF, which is owned by Berkshire
Hathaway, fell 25 percent in the first quarter of 2016.
The
railroad has been cutting staff in the wake of a changing economic
environment that includes low energy prices, the strong dollar and other
factors, McBeth said.
“Nationwide, while petroleum products volumes are down, coal is down, too, as are a number of other commodities,” she added.
newsok | BNSF Railway has parked dozens of its locomotives at a storage yard
north of downtown Oklahoma City over the past several weeks as slowing
traffic demand has left the units idle.
The engines parked along the east side of Interstate 235 north of NW
23 are from BNSF trains throughout the country, company spokesman Joe
Sloan said.
"We have a reduced amount of freight traffic now, and that storage point was available," he said.
Sloan said there is no timeline as to when the locomotives are expected back on the rails.
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