Transport: Gauging the Recession

Conrail Local CD-10 crossed the Charles River at Cambridge, Massachusetts behind B23-7 locomotive #1980 on 2-October-1997, a sight never to be seen again with the end of Conrail in 1999 and the retirement of the B23-7's soon thereafter

TORONTO, ONTARIO - Railfans often say that they know what is happening in the economy simply by looking at the traffic they are seeing in the trains that are going by. When trains start becoming more frequent and longer, and leased locomotives start supplementing those of the railroad being observed, the economy is experiencing an up-tick. When trains become fewer in number, become shorter, and locomotives start to line up in storage lines, a recession is coming or has already arrived.

Around Toronto, the railroads are showing the signs of recession. Most leased locomotives that had been supplementing Canadian Pacific power for most of 2008 have disappeared, and a series of SD9043MAC locomotives that had been regulars on transcontinental trains have been placed in storage. A number of trains no longer run, foremost the famous "frame train" from St. Thomas to Oshawa, Ontario that used to provide dedicated service for truck frames.

The most interesting report of declining traffic on the railroad has come out of my old stomping grounds in Massachusetts. According to postings on the bulletin boards at railroad.net, CSX has stopped running the Selkirk, New York to Boston, Massachusetts mixed freight trains, known in CSX days as Q420 eastbound and Q421 westbound. I was first introduced to these trains before CSX took over the "Boston Line" and these trains were still run by Conrail under the symbols SEBO and BOSE. I liked to pretend that "SE" stood for Seattle instead of Selkirk and that the trains would make a transcontinental run across the nation.

Indeed, some of the traffic in those trains was coming from the Pacific coast. Western produce (from California and Washington state) rode in refrigerator cars from western railroads on the Q420/SEBO trains into Beacon Park Yard in Boston, where they were transferred to a local train, known in Conrail days as the CD-10 ("CD" meaning Chelsea-Danvers) for the final few miles to the New England Produce Center in Chelsea, Massachusetts, where it was distributed to local grocery stores. It was this local, which became the WABP-10 (or B721) local after CSX took over in 1999, that ran through the MIT campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and provided my railfanning staple during my time there.


CSX Local B721 (WABP-10) crossed the Charles River into Cambridge, Massachusetts on 30-September-2001 behind GP40-2 #6204, bound for New England Produce in Chelsea, Massachusetts

Now, this produce traffic will instead ride train Q436 out of Selkirk to Framingham, Massachusetts, where it will be transferred to the WABP-10. Instead of going on duty at Chelsea in the afternoon, the WABP-10 will start at Framingham in the morning, drop off Boston traffic (mostly garbage containers) at Beacon Park, and then continue on the Chelsea and return to Framingham in the evening.

Ten years ago, this would have been a ridiculous operating plan. In those days, the SEBO/Q420 could have more than fifty cars, way too many for a local job to handle. The CD-10/WABP-10 itself might have upwards of 20 cars, creating a full day's work to switch the Chelsea industries and make a run out to Beacon Park and back. There was no way that the crew would have had time to run out to Framingham and back in a twelve-hour shift. That CSX thinks it can get away with this operating plan is a sign that traffic has decreased significantly.

Perhaps CSX will prove incorrect, the work won't get done on a daily basis, and the abolished train will need to be brought back. But, the changes to my old favorite train, the Chelsea Local, demonstrate that the railroad thinks the recession is real.