By BYRON ROHRIG, Evansville Courier & Press staff writer
rohrigb@courierpress.com
There were some bumpy rides during the inaugural year of the Evansville Western Railway. But overall, A.V. "Tony" Reck, president and chief executive of a company that includes the 124-mile short line, says he's happy with the trip. And he likes what he sees down the track.
Two days before 2006 dawned, Evansville Western assumed CSX Transportation's St. Louis Subdivision, connecting Okawville in Southern Illinois with CSX's Howell Yard in Evansville.
Paducah & Louisville Railway won a bidding contest, bought the track and ties and signed a lease for 20 years with a renewal option. The new EVWR, as it is designated in its official reporting marks, set up shop in Mount Vernon, Ind., home of its largest customers. By the end of 2006, it had moved some 55,000 freight carloads.
Neither EVWR nor CSX could anticipate everything. CSX had used Howell Yard for storing rail cars and putting them together into trains, but with Howell out of the picture for Evansville Western, "we were hamstrung for the first six months or so. We literally built a new yard," Reck said.
The facility west of Indiana 69 in Mount Vernon commanded a goodly chunk of the carrier's $5.5 million capital budget in 2006. Another large allocation went for buying and rebuilding used locomotives for the line's current fleet of nine.
CSX Corp. Inc., one of a few American rail behemoths, is indispensible to the national rail system and to short lines that feed it. Nonetheless, it gets bad marks - along with counterparts, including Norfolk Southern Corp. and Union Pacific Railroad and virtually all large railroads throughout U.S. rail history - in tailoring service to the needs of smaller customers.
Railroaders and customers agree Evansville Western created a new environment where everybody, including CSX, is coming out a winner.
"CSX sold the railroad and yet kept most of the business," Reck said. Evansville Western's main connect to the outside world is by feeding carloads to CSX at Howell. For EVWR, "financially, we've done excellent," Reck added.
Customers, too, are glad to benefit from a short line's characteristic aim to please.
Top Ag Cooperative, with elevators at the western end of the line at Okawville, was too small to load on its own a 65-car unit grain train within allotted time, usually 48 hours.
That spawned three problems: Top Ag paid much more per carload to ship; it sometimes couldn't get empty cars, because big railroads would sooner allocate empty cars to a large-unit train than to small elevators wanting 15 cars; and many markets - large chicken feeders in the Southeast, for example - were beyond its reach: economics dictated their demand for 65 loads in a unit train instead of Top Ag's 15 cars at a time.
So Greg Phelps, EVWR's head of sales and business development, got together with Dale Tippett, Top Ag's general manager and with his counterpart at Peavy Grain in McLeansboro, Ill., also a smaller elevator. Could Top Ag and Peavy combine on a unit train?
CSX policy was against "breaking a train" that way, but Evansville Western was game. It took months to put the deal together.
"It wasn't just us," Phelps said. "(Top Ag and Peavy) had to do some things to make it work."
The result was a series of EVWR unit trains, laden with cargo from both elevators, delivered to Howell Yard for hook-and-haul by CSX to big-ticket clients.
"It's definitely helped us maintain our business and move forward," Tippett said. "If we hadn't been able to do unit trains, it wouldn't have let us bid as aggressively for customers' grain. ... Our advantage has been to keep and maintain our customer base."
A big shipper closer to home, Mount Vernon's GE Plastics, now has a nearby yard for storing cars for its outbound loads. Result: faster service. At Southwind Maritime Centre, rail customers big and small say they're pleased.
"From the general manager to conductors and engineers (the railroad employs 30), all have great attitudes, workmanship and service are good and their time frames are accurate," said Taylor Kanipe, general manager of Mount Vernon Transfer Terminal.
The rail-to-barge coal handler at Southwind moved 2.2 million tons of coal in 2006, up 10 percent from the year before. Kanipe says coal's future is bright. Scrubber systems on more power plants mean the area's higher sulfur coal is in demand again. Reck said two new mines may start up along the Evansville Western line in Illinois within five years.
Coal was a huge part of the more than 4 million tons moved through the port in 2006. That tonnage was the biggest since 1998, and part of a mostly steady climb since 2000, when tonnage was 2.1 million, said the Indiana Port Commission's Jody Peacock. Part of the port's mix is Agrium Inc., a comparatively tiny shipper, where manager Roger Drake also sees in EVWR a "better fit." Agrium gets 100 to 300 cars yearly.
Three ethanol plants now in some stage of development in Posey County, Ind., should bring a big traffic boost, too. The railroad is talking with another ethanol manufacturer about a plant in Southern Illinois, Phelps said.