{"id":15597,"date":"2024-02-28T08:49:23","date_gmt":"2024-02-27T22:49:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.vibewire.com.au\/?p=15597"},"modified":"2024-02-28T08:49:29","modified_gmt":"2024-02-27T22:49:29","slug":"union-pacific-reactivates-the-hump-at-davidson-yard-in-fort-worth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.vibewire.com.au\/?p=15597","title":{"rendered":"Union Pacific reactivates the hump at Davidson Yard in Fort Worth"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Move comes as Norfolk Southern is returning two idled humps to service<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"UPFtWorthDavidsonYard4\"
Cars roll down the hump at Union Pacific\u2019s Davidson Yard in Fort Worth, Texas. Lance Lassen<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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OMAHA, Neb. \u2014 Are hump yards making an unlikely comeback?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Probably not, although three mothballed humps are once again using gravity to classify freight cars.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Union Pacific has reactivated the hump at Davidson Yard in Fort Worth, Texas, to ease the burden on the classification yard at West Colton, Calif., where UP is expanding the small \u201cpop-up\u201d intermodal terminal it opened in the summer of 2021.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Union Pacific\u2019s new intermodal terminal in West Colton, Calif., in the heart of the Inland Empire area, is where imports are transloaded into domestic containers before being loaded onto intermodal trains bound for the Midwest and Texas. (Union Pacific)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe recently began operating the Fort Worth hump as part of a strategic plan to reduce manifest switching operations at West Colton,\u201d spokeswoman Robynn Tysver says. \u201cThe move facilitates expansion of our intermodal ramp serving the Inland Empire intermodal market. Humping operations will continue at West Colton but at a reduced level as the next phase of intermodal construction begins.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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A tank car rolls down the recently activated hump at Brosnan Yard in Macon, Ga. Norfolk Southern<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Norfolk Southern announced last week that it is running cars over the hump at Brosnan Yard in Macon, Ga., and will soon resume hump operations at Moorman Yard in Bellevue, Ohio, after maintenance work is completed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What Davidson, Brosnan, and Moorman yards have in common is that they were idled as part of each railroad\u2019s shift to an operating model based on the principles of Precision Scheduled Railroading. CSX Transportation, NS, and UP have idled or completely shut down a combined 19 hump yards since March 2017.<\/p>\n\n\n\n


Some of the shutdowns were relatively short-lived, such as at Radnor Yard in Nashville on CSX and DeButts Yard in Chattanooga on NS.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

UP idled the hump at Davidson Yard in January 2020. It was the fifth hump shut down since UP adopted PSR in late 2018. UP also canceled the completion of its proposed Brazos Yard that was being built near Hearne, Texas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet the hump yard trend at UP has not been all downhill: The railroad has improved and expanded Englewood Yard in Houston. The hump received a new master retarder in December 2020. UP subsequently added a new hump control system at Englewood, along with new signals, new switches and ties, and extended bowl tracks so the railroad could assemble longer trains. UP also replaced three bridges in the yard.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The first car rolls down Englewood Yard\u2019s hump into its newly installed master retarder in December 2020. Union Pacific<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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UP and NS declined to say whether the reopening of the humps would be temporary measures or more long-term operational changes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The conversion of hump yards to flat-switching facilities \u2014 or shutting them down outright \u2014 has been among the most visible moves of the late E. Hunter Harrison\u2019s PSR operating model.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIs this a retreat from PSR? Absolutely not,\u201d says independent analyst Anthony B. Hatch.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The idling of humps was an outcome of PSR and was not among its goals, Hatch says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Operational changes \u2014 such as pre-blocking cars at origin, block-swapping cars en route, and pushing switching to smaller yards \u2014 starved humps of the volume they needed to remain open.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Humps remain the most efficient way to classify high volumes of traffic, but before PSR many railroads ran cars out of route simply to reach a hump yard or ran cars through more humps than necessary on their journey across the railroad. That inflated hump yard volumes while slowing service.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It takes cars 24 hours or more to make their way through a hump, versus 6 to 8 hours in a block swap, railroad operating officials say.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Since adopting PSR, UP\u2019s switching volume is down by nearly a third, CEO Lance Fritz has said, because the railroad touches cars fewer times en route.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When UP converted Davidson Yard to a flat-switching facility, about half of its volume was parceled out among nine smaller terminals in the Texoma Service Unit in Texas and Oklahoma.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

During its earnings call last week, NS officials said they once again needed the switching capacity that Macon and Bellevue provide.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe reactivated these humps to give ourselves some additional capacity that we need in two areas served by Macon and Bellevue. The way switching demand has evolved since 2020, there\u2019s enough critical mass to justify returning them to service as hump yards,\u201d Chief Operating Officer Cindy Sanborn said. The move also was made to concentrate traffic at Macon and Bellevue in order to free up yard crews elsewhere for use in local service amid ongoing crew shortages.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cFlat switching is slower \u2014 and harder \u2014 and when combined with inexperienced crews is a fluidity problem,\u201d Hatch says, pointing to a KBX Rail presentation from the North American Rail Shippers conference this year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Union Pacific has reactivated the hump at Davidson Yard in Fort Worth, Texas, to ease the burden on the classification yard at West Colton, Calif., where UP is expanding the small \u201cpop-up\u201d intermodal terminal it opened in the summer of 2021.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":20,"featured_media":15598,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[47,46],"tags":[9,7,11],"class_list":["post-15597","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-rail-news","category-union-pacific","tag-freight","tag-transport","tag-usa"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vibewire.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15597","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vibewire.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vibewire.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vibewire.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/20"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vibewire.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15597"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.vibewire.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15597\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15599,"href":"https:\/\/www.vibewire.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15597\/revisions\/15599"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vibewire.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/15598"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vibewire.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15597"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vibewire.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15597"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vibewire.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15597"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}