WHO KNEW THE STUB OF THE ROODHOUSE DOODLEBUG LINE WAS SO VALUABLE?

Canadian Pacific made a successful tender for Kansas City Southern, and after what looked like a smooth start, the game of Rail Baron, or perhaps, the seeking of rents, began.  The proposed combination, in the way of all such combinations from Erie-Lackawanna to Southern Pacific Santa Fe, claimed all sorts of opportunities to haul more traffic.  "CPKC’s growth will be fueled by a combination of capturing traffic from other railroads, diverting trucks off the highway, and tapping new markets that only a merger could unlock, the railroads argue."  The first set of public comments contained "no deal breakers" according to Trains analyst Bill Stephens.  But that's when the Roodhouse Doodlebug Line first was in play.

CN wants to create its own route to Kansas City by prying away Kansas City Southern’s former Gateway Western trackage linking Springfield, Ill., with KC and St. Louis. CN’s request that CP be forced to divest the Gateway Western is reminiscent of Conrail’s failed attempts to scoop up Southern Pacific’s eastern lines during the Union Pacific-SP merger in 1995 and 1996. The key difference is that Conrail wanted SP’s crown jewel – access to Gulf Coast chemical plants and its Cotton Belt main lines to St. Louis. CN wants to create a new single-line route from Kansas City to Eastern Canada that it says would convert 80,000 shipments from truck to rail annually, or a third more than the entire CPKC merger. There’s no precedent for a carveout like what CN is proposing. And it seems to be a long shot under the old merger review rules under which CPKC is being judged.

On the other hand, people who live in areas where a lot of trains run professed dismay that ... a few more trains might be run.

The Coalition to Stop CPKC, made up of eight towns along CP’s Elgin Subdivision west of Chicago, made demands that can only be described as outlandish. They claim that up to $9.5 billion – yes, billion with a B – is required to mitigate the impact of freight-train traffic rising from the current three per day to 11 per day. The price tag is more than double the cost of the 70 improvement projects envisioned as part of the CREATE plan in and around Chicago. This is utter nonsense, and the STB should recognize it as such.

In contrast, the county that includes Minneapolis simply identifies potential merger-related traffic and grade-crossing issues, asks CP to study them, and then fund necessary improvements. This is the right and reasonable way to go about it.

Only very old residents of those communities might remember how much more heavily trafficked that line was when some of Union Pacific's interchange traffic plus meat out of northern Iowa and a few trains out of Kansas City rolled on that line.  But Chicago's Metra got involved.

Metra shares trackage with CP freight on two routes, its Milwaukee District-North and Milwaukee District-West lines — routes owned by Metra but dispatched by CP. The filing says CP has a “history of non-cooperation and contractual breaches with Metra,” that its “poor dispatching” leads to regular train delays, and that the Metra-owned infrastructure used by CP freights “cannot accommodate” the trains the merger would bring. It says modeling for its Milwaukee West line shows delays per 100 train-miles will increase by more than 400%.

After what we've learned about climate modelling and contagion modelling, perhaps we ought be skeptical of railroad companies essentially messing about with Train Dispatcher and coming up with scary scenarios.  There's no word on whether Canadian Pacific plan to restore the second main track west of Elgin, or whether Wisconsin and Southern, or whoever operate the former Milwaukee Road trackage from Prairie du Chien to Madison to Fox Lake might seek to wet their beaks on some of that new traffic.

But Metra and the Milwaukee District suburban politicians aren't done.

The group includes Bartlett, Bensenville, Elgin, Itasca, Hanover Park, Roselle, Wood Dale, and Schaumburg, Ill., all towns along the Metra Milwaukee District West Line between Chicago and Elgin. Metra owns the trackage, which is dispatched by CP.

The Coalition to Stop CPKC notes that CP projects that the KCS merger will increase freight traffic on the route to 11 trains per day, up from the current average of three. But it now says the line could see an additional 6.6 trains per day, at least at the outset of the merger.

CP intends to shift north-south traffic currently interchanged in Chicago to a single-line CPKC route via its Marquette Subdivision in Iowa. Metra claims that the Marquette Sub lacks the capacity to handle the additional traffic, even with planned capacity increases on the line.

Good grief, there used to be more than three passenger trains a day west of Elgin, figuring a Midwest Hiawatha, an Arrow (with Kansas City cars exchanged at Savanna to the Southwest Limited) and a mail train.  The Milwaukee Road made their pitch to host Union Pacific's City trains (plus the Challenger, which replaced the Midwest Hiawatha) as a bid to solicit even more freight traffic.

The communities are seeking up to $9 billion worth of mitigation projects. Approval of the merger should be accompanied by conditions that include imposition of mitigation measures, elimination of any additional freight traffic on the western end of the Elgin Subdivision, and limits on train length on the Elgin Sub, the coalition has told the board.

As ridiculous as all that sounds, we haven't gotten to the Roodhouse Doodlebug Line yet.

Bartlett Grain Co., which opened a grain loading facility on KCS in Jacksonville, Ill., in 2013, says a divestiture to CN would end the single-line service it currently enjoys for grain shipments to Mexico. The $25 million Jacksonville facility includes a loop track that can accommodate 100-car unit trains.

“Nearly all of our shipments from Jacksonville go to Mexico,” Bartlett President Bob Knief wrote to regulators this week. “We made that investment to support shuttle service to Mexico that is a direct move from origin to destination on KCS.”

Last year Bartlett shipped nearly 11,000 cars from Jacksonville to its three unloading facilities in Mexico, which it purchased and expanded over the past seven years. “Bartlett does not want to jeopardize its substantial investments in delivering grain to the Mexican market and serving central Illinois grain producers,” Knief wrote.

Jacksonville is the end of the secondary line that used to connect to the Alton Route at Bloomington, offering single-carrier service between Chicago and Kansas City, although I suspect Jacksonville to Pontiac or Joliet to Louisiana was the more common ticket sold.  And who knew the home town of the Big Eli Ferris wheel and Scrambler spin-'n-puke ride was as the Polish Corridor to the merger?

Taken together, though, the rent-seeking is too much for Railway Age editor William C. Vantuono.  "I guess when it comes to politics, it’s whatever floats your boat."