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"These cuts in the workforce, and now the scrambling to hire people amid “labor shortages,” is contributing to issues in meeting heavy transportation demand: Union Pacific temporarily suspended traffic from Los Angeles into Chicago, and BNSF has started to meter traffic into Chicago, to allow them to catch up unloading the trains that are stuck in their Chicago railyards. The resulting pot-banging by frustrated shippers has gotten the attention of the STB.
“The railroads cannot strip down to bare-bones operations,” STB chairman Martin Oberman told the Wall Street Journal. “It’d be like a professional football team only having one quarterback.”
The American Chemistry Council – which represents companies in the chemical industry, such as BASF, Chemours (the DuPont spinoff), Chevron Phillips Chemical, DuPont, ExxonMobil Chemical, etc. – lamented in a letter to the STB, cited by the WSJ, that railcars were waiting at railyards for over a week and travel times for some routes more than doubled. Some factories were running out of materials because shipments had gotten hung up and were approaching the point where they’d have to close, and other factories have cut production.
The railroads “clearly weren’t as prepared as they should have been for the increase in traffic,” Jeff Sloan, senior director of regulatory and technical affairs at the Council, told the WSJ. The deteriorating service shows that the railroads cut too deep before the pandemic and were unable to catch up, he said."
