M/V Jincy

The good news: I rarely get to see a Crounse boat up close. Today I did, so I got lots of pictures.

The bad news: Now I have to sort them, select the good ones, edit them and post them somewhere.

Reflections

One thing about less barge traffic on the Ohio River is that it's easier to find still, reflective water.

Even when a tow goes by.

On the other hand, if you have a river flowing right to left and wind blowing left to right and a downbound boat pushing barges loaded to ten feet, you don't get reflections. You get big splashes.

A bridge to go silent

During the quarterly conference call with investment analysts yesterday, executives of Norfolk Southern confirmed they plan to shut down the rail line between Charleston, W.Va., and Columbus, Ohio.

NS had said earlier this month that idling parts of the line known as the West Virginia Secondary was under consideration. Although they did not come out and say it at the time, you had to figure the shutdown was almost certain merely from the fact they had mentioned it.

The line crosses the Ohio River at Point Pleasant, W.Va. On the Ohio side, it uses CSX tracks up to Middleport at a place called Hobson yard, where the railroad does crew changes and such and sends trains on to Columbus if they are northbound. CSX itself hasn't used those tracks in years as far as I know, considering the tracks that led to them from Gallipolis, Ohio, and points north was removed in the early 1980s.

The fact the West Virginia Secondary is being idled is not surprising, as there are few if any major customers along it between Charleston and Columbus. Norfolk Southern is fending off a takeover attempt by Canadian Pacific Railway, and it's doing what it can to cut costs to the bone to increase earnings and convince stockholders that it will function best as a stand-alone company.

The shutdown of the West Virginia Extended means train traffic will come to an end across the Point Pleasant bridge. A short-line railroad might take it over, but if Norfolk Southern doesn't have enough traffic to justify keeping it active, who else would?

The bridge was finished in 1907. Its owners have included the Kanawha and Michigan Railway Company, New York Central, Penn Central, Conrail and now Norfolk Southern. I don't know how many other railroad bridges there are on the Ohio that are no longer in service, but this is the only one I know of within an easy drive of where I live near Huntington, W.Va. This does not count the Purple People Bridge in Cincinnati or the Big Four Bridge at Louisville, both of which have been converted to pedestrian use and so are still in service in some way.

I do know of an unused CSX bridge over the Kanawha River at Charleston. The bridge had deteriorated since it went out of service. A few years ago a study was done to see what it would take to make it into a bicyce and pedestrian bridge. The cost was about $12 million, which quickly killed that idea. The dream might be floating out there, but if anything concrete is going on, I haven't heard about it.

I don't know what shape the bridge at Point Pleasant is in. There may be talk about converting it to pedestrian or bicycle use if no railroad is interested in it, but there's always the question of money.

So for now, an uncertain countdown begins to the day another bridge goes silent from lack of use.

Coal collapse on the Ohio, part 3

Text and chart © 2016 Jim Ross


About twenty years ago -- give or take a few -- coal truck traffic on U.S. 52 in Wayne County, W.Va., was a significant public safety concern. Overloaded trucks carrying coal from mines in southern West Virginia to docks on the lower eight miles of the Big Sandy River were involved in several accidents, plus they were so numerous that it was rare to drive a few miles on a weekday without encountering one. There were probably trucks in Kentucky supplying docks on that side of the river, but U.S. 23 is a four-lane road with more room for error.

The last few times I was on U.S. 52, there were still coal trucks but not as many. Likewise, when I've been down at the mouth of the Big Sandy, I don't see as many small boats bringing coal to the Ohio for the larger boats to pick up.

The graph explains a lot about that.

A caveat here is that I had to use two different kinds of publications from the Waterborne Commerce Statistics Center to get numbers from 2008 and earlier to compare with 2009 and later. But the chart does reflect the reality that less coal is coming out of the Big Sandy, and that's probably a big reason why less coal is moving through the Greenup and Gallipolis Robert C. Byrd locks nowadays.

Coal collapse on the Ohio, part 2

Text, charts and data © 2015 Jim Ross

The Kanawha River has long fed the Ohio River in terms of water and commerce. Undoubtedly part of the reason coal traffic on the middle Ohio is down is due in part to traffic on the Kanawha being down.

(Volume numbers in thousands of tons).

Campbell Transportation removed most of its operations from the mouth of the Kanawha a couple of years ago. Because power plants are burning less coal, there is less demand. Plus coal exports are down. The combination of the two means less coal coming out of the Kanawha to be moved on the Ohio.

Tomorrow: The Big Sandy River

Coal collapse on the Ohio, part 1

All text and charts © 2016 Jim Ross

My return to serious river photography began in late 2007 when I bought my digital SLR camera. I found boats I was familiar with from the 1960s and 1970s, and I found some that were relatively new to the river. I missed some familiar names such as Ohio River Co. and M/G Transport Services, but the industry was undergoing a consolidation similar to those of others I had covered as a business reporter.

Thanks to losing my job as my then-employer had to slash payroll by 12 percent, I found myself with some free time in the summer of 2009. So, I began getting new pictures of towboats, dams, bridges and other things you see along the river. That year and 2010 were good years to be on the river, as traffic was strong and companies were bringing new boats to the Ohio.

As I've mentioned before, nowadays when I go down to the river, I see fewer boats. Here, in two graphs, is why.

Coal is the main product moved on the Ohio River in the area that I am most familiar with. Here is a chart comparing the amount of coal moved through each lock in 2005 and 2015.

If you want to look at that in terms of how tonnage numbers changed in those years, take a look at this one.

(All numbers in both charts are in thousands of tons).

I spend most of my time in the Greenup pool, and as you can tell, the locks at Greenup and Gallipolis Robert C. Byrd have gone from being the busiest in moving coal to being among the least busy. That's probably due to the collapse of the Central Appalachian coal industry.

More on that soon.

Next: The Kanawha River

More bad news for the coal industry

If all goes well, I will have more on the state of coal on this blog this weekend. That assumes my power and my DSL service remain on during the big snowstorm we're supposed to have. The snow started falling here in Huntington WV around 9:30 a.m.

First, a federal court has refused to grant a stay of the EPA's Clean Power Plan. Notice that Murray Energy, which moves coal on the upper Ohio, is one of the plaintiffs. (If that link doesn't work, try this one.).

This is off the river, but still significant. I looked at numbers for CSX last week, and they were down, but it is industry-wide. Railroad loadings of coal in the first two weeks of this year are down.


Back to the snow, the National Weather Service said we could have whiteout conditions today. For boats that have radar, I assume that's like running in the dark of night with the exception that your spotlights don't help out a whole lot during a whiteout.

Back when I was younger, I liked snow. When I was in college, I preferred winter snow to winter rain because my feet didn't get nearly as wet in snow as they did in rain. Then I graduated and started to drive in the stuff. That first winter in a car that was terrible in snow was ... not fun. It was also one of those years when the Ohio River froze over, the first time I had seen that.

Crew change for the M/V City of Redwood

Today at Huntington WV

I talked with one guy who had gotten off the boat. He said he was heading for Louisiana. I hope he made a lot of progress before the snow moved in south of here.

Time to get this show back on the river

In the past few weeks, I have dealt with Internet reliability issues and other stuff that has kept me off here. But now most of those have been taken care of, so please check back this weekend as I roll out some original material regarding Ohio River cargo traffic and as I prepare for what I hope will be Gone But Not Forgotten Week.

To bring a few things up to date, here is a picture of one my friends, a permanent resident of Huntington's Riverfront Park who likes me as long as I keep finding month-old french fries my granddaughter has dropped in my car.

It's good to be back.