Railex to open new Jax Facility

[spuwho]

Well that was quick....

Breaking: Railex to close Jacksonville location

Railex, a rail company that specializes in cold storage, is shuttering its Jacksonville office.

The company, which opened in 2014, said it will end its Southeast operation for what is hoped to be a temporary closure.

"For various reasons beyond our control, we could not run a traditional unit train type service to Jacksonville," explained Paul Esposito, executive vice president of corporate affairs for Railex.

Esposito said that rail transit time was taking two days longer out of a small facility, located at 12740 Kenan Drive, making service time longer than what customers expected from the company.

Full article: http://www.bizjournals.com/jacksonville/news/2016/08/05/breakingrailex-to-close-jacksonville-location.html

I had requested on some railroad blogs for people to watch out for these Railex reefers going to Jax to see how they were routing.

The "issues outside their control" came down to two things.

-California Drought
-Poor routing by railroads

The extended drought in California has had a huge impact on the level of produce coming out of the central valley. Because of this, Railex couldnt get enough reefers together to justify a railroad using an express route.

So Union Pacific aggregated the reefers in Green River Wyoming with the Railex job from Walulla Washington. This meant the reefers had to be broken up in Chicago before turning over to CSX for the rest of the trip.

This added precious time to the shipment designed to beat trucks.

Even if the drought ended, CSX shut down the Illinois Sub that Railex had planned to use to cut the transcon time and avoid the Chicago overhead.

Last time I asked Railex was only generating 5-10 reefers per shipment to Jacksonville. With a twice a week schedule, that is a 20 car a week deal, not enough to keep a warehouse active or profitable.

So I am not surprised that Railex will want to revisit this in the future. If/when the drought ends in California, I can see this being restarted.