So Why Would Canadian Pacific Reacquire It’s Old Line East of Saint-Jean, Quebec, now the Central Maine & Quebec Railway (of the Lac Magantic Derailment and Fire infamy)?

So why would Canadian Pacific reacquire it’s old line, now the Central Maine & Quebec (what was the Montreal, Maine & Atlantic of the Lac Magantic, Quebec tank train derailment and resultant fire and deaths infamy)?

Well, my opinion is that CP has seen the writing on the wall:  Transcontinental Intermodal rail service won’t ever be the once lucrative cash cow it once was, before the opening of the New Pana-Max shipping lane of the Panama Canal.  With this tectonic shift in the way intermodal containers go to marketing and distribution centers, to deliver products at retail stores, I believe that the Management at CP decided it was in their best interest to have an East Coast port or two, from which they could ship short run intermodal trains to their Marketing Hubs and Distribution Centers in the Eastern half of Canada and the northern US.  

Am I delusional?  I don’t think so - Let me continue my thoughts.  Before The new Pana-Max Lane of the Panama Canal opened, I wrote a blogpost explaining, from a Supply Chain perspective, why Transcontinental Intermodal would die a quick death.  

• I started by showing that most markets for goods are in the eastern US, as that was where the major Population Centers and, therefore the Marketing Centers and Distribution Centers we’re located (70 % east of the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers)  and many of the largest Western Population Centers were on the Coast and did not require Intermodal Containers to ship by rail.  
• I detailed the “Interchange Points” where railroads would transfer traffic and their problems.  
• I ran a SWOT Analysis, showing the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats on each transcontinental rail route from the Pacific ports to the interchange locations.
• I showed that it will cost less for containers to be delivered by ship to East Coast Ports and delivered to Distribution Centers in the East to Midwest of North America, simply because 1 container ship could haul the equivalent of 22+ container trains of 300 Containers.

I later wrote another blogpost, about a new joint BNSF-CSX Intermodal train from LA to North Baltimore, Ohio and discussed how CSX would probably convince the suppliers that by shipping directly to the East Coast and then by CSX that their shipping costs could be lowered.

As Savannah made an agreement with St.Louis Freightways  to ship from Savannah to St. Louis and then a second agreement to ship to Chicagoland quicker and at a lower cost than from the west coast, I pondered if Savannah, the 4th busiest port in the US by TEU Lift Volume, would “run the table” on Intermodal traffic and “If All (rail)Roads would lead to Savannah.

With this article in Trains Magazine’s News Wire, http://trn.trains.com/news/news-wire/2019/12/04-canadian-pacific-has-eyes-on-its-old-route-to-quebec-city, my guess is that the editors are thinking the same thing as I am:  It's no longer going to be profitable to ship containers by rail from the Pacific Coast to East Coast Markets, when container ships can carry containers directly to East Coast Ports at a lower cost.