<B>AFPA, Paper Companies Initiate Freight Pilot Test</B>

The American Forest and Paper Association and several paper companies have initiated a freight car pilot test. The goal of the test is to determine whether boxcars can be tracked and moved more quickly.

Along with the AFPA, the test involves paper companies Westvaco, International Paper, Georgia-Pacific, Weyerhaeuser and Rayonier, railroads CSX, Norfolk Southern and BNSF; and GE/IntelliTrans, a shipment management company.

The test, slated to run for six months, is in its third month.

According to W. Henson Moore, president of AFPA, the paper industry has found that the rail boxcar is the most cost-effective vehicle to deliver paper products. “But the boxcar fleet has declined in size while individual car trips have remained at 12-13 per year. So you have fewer cars available for a growing volume of work. This forces us to use trucks more, so the future of the boxcar is cloudy, at best.”

The pilot includes a designated fleet of boxcars assigned to eight paper mills. Half the fleet will be managed by IntelliTrans personnel, while the other half will act as a “control” for existing service. Sixteen traffic lanes experiencing recent service problems have been selected by the companies to see if the IntelliTrans approach offers improvements to the customers of the paper companies.
The project is expected to be complete in April.