Re: Pacific Northwest Lumber Traffic
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Greg Martin
Mark Hemphill writes:
"It would have to be some very special lumber to compete on cost including transportation, for PGE-originated lumber in distant markets. It would not be a framing grade of Western Hemlock or Douglas-fir or some Spruce-Pine-Fir grade unless the mill was just giving it away; the rail transportation costs in the Steam Era made it rare to be able to rail lumber from the PNW beyond Chicago and compete effectively with Southern Yellow Pine. And in the 1930s, Weyerhaeuser developed its own giant lumber warehouse, distribution, planing, and millwork centers in Baltimore and Newark using its own coast-wise shipping line that avoided the whole cost-of-rail problem completely, competing effectively with all-rail Southern Yellow Pine from the Southeast. See this for a capsule history: http://www.wsl.com/WestwoodShipping_History.aspx So yes, you could find a lot of Douglas-fir being used in the Northeast in construction, but it didn't get there very often by rail."
"It would possibly be some fancy grade
quarter-sawn clear Douglas-fir veneer or long boards. But there was plenty of
that lumber in Washington and Oregon, so a carload from B.C. would have to
leapfrog over them. (To add some detail to what Dave Nelson said earlier, a
lot of lumber moved via coast-wise shipping from every port in Oregon,
Washington and northern California to every port from San Francisco southward
at lower-than-rail cost. After WWII, the whole cost-of-ocean shipping equation
was upended, and the coast-wise lumber business declined rapidly.
There's an excellent history of this in The Rise and Decline of U.S.
Merchant Shipping in the 20th Century, Rene De La Pedraja http
://www.amazon.com/Merchant-Shipping-Twentieth-Evolution-Business/dp/0805798269)"
"However, there are some
unusual species/grades that do
come out of BC, for special
applications. Yellow Cedar, for instance, virtually only comes from
B.C.'s coastal range in commercial quantities in large, clear, book-matched
veneer. I saw a carload of that in the mid-1980s for paneling for a university
recital hall. It went all the way to Philadelphia to a specialty paneling and
door manufacturer. Then all the way back to Alaska, in containers, for a
University of Alaska recital hall. Kind of expensive, but it was really
pretty."
"How do we know the PGE car we see at a distant location was loaded on
PGE? &nb sp;I have plenty of examples from my own career where we have
borrowed foreign cars, loaded them on our line, and sent them in the wrong
direction away from the owning road. We've done this by calling the owning
road and horse-trading with them, or sometimes we just ignored the car-service
rules and ignored the fine that might result because we were desperate for
empties, and sometimes just in error because a trainmaster or conductor wasn't
paying attention and just grabbed the nearest empty car."
I've also seen lumber brokers get the market wrong and redirect a car
they thought would, say, find a market in Denver to a market in Pittsburgh.
And take a huge bath on it. They don't do that very often and stay in
business, though. That could also explain an unusual car that is a long,
long, away from home.
Almost anything in railroading is done once.
Mark Hemphill"
My only comment to Mark's message would
be that the lumber futures on the Chicago Mercantile was based
on FOB mill price plus Chicago rail freight regardless of
specie.
The vast majority of lumber on the west
coast was shipped over Chicago to the markets on the eastern seaboard.
Some species like Southern Yellow Pine and Eastern Green Spruce had
reputation issues that took years to overcome for framing lumber.
Remember to find a mill that cut lumber longer than twenty feet (in the scope
of this list) you had to come to the west coast.
Specialty species like Alaskan Yellow
Cedar or Coastal BC Yellow Cedar were much like that of Redwood and Port Oford
Cedar and were just that expensive and specialty. To see them used in the east
was to find them in the finest institutions and businesses.
Barge freight to the east coast was an
option if you didn't mind paying for an item (ADI ADF) you wouldn't mind
seeing for two months. That tied up a lot of capitol and
inventory for sometime, but it was and still is done. Missed markets with this
kind of inventory could ruin your P&L for the quarter.
Just remember as one of the early
founders of the Forest City Companies told me, "if there was no
market we would often roll cars on Monday and create a market
by Friday." Speculation was all part of the game and as they will
tell you. "your first loss is your best loss..." Hopefully that doesn't
happen often at all.
Rail cars of lumber over the Rockies and
the great plains is a pleasant site. Many of the cars traveled on slow
freights that allowed the consignees to get off their position in route
to Chicago.
Greg Martin
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