Congressmen want coal-volume monitoring

Six congressmen have repeated the call for the Surface Transportation Board to keep track of the coal shipments of Class I railroads.    Six congressmen have repeated the call for the Surface Transportation Board to keep track of the coal shipments of Class I railroads in much the same way they have started watching grain volumes.
   Congressmen Tammy Baldwin, Ron Kind, Sean P. Duffy, Tom Petri, Reid Ribble and Paul Ryan sent a note to the board last month asking it to monitor carriers and require them to submit “publicly available coal service recovery plans.”
   The politicians recommended such an action if coal delivery problems persist. As of right now, the congressmen only have a “growing concern” about coal volumes, and they wrote that price hikes and service outages could become a reality during the winter if service levels aren’t improved.
   “Power plants in our region are facing dangerously low stockpiles — in some cases, 60 to 70 percent below contracted levels — due to decreased rail service,” they wrote. “These utilities have no choice but to take extraordinary and costly steps to conserve coal by shutting down power plants, restricting operations, and purchasing more costly power from other sources.”
   The congressmen see this request, they wrote, as an enhancement of the board’s previous service-reporting requirements.
   “More transparency will be useful in helping the board and rail customers better understand current and future service disruptions,” they wrote.