(The following article by John D. Boyd was posted on the Traffic World website on February 23.)
WASHINGTON — Union Pacific Railroad and CSX Transportation resumed their train movements through New Orleans, which had been disrupted for weeks after a CSX bridge fire earlier this month.
The Feb. 7 fire caused CSX to demolish the bridge at Catfish Bayou near Mobile, and replace the 312-foot span that reportedly handled up to 18 trains a day.
UP quickly warned its own customers that the outage affected its connecting traffic with CSX over the New Orleans gateway. The two lines rerouted some rerouting trains through St. Louis, and general manifest trains through Memphis, with delays up to 24 hours.
But on Feb. 20, UP announced that repairs had been completed the day before, and “normal operations are resuming” to get UP-CSX interchange traffic back to New Orleans.