[tshaddox]

Of course a huge amount of agricultural freight transportation goes by freight train. The question is whether these train deliveries are highly sensitive to small delays (relative to the time the train journey normally takes). Is it a major problem for these agricultural plants if, say, a particular freight train that normally takes 48 hours to complete its journey instead takes 60 hours due to delays?

[protomyth]

The addition of 12 hours to a freight contract can cause a processing plant to require a shutdown. There is a reason for the penalties in those contracts. Worse, the people who show up to load a train and have a small window are now waiting for the train and stuck in a holding pattern. Disrupting the freight system when passengers in the US have multiple other ways to get from A to B is problematic. The whole idea that moving people from A to B is more important than moving cargo from A to B doesn't take into account the jobs and time required to maintain our complex economy. Delays will increase the price of basic goods which has a big effect on the rest of the economy. Look at what happens when energy is more costly then add other basic product building blocks to that rising price beyond just fuel. That person buying groceries is more important than passengers riding a train.

[Teever]

Why can't these plants float a 12 hour buffer of stock?

This sounds like a JIT failure more than anything else.

[protomyth]

Why spend extra money for an event that doesn't happen very often? Elevators have storage (it's part of their function) so plants don't have to deal with that. Changing our manufacturing/ agriculture sector to cater to people wanting to ride the train seems a poor decision based on the needs of everyone else.

[dehugger]

Yes. logistics is a house of cards. Small delays cascade and pile up, leading to systemic problems with staffing, spoilage, contract violations, etc. A 12 hour delay means an entire shift of workers doing nothing while they wait for the product to arrive, for example. When you have production scheduled out months in advance it matters quite a bit, which is why contracts are so strict on this in the first place.