Ride the Freight Train
Phillip Longman has a piece in The Washington Monthly making the case for increased investments in high-quality freight rail. I think this is about right. There are certain kinds of trips that are — if the trains exist — intrinsically better-suited to passenger rail than to driving or flying. But that’s a limited set of trips, especially in the United States which is relatively sparsely populated. For freight there’s a similar calculus, but you wind up with a different answer, and there’s a much wider set of trips that are best done by rail. Which is one of the reasons why in even our current pathetically train-deprived state a great deal of freight shipping happens on trains. But we could be doing much more. He observes:
By all rights, America’s dilapidated rail lines ought to be a prime candidate for some of that spending. All over the country there are opportunities like the I-81/Crescent Corridor deal, in which relatively modest amounts of capital could unclog massive traffic bottlenecks, revving up the economy while saving energy and lives. Many of these projects have already begun, like Virginia’s, or are sitting on planners’ shelves and could be up and running quickly. And if we’re willing to think bigger and more long term—and we should be—the potential of a twenty-first-century rail system is truly astonishing. In a study recently presented to the National Academy of Engineering, the Millennium Institute, a nonprofit known for its expertise in energy and environmental modeling, calculated the likely benefits of an expenditure of $250 billion to $500 billion on improved rail infrastructure. It found that such an investment would get 85 percent of all long-haul trucks off the nation’s highways by 2030, while also delivering ample capacity for high-speed passenger rail. If high-traffic rail lines were also electrified and powered in part by renewable energy sources, that investment would reduce the nation’s greenhouse gas emission by 38 percent and oil consumption by 22 percent. By moderating the growing cost of logistics, it would also leave the nation’s economy 13 percent larger by 2030 than it would otherwise be.
One appealing thing about freight rail investments is that there’s a greater potential for interim steps that make a difference. Since there’s already a lot of freight rail happening, there are plenty of places where smallish improvements would increase usage and capacity a great deal. And then when the small improvements have piled on, that creates a bigger rail infrastructure that can also support passenger projects like commuter rail lines.
One word of caution I would offer about all this, however, is that while we certainly should try to get stimulus money to fund good infrastructure projects, we shouldn’t think of infrastructure spending as primarily a stimulus issue. A genuinely good infrastructure investment is worth making whether or not there’s a need for short-term stimulus. And just spending on infrastructure for the sake of spending can get you a lot of pointless garbage like we’ve seen recently in Japan which isn’t what we want. And people who have worthwhile projects to advocate shouldn’t invite people to think of the projects as make-work by talking about them exclusively in terms of the stimulus. This freight rail stuff would be worth doing in a totally normal economic climate.
36 Responses to “Ride the Freight Train”
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January 13th, 2009 at 12:07 pm
Please stop the madness. The railroads are really in pretty good shape to do the job they want to do viz. move coal, grain and containers long distances. They have a much harder time figuring out how to move one tank car of corn syrup to your local pasta sauce factory. Most of the work that trucks do cannot be diverted over to rail. Ever. You wouldn’t take the train to the Outer Bank or the grocery store. Same for freight. Better to figure out how to ship less stuff and still satisfy the same need.
January 13th, 2009 at 12:16 pm
What?
You move an entire train stacked with containers 1000 miles to my city; then you offload one of those containers onto a truck and drive it 2 miles to the bakery. What’s so impossible about that?
January 13th, 2009 at 12:17 pm
You already see them doing that in Houston, from shipyard to grocer all in 1 day. Those not going to a local store get loaded onto a train and head out.
Those giant shipping containers are designed for ship – train – truck transport, they even have tires built-in.
January 13th, 2009 at 12:21 pm
Correct.
It’s happening with rail to truck right now, too.
With better rail infrastructure that can handle double-stacked cars, it would happen a lot more.
BTW, the rail tunnel through the Berkshires in Western Mass is another such chokepoint, and that’s the route trains take from the midwest/Great Lakes to New England.
January 13th, 2009 at 12:26 pm
This seems to me to miss the favoritism already given to private industry in public subsidies. It’s no accident that Snow was in Bush’s cabinet or that Amtrak slows to a crawl once one enters Virginia, where freight has right of way.
There’s room for infrastructure improvement in freight rail, but I’d urge a combination of public investment in mass transit, especially better passenger rail throughout the northeast, and regulation that puts the onus on private industry to modernize.
January 13th, 2009 at 12:29 pm
so will truck drivers be the next round of buggywhip and wagon wheel makers?
it won’t have the overall economic significance of detroit failing, but there will be a lot of trucks and drivers idled, and a lot equipment mortgages left unpaid. those damned things are expensive.
January 13th, 2009 at 12:33 pm
Most of the work that trucks do cannot be diverted over to rail. Ever.
It’s like this guy has never been on a road trip in America.
January 13th, 2009 at 12:41 pm
joe from Lowell,
I’m guessing you’re familiar with the area, so maybe you can answer a question for me: Is it my imagination, or is the infrastructure situation in Western Mass fucking horrible? (RE: Specifically-transportation chokepoints in general)
I’ve never been in a state with so many intelligent people yet with such a retarded and retrograde infrastructure.
January 13th, 2009 at 12:52 pm
Dmonteith I have been doing this stuff more or less as a job since they still had a MKT, SLSF and MILW. So STFU. Waingro….the reason why Western Mass is FU is a) the Berkshires are in the way 2) rail freight isn’t very important in NE 3) Guilford is the worst RR in NA. I can say the latter because I’ve said it in court.
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January 13th, 2009 at 12:53 pm
I echo efgoldman’s thought. We need to recognize that if we do the trains a lot of truckers, both independent and employees, are going to be hurt. The Teamsters would kick against this.
January 13th, 2009 at 12:56 pm
Waingro,
You’re not imagining things.
It’s a combination of western Mass being an economic basket case, so municipalities don’t have the resources, and of the state’s infrastructive dollars being concentrated in the east, especially for the Big Dig.
January 13th, 2009 at 12:56 pm
The $250b to $500b investment over six years modeled by the Millenium Institute is fundamentally an electrification of STRACNET, with the $250b price tag for creation of a 79mph system, and the $450b price tag creation of a 110mph Rapid Freight Rail system.
As far as this:
… this shows what happens when you reason based on stereotypes rather than information. When the Millenium Institute talks about taking 50% to 80% of truck traffic off the road, that is not trips … it is ton-miles. A lot of those ton-miles are the trucks going 500 miles, 1,000 miles, 2,000 miles on the Interstate Highway system.
The above argument about moving one container from a local origin to a local destination is perfectly correct … that is a big share of the 20% of ton-miles that do not go on the train in any event. And some of the ton-miles on truck are complementary … short hauling of the container to the origin railhead and from the destination railhead.
The difference between the 79mph Express Freight Rail and the 110mph Rapid Freight Rail is, of course, the distance of trips that are captured. There is a time overhead in hauling the container to the container marshaling, which is recouped on the faster movement of container freight rail when clear paths are available. Obviously an electrification of STRACNET and elimination of bottlenecks where bulk freight is interfering with container freight will capture the bulk of the very long truck hauls … what the 110mph system permits is capture of more medium distance business.
Of course, it also means that our national freight transport system is no longer held hostage to imported supplies and externally determined price of crude oil.
January 13th, 2009 at 1:00 pm
Nineteenth-century railroad infrastructure can worsen road congestion, too. As in Chicago, where all the major four-lane streets running east and west get periodically squeezed to two lanes going under railroads.
January 13th, 2009 at 1:08 pm
I love this. It is as if Drew didn’t even read the article at all. Or omitted the part that said
So Drew, did you miss that, or are you just stupid? Please, stop the madness!
January 13th, 2009 at 1:16 pm
OK, so this is as good a time as any to bring out my crazy railroad idea– shipping passengers as freight. The key is a special shipping container with noise reduction, and serious shock absorption, furnished inside like an inexpensive hotel suite. You board the train at a passenger terminal outside of town, get into your family-sized container, and you can read/nap/watch TV/surf porn/whatever while traveling cross-country. At your destination you disembark, a friendly valet brings your car around front (from the car carrier where it has been riding) and you now have the whole family at your destination, rested and refreshed, with much less greenhouse emission than driving or flying, plus you have your own car in place so no need for a rental. Your passenger pod could ride on a standard flatbed, so the railroads don’t have to upgrade their cars or their rail lines. Pods would be expensive, but amortized over hundreds of trips over several years they’d probably pay for themselves fairly quickly and railroads (or third-party PeoplePod services) could start small and then grow them organically.
I’m sure there are reasons this wouldn’t work, but I can’t think of them right now….
January 13th, 2009 at 1:25 pm
You’re not going to get any appreciable and lasting peace between freight and passenger rail lobbies/interests without a total re-write of the clusterfuck that is federal policy wrt rail. There are few industry/government relationships that can claim such a bipolar status as the Fed and Freight.
January 13th, 2009 at 2:19 pm
I thought the Hoosac Tunnel has been cleared for double stacks? Isn’t Norfolk Southern basically buying Guilford’s railroads?
January 13th, 2009 at 2:59 pm
Whoa, turns our you’re right, msj.
So, one down, a couple hundred more to go.
January 13th, 2009 at 3:07 pm
msj,
Triple-stacked, apparently.
January 13th, 2009 at 3:11 pm
Yes, if only the vast expansion of freight and passenger rail could also be accompanied by an expansion of employment alternatives. But with all track building and train-related freight handling already turned over to sentient robots, there’s no way to keep Teamsters from starving in large numbers.
January 13th, 2009 at 7:42 pm
Aaron, January 13th, 2009 at 1:25 pm
This is turned around on its head … without a peace between freight and passenger rail lobbies, FRA regulation will remain a clusterfuck.
The core of that negotiated peace is:
cut operating costs of bulk freight rail (electrification)
expand market share of a new Rapid Rail network (track and electrification)
restrict the capital cost of the signaling for Rapid Rail to the dedicated Rapid Rail paths, so it is elective for the freight carriers rather than a mandatory expense on all their rolling stock. (regulatory solution available under above)
January 13th, 2009 at 11:45 pm
I’m not so sure about the glowing description of the railroad express agency. I remember my father telling me that the railroads took a week to ship a parcel from New York to Boston in the 50s.
January 14th, 2009 at 12:14 am
BubbaDave, January 13th, 2009 at 1:16 pm
A primary obstacle is regulatory … it’d be a lot easier to get past the FRA if the person was not inside the container, or if the pod was on a rail car pulled by a passenger train.
In a way, its a natural co-evolution of RV’s and the construction of pre-fab houses from excess containers to have a shipping container that is a rail-based RV.
There is a major network economy in the idea … you wouldn’t want to be stuck with the equivalent of a Betamax dimensions and utility hook-up pod when everyone has settled on the VHS dimensions and utility hook-up pod (replace DVD-HD and Blue-Ray if you don’t remember Betamax and VHS) … so someone finding a successful way to bootstrap it might be the main hitch.
One way to boostrap it might be to have a pod warehouse somewhere in the Northeast and a couple of start-up podtels in South Carolina and Florida so that urban residents in the NEC could order their pod to their designated site and meet it … if they are designed with hook up requirements along the lines of the Tumbleweed Tiny Homes but with a more podable shape, then a podtel would be a water hook-up, electric hookup, and overflow line for the sailboat composting toilet.
February 5th, 2009 at 6:26 pm
Many posters fail to realize that most supply chains require a certain degree of trucking. Injecting more rail to these networks would cost more energy and pollution. You take that container off the stack and go to a regional distribution center (DC). From there, everything best go by truck. The DC’s are by the customers. That means that you may bypass a small city to go to a major ramp (intermodal rail-truck terminal) go through a DC, make a truckload of mixed products and then backtrack to that small city Big Box store. If you try to reload and back track on the rail, you have lost time and must invest precious capital for an underutilized small city ramp. The truck moves the product much faster through the pipeline so you make less and pollute less to keep product on the shelves. If you slow freight down on short corridors by overloading ramps, you end up with a mess – not a solution.
The idea of a mixed train (freight and passenger) has merit on long corridors. In fact, almost all trains used to be that way. However, it works best for expresses, not locals.
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