After decades of struggling to regain their financial footing, railroads are proving they can co-exist with other modes of transportation to provide efficient, environmentally friendly service to consumers.
Evidence of success began to show about midway through 2003.
“You could almost begin to see this perfect transportation storm develop, in which you had rising oil prices, which obviously meant higher prices for diesel fuel and gasoline,” said Steve Forsberg, spokesman for the BNSF Railway.
China’s emergence as a manufacturing center was a second factor that began tipping the scales in favor of railroads. Increased trade with Asia — and the subsequent need for more and more trucks to haul the goods — exacerbated a “persistent driver shortage for long-haul trucking,” Forsberg said.
“And finally, high natural gas prices, which caused a lot of electric generating utilities to look more to lower-cost coal as a cheaper source of fuel for generating electricity,” he said.
Railroads long had been efficient carriers for coal.
“So, you had all of these things occurring simultaneously, and it really has driven record volumes back to railroads, including many of the consumer goods that had shifted to the highway several decades ago. …
“It’s like night and day, compared to what it was in the 1980s,” he said. “It took a long time and a lot of hard work to get to that point.”
With well over a dozen quarters of record consecutive increases in shipping volume, Forsberg said that BNSF has been using the increased cash flow to make substantial investments in its infrastructure — new locomotives, new facilities, and new ways to make shipping as efficient and environmentally friendly as possible.
The industry has encountered a softening in some sectors, which has somewhat flattened volume so far in 2007. Fewer loads of building materials reflect a corresponding softening of the housing industry, for example, Fosberg said.
“Really, the volumes that we move in some segments that have gotten a little softer are just a reflection of what’s occurring in the broader economy,” he said.
BNSF’s diverse traffic base is a strength, however. While traffic in building materials and agricultural products is decreasing, coal shipments are increasing.
Overall, business has improved considerably during the past five years, and its efficiencies are even more noticeable.
Earliest statistics on railroads show the industry had about 230,000 route miles in 1929. Today, there are about 97,000 route miles.
“The industry is moving about three times as much tonnage over less than half as many route miles,” Forsberg said, “so it’s gotten a lot more productive, a lot more efficient. The routes carrying most of the traffic are the shortest, fastest, and most efficient routes between the major consumption centers.”
In Emporia, the evidence is in the number of trains that travel through during a 24-hour period.
Seven or eight years ago, approximately 60 to 70 trains moved through the city.
“Today, we’re moving 80 to 90 or more every 24 hours,” Forsberg said. “The trains are also longer now.”
The “revenue ton-miles” of freight carried has shown a dramatic increase in the amount of freight moving over the rails in the United States. Forsberg said that in 1955, there were 623 billion revenue ton-miles of freight. In 2004, the latest figure available, the figure was 1.662 trillion.
BNSF’s Intermodal operation, and others like it, is a textbook example of what railroads and others in the transportation industry can accomplish when they work in tandem with other modes of transportation instead of in direct competition.
BNSF Intermodal stations are located in major metropolitan areas across its line — including a new Intermodal operation in Gardner.
Some of Intermodal’s advantages for customers lies in its “hands-off” format. Trailers full of freight from China, for example, can be loaded, double-stacked, onto a train at Seattle and shipped to another metropolitan area, like Minneapolis-St. Paul, where they are unloaded and hauled by semi-trailer truck on short runs to its destination. The goods are not unloaded from the trailers until they reach their destinations. Intermodal also saves on fuel use and reduces emissions.
Forsberg said that the average freight train moves its load at approximately three times the fuel efficiency of a semi-trailer truck and at about 250 times the efficiency of a sports utility vehicle. The diesel engines actually drive a very large generator to produce electricity for the electric traction motors that are in-between the wheels on the locomotive.
“And that is what is actually pulling the train,” he said.
Factored into that efficiency is the ease with which the steel wheel rolls on the steel rail. That combination has about one-tenth of the resistance of a rubber tire rolling on pavement.
“The average vehicle you or I drive can’t carry its own weight in payload, where the average rail car can carry almost four times its own weight,” Forsberg said.
A diesel engine that powers a locomotive produces enough energy to power almost 100 average homes, he added.
“To this day, trains remain the most fuel-efficient means humankind has ever created for moving large, heavy volumes long distances overland,” he said.
Forsberg acknowledges, however, that railroads cannot handle all of the needs to move freight from one place to the next.
“The reality is, we need them both (trains and trucks) because they do different things,” he said. “But certainly we can extend freeway lane capacity and reduce energy consumption ... reduce emissions by using the strengths of both trucks and trains, particularly if our economy continues to grow.”
Forsberg said that Kansas has “done a wonderful job of rebuilding and expanding freeways.” That is one reason for BNSF’s opening of the Intermodal station at Gardner, a suburb of Kansas City, which is billing itself as an “inland port”.
BNSF’s longest Intermodal trains are about 8,000 feet long.
“Those biggest trains will carry close to 300 truckloads, so you’ve got one train that is carrying 300 truckloads through Kansas on our rail lines instead of on freeways,” Forsberg said.
In addition to saving taxpayer dollars on highways, railroads contribute to the economy in other ways, he said. In addition to paying taxes on its rail lines, he said, BNSF is a major employer in Kansas.
“We have over 4,300 employees in Kansas, predominantly in Kansas City and Topeka areas,” Forsberg said, naming other smaller Kansas cities as additional employee sites. “The average railroad worker in the United States, according to the industry data, makes an average of $65,000 a year. Not all jobs pay that, some more, some less, but that works out to be the industry average.”
The industry has been hiring aggressively in recent years, with BNSF alone hiring between 3,000 to 4,000 employees per year in the 28 states and two Canadian provinces in which it operates, he said. Some of the hiring is prompted by retirements; others have been hired as a result of record freight traffic.
“... A lot of people, including many of the state departments of transportation across the country realize that rail has to play an even bigger role in freight movement,” he said. “Long-term, and our CEO has said as much, we’re excited about the future. The key thing we have to decide as a nation is how we want to move people and freight in the future.”