Trains April 2022

jwrinn@kalmbach.com @TrainsMagazine @trains_magazine Never in all my years as an observer of railroading did I ever think that sometime in the future, coal might not be the predominant cargo that it has been since the beginnings of the industry. Change, the one constant, has finally caught up with coal, as you’ll see with our report on pages 26-35. There will always be coal traffic but it will no longer be one loaded train after another of export coal bound for Tidewater or Baltimore. There will always be coal moving out of the Power River Basin, but it won’t be in the volume the likes of which we once saw. The question for railroaders of tomorrow is what will the industry do with its franchise as coal traffic fades. The money resides with the…

BNSF RAILWAY IS BRINGING Montana Rail Link back into the fold. MRL announced on Jan. 10 that it was terminating its long-term lease with BNSF and that the Class I railroad would resume operations and maintenance of the former Northern Pacific main line. No timetable was given for the transfer. But MRL said the railroads planned to negotiate labor agreements with MRL employees before seeking Surface Transportation Board approval. Montana Rail Link began operations on Oct. 31, 1987, under a 60-year lease from Burlington Northern. BN had excess capacity across Montana, favored the parallel former Great Northern main line, and was saddled with antiquated union contracts and labor unrest. So it sought to unload the 590-mile former Northern Pacific between Jones Junction, Mont., and Sandpoint, Idaho. “We couldn’t abandon it … but we…

UNION PACIFIC made the largest commitment to date to battery-electric power, ordering 10 locomotives from WABTEC and 10 from PROGRESS RAIL to test in yard service. The units will be deployed at North Platte, Neb., and in the Los Angeles basin to provide testing in warm-and cold-weather conditions. Prior to the announcement, CEO Lance Fritz told Trains the railroad believes yard operation is “best-case use for current battery-electric locomotive technology.” The order follows a series of purchases by Western Australia mining railroads. BHP ordered two units from each builder; RIO TINTO ordered four from Wabtec, and FORTESCUE MINING GROUP ordered two Progress units. AMTRAK and VIA RAIL CANADA cut service, attributing it to a spike in COVID-19 cases that created staffing issues and reduced demand. Amtrak cut long-distance starts by 8%,…

bybillstephens@gmail.com @bybillstephens Analysis: Trains.com Do railroad mergers live up to the hype? It’s a question that’s been rattling around in my head as federal regulators review the Canadian Pacific-Kansas City Southern merger, the first between Class I railroads in two decades. Within three years of the merger, Canadian Pacific Kansas City expects to gain 80,000 carloads and 137,000 intermodal containers currently handled by competing railroads. New intermodal service — the first connecting the CP and KCS networks — will take 64,000 trucks off highways annually. And by pairing origins on one railway with destinations on the other, the expanded CPKC system will be able to gain new traffic. That’s the projection. Now, the key question: How did prior Class I mergers play out from a traffic-growth perspective? To find out, I looked at Surface Transportation…

briansolomon.author@gmail.com @briansolomon.author Blog: briansolomon.com/trackingthelight/ Podcast: Trains.com To make significant traffic gains, the large freight railroads must evolve. Although North American freight railroading moves great volumes of tonnage in select corridors, the mode has been losing market share to highways and, as stated in last month’s column, carries less traffic than 15 years ago. Railroads benefit from the ability to provide exceptionally energy-efficient transportation, but the restrictive nature of railroad infrastructure constrains service flexibility. Over the past century, this efficiency-inflexibility paradox has contributed to the transformation of the North American network from a near full-service freight network to a specialized conduit for concentrated traffic volumes in select corridors. The 19th-century for-profit transportation system evolved as it reached most corners of the continent, but never functioned as an integrated network. By contrast, 20th-century highway transportation, while less efficient and…

THROUGHOUT THE DECADES, railroads of all sizes have inadvertently eased our pain of lookalike head-end consists with special and sometimes customized or experimental units. The reasons are varied: the dictates of management or somebody in engineering had a wild idea. Another, perhaps more sobering, is that funds were low and what is on the property must do the job. If necessity is supposed to be the mother of invention, then there have been some creative mechanical forces throughout the history of railroad backshops. Here is a smattering of a whole bunch of oddballs and misfits that did their jobs keeping their owners working. Some are innovative technology that just did not catch on in North America, others are fanciful creations that words just cannot truly explain; fortunately, many of these wonders were…