Are Freight Companies and Local Governments on a Collision Course?
Around the country, local governments are relying on existing freight tracks to provide commuter rail service quickly and cheaply. In the Puget Sound we have the very popular Sounder running on BNSF tracks, South Florida uses CSX tracks to run Tri-Rail commuter rail, and Utah's FrontRunner and New Mexico's Rail Runner operate with similar arrangements.
These services require complicated leasing arranements with the freight companies involved, and service is often limited or delayed because the freight trains have priority on the tracks. This is the major reason Sound Transit hasn't been able to offer as many round trips as it would like to.
Today I came across not one, but two stories from back East on this issue: one involving Florida and CSX, and the other related to Massachusetts and CSX. Both issues center around liability agreements: CSX is saying to both states, in effect, "sure, you can lease our tracks, but we don't want to be liable in the event of a passenger train crash, even if it's caused by our neglegence."
Lawmakers are understandably skeptical about agreeing to such conditions. But what else can they do? We've let our passenger rail system atrophy over the last 100 years, and building new rights-of-way is time consuming and expensive. Even Amtrak only owns the Northeast Corridor tracks -- their trains run on leased freight rail everywhere else in the country, as far as I know.
Add to this the fact that demand for freight rail is surging in America. You've no doubt seen the factoid being pushed by the freight rail industry that it can move one ton of freight 400 miles on a gallon of gas. With business booming, freight companies have little incentive to give up track capacity to passenger rail.
And so we have a bit of a crisis simmering between local goverments and big rail companies, one that could evenutally come to a boil as demand for rail -- both for freight and passenger travel -- continues to rise. Could we nationalize the freight rail industry like France? I very much doubt our Congress would do something that bold. Yet even if the two sides can come to an agreement on the liability issue, the capacity problem will still be there, and getting worse.
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It's only going to get worse. With the government trying to re-regulate the rail industry, they are going to be even less willing to allow commuter rail on their tracks.
An issue though is, existing ROW for freight usually skips a lot of the places people want to go. A lot of corridors are fairly useless for transit and there needs to be more study as to which lines are and aren't appropriate.
Well, the fact is, pretty much everything is different about a freight line from a passenger line. Where they go is different, superelevation on curves is different, gradients are different, train lengths and speeds are different, and the stopping ability is different.
Some freight railroads do a lot better than others at getting Amtrak over their rails, but you have some real conflicts with mile long freights running in single track territory with opposing traffic.
As for successfully nationalizing the freight railroads that have rebuilt themselves over the past twenty years, I doubt there'd be much support for that.
Of course, compared with how we actually spend our money ($600 billion defense budget + "off the books" Iraq spending) the cost of building a new high-speed rail line is modest.
It's just a matter of priorities.
I think the best strategy is to start small, but build a completely new system. Spending national dollars on heavily travelled corridors that will compete with air travel would give us a high value for our money. For example, high-speed rail from Vancouver to Seattle to Portland should follow high-speed rail from LA and San Diego to SF and Sacramento. As demand increases and fuel costs go up, connect the two lines.
Agreed with all points above. We certainly could get our priorities in order and build HSR if we wanted to. It's a matter of having the political (and public) will. But it seems in the short- to medium-term, there's still a tension brewing.