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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