435 MPG?
If you're like me, you probably assumed that the recent claim on television, that a railroad moves a ton of freight 435 miles on a gallon of diesel, was a little cherry picked- that is to say, that maybe on a straight level track in the desert the Southern Pacific could move a ton of freight that far on a gallon, but surely a conservative guess would halve the figure.
Not so, according to FactCheck- the 435 mpg turns out to be an industry-wide average. Not bad, I say, not bad at all.
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Out of curiosity, how does that compare to a ton of freight moved by semi?
I heard a trucking industry lobbyist on NPR the other day, and even he didn't have a good counter to the rail industry's claim of 435mpg.
I don't think trucks can try to compete on fuel economy. There's simply no alternative for short-haul freight. Most of our short-haul rail lines here in Seattle have been converted to bike paths or roads. I don't see them coming back any time soon.
New semis move one ton of freight 110 miles on one gallon of diesel. Older semis can move one ton of freight 120 miles on one gallon of diesel. The reduction in ton-miles per gallon is due to increased fuel efficiency standards..
Semis aren't the best solution but we need to get rail, especially high speed freight rail built, up in this country. Rail works great for pre-planned shipments and ones that are not as time sensitive. When I worked in the produce industry we looked at trains and found that they weren't fast enough and they weren't smooth enough. (I know that seems counterintuitive, but this analysis was done by a rail enthusiast.) We could move our product from Gulfport, MS to Chicago in about a day and a half on a truck, but to do it via rail with all the intermediate truck hauls would've taken over two days. It doesn't seem like much to the average person but a whole extra day in transit time in the produce industry can be murder.
Rail has and continues to make great inroads into lower priority freight using trucks as the last mile drayage, but I'm not sure putting short lines everywhere is desirable from a neighborhood planning perspective.
Actually, if we had the will there's quite a bit that could be done about short-haul freight. For a century this has been a sore point with neither the shippers nor railroads pulling their weight.
Once they had established market share, railroads resisted adding short-haul lines, while shippers took advantage of the mandated service, for example, by keeping cars for too long instead of finding quick ways to load and dispatch them.
In Keeping the Railroads Running Bjorntrager (a former NYC VP) describes working with shippers in the Finger Lakes Region of New York to preserve freight service. In the 80s his experience was echoed by a few entrepreneurs who bought and re-vitalized shortlines when the railroads were deregulated. In Europe some cities use cargo trams for LCL freight delivery in the city core.
Locally, of course, we have the trucks carrying containers a mile or two from the ships to the railcars. The last time I drove I-5 south it was bumper-to-bumper trucks, paralleling a rail line. On the Olympic Peninsula a different order of politics and social forces would have preserved the Port Angeles-Port Townsend-Seattle rail operation. Probably the rail service around Woodinville will be eroded by the same forces that allowed abandonment of the rail line on the Peninsula.
In brief, it is a characteristic of Americans, not of railroads or trucks, that puts cargo in trucks.