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The Association of American Railroads reported carload traffic in February 2015 totaled 1,089,211 carloads, down 1.1 percent or 11,726 carloads from February 2014. At this time, there is no indication that this is a trend. The eastern half of the U.S. has been hit with record snowfalls and general weather conditions so bad that weather, by itself, could be the sole contributor to this statistic. Likewise the West Coast ports situation. I, myself, have watched scheduled double-stackers moving east with only a single stack of containers, and single-stacking continued well after the labor dispute was settled. Once you bottle up traffic, it takes a long time to pull the cork back out.
Like so much of the rest of what's left of industrialized America, U.S. Railroads are operating on knife edge between fluidity and total meltdown. And, like other modes of transportation, railroads lurch from one day to the next hoping that the next will not be the day that an infrastructure failure results in disaster. The business model for our railroads is one where long-term increases in any kind of traffic are viewed with skepticism. You do not want to be the manager who decided to invest gobs of capital on capacity to move those oil trains only to find that the oil boom has gone bust. Look at how many years it is taking U.S. Railroads to accomodate the steady flow of double-stack container traffic, a much more predictable if still volatile traffic that--excepting recessive economy--has been on the upswing for a couple of decades.
Railroads are historically better positioned to handle the vagaries of weather because of their infrastructure. When our current routes were finalized, mostly in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, they were built to withstand what the public then still understood to be a Mother Nature who could be capricious and deadly. The mid- to late-twentieth century left many, including politicians and railroad managers, with the false impression that bad weather was not supposed to be so bad that it turned over things as heavy as railroad trains and bridges. Then, too, the style of management and politics turned truth-telling on its backside. When you are throwing gobs of public money at a passenger railroad system that is barely adequate, you have to lie through your teeth and tell the people that it's been designed to weather anything. When you tell a board of directors that you have to spend $1-billion for double-tracking, you have to lie and say that it will prevent all future service disruptions no matter how badly screwed up your operating plan is.
Then we have the political establishment, aided by big business and big media, who need a scapegoat. "Gee, Mister Everyman, we designed the (fill in the blank) to last and work and weather any known storm, but you've pumped so much (name a pseudo-pollutant) into the atmosphere that we can't be responsible for what happens." Unless, that is, Mr. Everyman stops his wasteful habit of feeding his family with corn that could be used to make E-88.
I didn't mean this to become a rant. The point is, like the family that has just enough money in the paycheck to get by, when it comes to transportation we are just getting by. We've got just enough roads that aren't falling apart, just enough rail that won't fracture in a cold wind , just enough bridges that won't drop into the river, just enough pipelines that won't leak, and just enough barges, ports, and container cranes that won't spill crude into the bay. And we've probably only got just enough crews and just enough Dawn to clean up the ducks. Like the family that's one paycheck away from homeless, the railroads are just one bad one away from a standstill. I, for myself, don't like it. There has got to be a way for the U.S. to return to the land of plenty instead of the land of just enough. Railroads could lead the way.
©2015 - C. A. Turek - mistertrains@gmail.com
