When you’re down in the dumps…

Bulk commodities (BCs) have been the bread and butter of railroads for years. In the U.S., at least, BCs have tended to be seasonal. Grains move heavily in late fall and winter. Iron or taconite, when it is produced, tends to move when the Great Lakes aren’t frozen. Rock and gravel both move more during warm months when construction is at its peak. Coal used to move all year, but because of energy policy may soon not move at all. Oil, however, will continue to move all year, mostly, again, because of energy policy. There are other bulk commodities that don’t get as much press, or respect, from railroads.

One non-seasonal bulk commodity is trash. The flow of garbage from population centers never stops. Sure, there may be minor seasonal variations, but for the most part it’s a constant thing. Where does this trash go?

Two major destinations are landfills or land restoration projects. Landfills can be of two kinds. There are those where a certain area has been chosen as appropriate for trash disposal, and there are those where another historic activity has left the land scarred and filling the scars with garbage, properly managed, will improve the look and utility of the land. Land restoration projects might be areas where there are no scars, but improper prior disposal has left toxic areas that must be dug up and replaced.

There are two opportunities for railroads in the latter case. First, to bring fill in from a population center, then to transport the toxic material, properly contained, to another certified landfill for proper disposition.

As the labor unions and criminal syndicates in major cities historically have learned, hauling garbage can be all kinds of profitable. Let me be clear. Railroads probably could not make a dime on moving trash within the limits of metro areas. But where alternatives for final disposal within metro areas have been used up, and where there are sites 150 to 500 miles away where large volumes can be accepted, rail should be able to clean up—pun intended.

Once there was a movement afoot to burn trash in super-efficient furnaces and produce electricity therefrom. This has failed more on account of the solar and wind power crowd than to the economic inefficiencies and costs related to engineering and building those super furnaces. There’s also little glamor in trash, and burning it just seems too mid-20th century to rip the gaze of Millennials from their smartphone screens.

In all fairness, trash trains already exist, and where they have been workable without too many complaints from the NIMBYs, they turn a marginal profit for railroads. There may be other commodities that we don’t usually associate with rail transportation, water being among them, as climate change—no matter how caused—makes water more expensive in some venues and therefore profitable to move in long trains of tanks, like crude oil. But with coal as a major commodity possibly going the way of the dodo, and for largely the same reasons that burning trash never caught on, trash may be picking up. (Again, pun intended.) Seriously, it may have a bigger future on the rails than we ever thought.

©2016 – C. A. Turek – mistertrains@gmail.com

(Charles A. Turek is a writer and novelist based in Albuquerque, NM. After four decades working in areas of the insurance industry related to transportation, he now writes on all aspects of American railroading. Charles is a political conservative but believes in public funding of passenger rail as a part of the federal government’s constitutionally conservative obligation to provide for defense and public infrastructure so that private enterprise may flourish.)