Surprises

As 2017 reaches its stride, the news on railroads, both passenger and freight, appears to be evening out as well. Not that there weren’t some surprises.

Possibly the biggest surprise was the announcement by Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel that the city would move forward on a high-speed rail link—or express rail link, as has also been reported—to O’Hare International Airport. This is particularly surprising to me, as Chicago has had a CTA (Chicago Transit Authority) line from Downtown to O’Hare for quite some time now.

Except that designs for stations at O’Hare and Downtown have already been solicited, as well as proposals as to the best end-to-end routing through the rest of the city, the project’s details were kept vague.

Because the re-energization of the project was announced along with a new Green Line CTA station near United Center, some outlets even reported that the high-speed line would include a United Center station.

In fairness to anyone supporting this project, I would note that there are no O’Hare express trains on the CTA route currently in use, and re-configuration of that route, the Blue Line, to accommodate such would be complicated and disruptive of other commuter traffic. A completely new rail route on a new right of way may be just the ticket.

Not surprising: CSX is giving 72-year-old hotshot CEO Hunter Harrison and Mantle Ridge, the investment firm of Paul Hilal, more leeway in coming up with suitable terms for taking over the railroad. At the end of last week, layoffs numbering about 1000 in management positions, and the departure, in May, of CSX’s current CEO appear to clear the way for the Hunter Harrison era. Harrison has never met a railroad on which he couldn’t create an impossibly good operating ratio and turn it into a money-making machine, even though his style may not suit the railroads’ employees, customers, and common stockholders.

Also not surprising is the announcement last week by Greenbrier Companies, makers of railroad freight cars, that it had produced its 100,000th double-stack car in January 2017. Traffic was up again last week, buoyed in no small part by intermodal. The eastern Class Is are just now starting to reap the full benefits of capital expenditures to create corridors with double-stack clearances where it mattered most. The realities of the current rail economy dictate that stack trains—in fact all trains—will get longer wherever possible. Why shouldn’t there be a market for Greenbrier’s products?

On the infrastructure front, Metra, Chicago’s commuter rail agency, has slated a public forum for its plans to replace the 1881 Fox River bridge in Elgin, IL. Because this is the only single-track section of Metra’s Milwaukee West Line, the surprise here is that the bridge hasn’t been replaced sooner. A quick look at Metra schedules tells us that the bridge carries 54 weekday Metra commuter trains. Progressive Railroading also reports that up to 6 CP (Canadian Pacific) trains use the bridge on any given day.

If you’re a railroad bridge aficionado and want to get some photos, don’t run out there quite yet. The project won’t start until third quarter 2017, and it will take 3 years. I suspect, based on my engineering knowledge of other bridge projects, the old bridge won’t come down until at least one track of the proposed new two-track bridge is in operation, somewhere around the middle of the project timeline—best guess: early 2019.

Last but not least, there have been no railroad-shaking political developments in the past week; that is, unless you call Warren Buffet’s comments quoted in several outlets to the effect that he is willing to take a wait-and-see attitude insofar as President Trump’s economic and transportation plans. Up to a point; that point being he probably will not vote to re-elect Trump under any circumstances.

In the wings: The Senate is considering the BRACE (cleverly acronymed from Build Rail Access for Customers and the Economy) act S 407 to make permanent a tax credit used to repair and rehabilitate shortline and regional railroads. Commuter railroads report they are on schedule to meet the December 2018 PTC deadline (but need lots of money). And industry analysts continue to rattle the specter of autonomous trucking in front of the rail industry, despite trucks running off the highways and crashing in record numbers on this winter’s poor-weather roads; a fix for which no designer of autonomous trucking, that I know of, has been able to explain.

©2017 – 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.)