Last week’s Economist had an article on Chicago bogging down with 1,200 trains a day, a third of the nation’s rail traffic. It can take days to get freight across town. Unlike airlines, or any efficient logistics operation railroads have no intermediary to route shipments from one carrier to another. Railroads just fax news of arriving trains.
The Chicago Transportation Coordination Office (CTCO) wants to fix this and a planned Chicago Region Environmental and Transportation Efficiency (CREATE) program is waiting for federal funding (which they’ll never get from Bush).
I’d imagine anyone planning logistics at FedEx or WalMart would look at this and wonder why railroads have neglected hubs that connect carriers.
This looks like an obvious business opportunity for logistics entrepreneurs to save railroads and customers a huge amount of time and $ nationwide. Why aren’t railroads a lot more interested.
If that’s what the Economist said, then the article is a screed, a diatribe, and arrogant. Or it got its information from a source with an axe to grind or with an undisclosed financial interest in a certain outcome.
What makes you think railroads aren’t interested? No insult intended, but if you approach railroads and railroaders with the presumption that they’re antiquated, dimwitted, or complacent, I don’t think you’ll have a positive experience. There are substantive economic reasons that created the way things are done at present. I recognize that street legend says railroads are the way they are because of (check one) venality, stupidity, arrogance, greed, or all of the above, but street legend is self-serving and uninformed.
Would you like to know why railroad transportation is the way it is at Chicago and other gateway cities? If you do, I and others would be delighted to answer.
I vaguely remember an article in Trains about 30 years ago dealing with the interchange of cars between the then SF and the NYC. There was the Kankakee line which ran between Streator, IL. and South Bend, IN. which avoided going
into Chicago for interchange.
SF preferred Chicago since they would get more mileage on the shipment and therefore more money.
How short sighted. I believe Mr. Kneiling even agreed with SF.
Now, the Kankakee has portions torn up. How many trains that need to go Chicago today could possibly use this route which would be faster. I don’t know. But it seems anything that can be diverted from Chicago would be an improvement.
Sadly, I feel the money won’t come forward for what may be cheap solution and reduce at least of a little bit of Chicago’s congestion.
There is a whole $2B plan to detangle Chicago. The RRs and the city put it together. It benefits all the roads, Metra, Amtrak and the highways.
But, when you just barely have enough capital to keep things status quo, big projects like this dont’ happen. CN, NS and BNSF might be able to scrape up some capital but it would help if CSX and UP could get straightened out. Having just one road opt out makes the whole thing impossible.
There’s a number of issues here. I don’t want to try to summarize the Chicago issue of Trains done two years ago, and if you’re interested in Chicago, doing without that issue is like trying to build Boulder Dam without concrete. (Maybe if you had a 900-ton beaver with a 200-foot tail and a big pile of sticks … )
One of the economic principles of railroading is “distance makes money, terminals cost money.” A terminal cannot generate income, it is purely overhead. Thus a railroad spends the least possible money on terminals.
When the terminal also includes an interchange with another railroad, the costs and complexities grow by an order of magnitude. Now there are in effect two or more abutting terminals, each a gigantic money pit, that each have to coordinate the interests of two or more railroads, interests which will be congruent on through traffic and divergent on terminating and originating traffic. It’s quite schizophrenic, and there’s no way around it – economics only apportions competing interests, it doesn’t make them go away.
Because Chicago historically was more of a origin/destination for traffic than it was a waystation for traffic, there were very large economic disincentives for each railroad to spend money building efficient connections to the other railroads at Chicago. These connections weren’t going to be used very much in relation to the use each railroad was going to get from its own main line leading to and from Chicago. So the historic pattern was to build enormous capacity right up to the city, and skimp when it got into the city, leaving somewhat of a moat between the railroads n the city itself. Whether one likes that or not, these companies would have been irrational to do otherwise. A company must spend most of its money on the things that generate most of the revenue.
Today, Chicago still is a huge consumer/originator of traffic. In terms of intermodal lifts each year, it is the number one city in the world, bigger t
I might add that the Class I carriers have and and continue to implement system wide blocking schemes that utilize Gateways other than Chicago to all extents practical. However, as opposed to airlines, routing a shipment from New Englad to the Pacific Northwest via DFW, the railroads need to keep the operating milages as short as reasonably practical. Gateways other than Chicago also have their own set of capacity constraints.
Wall Streeet and it’s mind set that the railroads are an archaic and dying form of transportation have directly caused the capacity constraints by pricing capital dearly. Railroads and not like the Dot.Com industry that can turn paper profits from minimal investment; railroads require real investment into real objects (Engines, Cars, Tracks, Signals, and employees to operate and maintain it all)…such investment in the Wall Stree World doesn’t return itself 5 times over in the first year and is thus percieved tobe a poor investment and rated accordingly.
Thanks OS for a clear explanation of the physical constraints of routing through Chicago but the thing about the article that’s bothered me for a week was this sentence. Unlike the airlines, railroads don’t have an oversight agency to co-ordinate their traffic: each of them uses its own dispatchers, who sometimes send faxes to their counterparts to let them know trains are coming. That’s an IT problem not a physical problem. Before a container ship arrives in port a plan is drawn up to unload, transfer, and reload the ship in the shortest possible time. It looks like no one is responsible for this when trains arrive in Chicago. If that’s the case, inter-railroad information technology would expedite cargo through Chicago, to some extent, without building bypasses or running short-tonnage trains.
Ever wonder how a B747 can fall out of the sky if only one part breaks? It’s because all the other parts can’t carry on without it. Railroads are no different. One thing breaks, and the whole system starts to grind to a halt. The railroad version of flight is the fixed guideway: you can’t steer around it and continue on as if nothing happened, and you can’t do without it. Plus, the locomotives, cars, and crew are all already being figured for future trains, so you’re affecting future trains, not just the ones you have on hand. Railroads run 24 hours a day – they have no makeup time every night like an airline or your average workplace, where the timer can be reset to zero for the next morning and you start over and have chronological forgiveness for everything that went out of kilter the day before.
And when something goes wrong on a railroad, it isn’t right there next to you in the office where you can reach out and grab it. Or out on the factory floor under lights, temperature control, and clean conditions. It’s 423 miles away from you, 20 minutes on foot from the nearest 4WD road, in the middle of the night, in the mud, in a pouring rainstorm, in a windstorm, the power has failed, the microwave carrier for the radio has failed, and your nearest maintainer has 92 minutes left on his hours of service, it’s a Saturday morning, the roadmaster is on vacation, the signal maintainer is laid up with a broken ankle, and you’ve got 18 trains holding while you’re wondering what the hell to do next as one of them reports 24 inches of water over the rail and another reports a bank failure along a cresting river. Standing still starts to seem like a bad idea, but do you dare move one of them … right into a washout?
Oh – I’m not dreaming this up. It describes one night a few weeks ago. It wasn’t all that unusual a night on anyone’s railroad.
Ever throw a rock into a small, still puddle, and see the ripples reflect and refract for the next minute? Write a mathematical for
Garyaiki said:
"Before a container ship arrives in port a plan is drawn up to unload, transfer, and reload the ship in the shortest possible time. It looks like no one is responsible for this when trains arrive in Chicago. "
Every railroad has a plan for every train. When it gets to a yard there is a classification system in place. Every destination is served by a different train. If a train arrives with a car for the ABC RR, then the car will leave on train 102. If a train arrives with a ca for the ABC RR, then the car will depart on train 102 tomorrow too. There is a plan in place.
Part of the problem is sheer volume. The other is that with a container ship the cans drive off by themselves. Railroad cars don’t do that.
The container ship analogy breaks down because its not the same operation. A steamship docking is INTERmodal, the railway interchange in Chicago is INTRAmodal. That makes a big difference in the dynamics.
They’ve been trying to fix rail congestion in Chicago ever since the railroads got to Chicago. If you want to see trains standing still, this is the place. I ride in every workday on Metra. Lots of waiting freights.
A real hang up is Tower A-2 at Western Avenue. That’s where the old Milwaukee Road commuter lines, plus the new North Central service, cross the old C&NW west commuter line.
East of the tower the tracks are seven wide, 3 for the MILW and 4 for the CNW.
Topping the whole thing off is that the storage/maintenance facility for the old CNW trains is west of the interlocking. So even trains that run other ex-CNW routes have to go through the interlocking before and after their inbound/outbound runs. There are a lot of stopped trains waiting at the junction as I ride through.
Right at tower A-2 there is an industry that actually still uses boxcars. It must be fun/expensive/interesting to get those cars in and out.
The comment about “Good luck getting money to fix this from the Bush Administration” is ignorance. For the Federal Government to fund this they would have to take the money from other economic development in the private sector. That is, they’d have to tax it away from some other purpose.
The problem is, they have absolutely no, none, nada, zero way of knowing what they are taking it away from. And they can’t begin to measure the cost/benifits of doing such a thing. That’s why the gubernmint should stay The Hell! out of allocating economic resources.
Absent gubernmint intrustion, investment capital is basically allocated on an auction basis. That lets each applicant for capital decide how much the allocation is worth to him/her. It isn’t perfect, nothing is, but it sure beats a bunch of politicians deciding which projects get funded.
If an improvement in Chicago, or anywhere else, is worthwhile it will be privately financed. Otherwise, it just is less costly to let the trains sit.
You may find it interesting that the EJ&E is very much busier in the past two years than ever before, serving like the bypass you speak about. I heard a rumor last weekend about them looking at possibly double tracking “The J” in the future to accomodate more bypass traffic, but it was just a rumor. The UP and CN are using the J right now in addition to the J’s own trains. I live about a mile from their main and hear lots of trains at night blowing for the Rt. 34 crossing. Also, when I cross Rt. 34 I see their approach lit signals glowing much more often than ever before.
PS: Chicago drowing in trains may be not so good for the railroads but very good for us railfans.
Good explanations for why there’s a problem. I’ll throw in another quote from the article. Air-freight tonnage in Chicago is projected to double in the next 25 years; the number of lorries coming through the area is expected to rise by 80%; rail volume should almost double in two decades. And there will be a compounding effect from the fast growth of inter-modal transport (switching freight from one “mode” to another, such as train to truck or aircraft) which tends to send even more traffic to hubs like Chicago
Gary: That is essentially true. I think their inclusion of “aircraft” in the sentence shows they don’t know the difference between freight value and freight tonnage. A huge percentage of freight value moves by air, but the effects of that freight on the highway and rail infrastructure is almost nil.
Greyhounds: I’m suprised to see you advance this argument. Your other posts show great awareness of complexity. You would propose that all the intermodal traffic reaching Chicago should simply be rubbered from one side to another, each truck paying a fuel tax that is penny or so on the dollar of its actual use of roadway resources, and that the air pollution and subsequent impact on everyone else’s health care, building maintenance costs, etc., should be foisted onto the people paying for the health care and building maintenance?
Is there ANY government expenditure you think justified? National defense – shouldn’t that be paid for in user fees, too? I realize that your insistence on belittling those who disagree with you by calling it “gubermint” means you’re probably not open to different opinions, but I’ll give you the benefit of any doubt.
I agree, in the long run, the free market will work just fine. Traffic and pollution will drive people out of Chicago, real estate prices will collapse, and the railroads will find it easy to build connections across the deserted land once occupied by a thriving metropolis. The loss of wealth will be enormous, the loss of productivity will be enormous, but measured against the threat to a sacred ideology, a trillion dollars here or there seems a cheap price indeed. My friend, I don’t like the abuse of the free market by people using the government to extract money from my wallet to put in their wallet any more than you do – and I spend a lot of time in my job analyzing the negative (and sometimes positive) effects of subsidy, regulation, and taxation, but in my view, the whole point of life isn’t to erect a shrine to the free mar
Wondering about the growth projections. Are people going to continue to load up their lives with so much physical stuff? Will the transportation component trend downward as technological change continues? Projection TV’s become thin membranes?
Tom: Incisive question. Many people thought that the gross ton-mile growth we’re experiencing wouldn’t happen, because heavy capital goods and durable consumer goods would achieve market saturation, then become more durable, nearly eliminating new installations and reducing replacement needs. That is, as soon as everyone bought a washing machine, we wouldn’t be shipping so much weight across the country – just a few replacement machines as the old ones wore out.
That was pretty naive thinking. In fact, heavy and durable goods did decline, once everyone had one of everything, but in the meantime, transportation capacity had been built to haul all that stuff, and now it had spare capacity. That allowed people to leverage that spare capacity and transportation productivity to source things from a lot farther away that we used to produce locally. So what we’ve quit shipping in terms of heavy goods we’ve filled right back up with things like food, clothing, paper goods, and other consumables. To leverage labor costs, the U.S. and Canada will continue to source things from farther and farther away, and transportation GTMs will continue to grow. In the very long run, wages in foreign countries will rise a little, while ours fall off a cliff to meet them at the bottom, and these labor advantages of foreign countries will evaporate. But we’ll still have a huge transportation infrastructure in place which can move things very cheaply, so then natural geographic advantages will come into play.
While there might be a day in the future when averaged GTMs begin to decline, I don’t think it will be in my lifetime. Wages are already on the decline, though.