Interesting article. Sounds like a RR industry lobbiest, tho’.
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2009/0901.longman.html
I thought it was a great article! I can’t see some things mentioned in it coming true (electrification is a great idea but getting railroads to use it will be tough, and somehow I can’t see any major railroads being interested in operating commuter service) but nonetheless it was a good read and gives a feeling of hope to the industry.
I thought the article was very good also, but: I think he underestimated the capacity improvements needed if they throw passenger in with the freight, especially if passenger will be running at any kind of speed. It already takes 3 tracks to get BNSF out of SoCal. Throw in a couple dozen pass/mail trains which have priority over freight an you will be right back in the same jam as before the third track. Passenger really needs its own dedicated two track right of way if its to have any kind of effeciency that won’t kill freight in most high capacity lanes. Not so sure abouth those 100mph double stacks either. On long tagents, sure, but on the curves that are presently in place it seems to me (I’m no engineer [civil or any other kind]) that the lateral forces would be a killer. But I’m all for the increased capacity…bring on the trains!
John
I
The author makes a great case for the railroad although I don’t know whom if anyone he represents.
Growing up along I-81 was as he said: an endless game of tag passing trucks uphill, trucks passing us downhill. I don’t see six-laning would give a lot of relief unless trucks are absolutey, positively not allowed to use the leftmost (inside) lane, as is the case in Tennessee and Kentucky, and probably states I don’t know about). .
Eleven billion dollars seems a little steep for six-laning around 300 miles of Virginia roadway; and as the article states, the route is mostly rural. (Roanoke lies several miles to the east off its own Interstate spur). In a hypothetical six-laning operation, and allowing ten times as much per mile as the original four-lane I-81 cost in 1964-68 (estimated at $1million / mile incl. surveying, land acquisition, grading, labor, and materials), I’d get about $3 billion. Why it is almost four times as much I have no idea.
I’m not sure about getting acrosss central PA, but I believe it would be possible to load a piggyback trailer on a train within 30 miles of where I-81 touches the Canadian border and move it at least to Scranton. There are a couple of spots where it’s not a straight shot, but that could undoubtedly be fixed or otherwise dealt with.
The lines involved - CSX from Watertown, NYS&W from Syracuse to Binghampton, and CP south to Scranton - are not capacity constrained right now, from what I know. They would need work to get up to 60 or so, but clear routing at 40 would certainly serve to move them in a timely manner.
I don’t really know how things are in the midwest, but if I read everything right, the two coasts suffer most from congestion, land scarecity, and air pollution especially in conjunction with transportation issues. The midwest appears to have pockets and corridors reflecting the same problems but evidently the way most midwesteners post here and elsewhere, it does not appear to be as bad as on the coasts. For I81 there simply is no room to build another lane to aleve the congestion; nor can the air take any more pollution. Building up rail capacity is the least expensive, least intrusive, least polluting thing that can be done. Urban and transportation planners have been saying that for at least 15 years. The westcoast understood and have done well dealing with thier transportation programs though a lot more work is needed. The east is comiing around and the I81 Corridor is the poster child. Not only is the environment and pollution problematic with land use, so is the value to the people who own and live on the land: taking land away from living is also a problem by creating crowded urban areas which start new environmental issues. The planners have pointed to rail for years. It apparently is time to follow thier advice and act.
I’m not advocating for the six-laning of I-81 in Virginia, but the land acquisition costs would probably be very low. The median is generous and could hold the new lanes (this is the case with a portion of the road that has been six-laned, near Bristol).
If the process works as I’ve seen it on similar Interstates (I-75 in Kentucky and Tennessee, for instance), the left shoulder on both sides is widened into a left breakdown lane, with a guard rail in between (better looking than those nasty “Jersey Barriers” at any rate).
NS takes double stacks across central Pennsylvania now…They opened up clearance across the Alleghenies {tunnel}, so it is being done now. This is the old Pennsylvania RR route across there…
This, of course, came right after the “planners” spent decades pointing away from rail and artificially diverting freight to truck transportation through regulations. (As mentioned in the "Interesting Article.)
The solution to errors in “government planning” is always “more government planning.”
I’ll hand it to the author. He is more knowledgeable than most. But, he’s writing with a purpose and he does bend the facts.
He spends a lot of effort blaming Wall Street for not funding railroad capital improvements. Well, where the railroads have been able to show that they can operate and market (including pricing) efficiently, they’ve found the capital. The author cites the CSX proposal for improvements down the Atlantic seaboard as an example of failure to fund. Well, CSX hasn’t exactly been an example of a well managed company for the past couple of decades. Conversely, BNSF can double track the Transcon, triple track Cajon and expand in the Powder River Basin.
He mentions “delapidated” railroads. No, the rail network is in decent shape. It’s certainly not “delapidated”.
He fails to mention government impediments to rail capacity expansion, such as the lengthy environmental studies that delayed the Abo Canyon work and Arizona’s insistance that every road crossing on the double tracked Sunset Route have an overpass. Every last one of them.
He doesn’t understand the need for aggregation in transportation and, as a result is critical of the FedEx hub operation in Memphis. He describes their hub as a “process that demands far greater expenditures of money, carbon, fuel (I thought that was the carbon), and in many instances, time than one used eighty years ago.” He c
If they can extract $350-billion TARP money from the economy and use it with no accountability, you would think we could afford a $350-billion tax cut. What would that do for the economy?