KCS stays on track
(The Kansas City Star posted the following article by Randolph Heaster on its website on August 24.)
KANSAS CITY – Last month, Kansas City Southern chairman and chief executive Mike Haverty took the railroad industry’s top regulator on an aerial tour of Kansas City’s freight rail operations, the nation’s second busiest by volume.
Surface Transportation Board Chairman Roger Nober was making his inspection as a heating economy was overloading the railroad system in certain hotspots of the country, particularly the Union Pacific Corp.'s resources in the West.
“He was astounded by how fluid the traffic generally was in Kansas City, as opposed to what he had seen in places like Houston and Los Angeles,” Haverty recalled recently.
Nober said Kansas City’s rail system has some geographic advantages that other rail hubs lack, but the area also benefited from more than $500 million in rail infrastructure improvements in recent years. He pointed to the $74 million Sheffield Flyover Rail Bridge in the Blue Valley industrial district, which has eliminated delays at one of the busiest rail intersections in the country.
“The carriers in Kansas City have made infrastructure investments that have kept your system operating more smoothly,” Nober said last week. “It’s sort of a minimodel for what they’re looking at in Chicago.”
The movement of goods by rail has become a much-discussed topic in the business world as the economy began to improve earlier this year. U.S. railroads have been trying to do more with less: moving more freight with fewer workers.
In 2003, the major railroads moved nearly 2 million more carloads than 1999, generating $3.1 billion more in revenues. And that was done with 23,000 fewer workers at the major carriers.
But earlier this year as the economy picked up, Union Pacific, the country’s biggest railroad, was caught off-guard by the amount of freight customers needed shipped. T