Recently I’ve been pondering the future of railroads whenever I found spare time to do so. With gas prices what they are, more people are talking about rail transit and its got me thinking.
Oil prices are not only affecting the roads, but could we see the day when its more economical for a railroad to operate Coal fired steam rather than diesels, like the Crab Orchard & Egyptian Railroad did in the 1980’s?
Could railroads once again be the top choice of transportation as they had been?
What do you think will happen?
Cheese
P:S: This isnt really relavent to this topic, but I thought I’d ask anyway. Say I were to become the owner of a 80 odd mile long shortline, with track in such bad condition the maximum speed limit is 10 mph and I wanted to rebuild the tracks and roadbed, what would be the better rail for me to use: Welded rail or Jointed Rail. Should I use Concrete ties or Wood ties. If I were to rebuild the roadbed from the ground up what would be the best way to do it? And finally, if I were to replace a very old wooden trestle that people are afraid to cross when passenger trains for special events are run, what sort of bridge would be best?
(My, my, my, it seems the future of rail seems to have taken a backseat to the other questions)
Regarding the cost of fuel, here is something you may not have thought about:
Last month Investor’s Business Daily noted that the cost of transporting a container across the Pacific has risen dramatically. They report that what used to cost $3000, now costs $8000. If this added cost of transportation is permanent, there will be a migration of manufacturing from China and other eastern areas to Mexico, says IBD.
Such a move would have a profound impact on our railroads. Container shipments from west coast to east will dwindle, to the detriment of UP and BNSF. KCS, on the other hand, is in perfect position to profit from increased traffic originating in Mexico. Much of the container flow through Chicago would shift to KC and perhaps StL. NS and CSX would still move container traffic as before, but with emphasis on more southerly routes. Thus, the Lake Shore Line, for example , might give up traffic to the old B&O route through Cumberland.
Note that what IBD reports isn’t just idle speculation. The reported costs are actual and the expected migration is the thinking of business insiders who know what they are talking about. The impact on the railroads IS idle speculation - mine.
Traffic from Mexico might mean more carload bussiness and the BNSF and UP would probably continue to ship raw materials and grain to the west coast ports even if container import tapers off. Even if Asia can’t sell thier products here they would still need raw materials just to support themselves… maybe
If you go back a few pages on this forum you will find an extremely long thread called “could steam make a comeback” with detailed discussion of the issue of coal as a rr fuel…
I offered a bet in the other thread about steam that I will eat the first ounce of coal from the tender of the first Class I revenue freight, regular everyday service steam locomotive, if the person taking the bet will agree that if this doesn’t happen within 10 years, they have to drink an ounce of diesel fuel. I’ve got no takers so far.
They never were anything but the top choice for the purpose at which they excel, the cheap movement of large, regular amounts of bulk cargo overland. If you’re asking if they will replace trucks, no. We’re not going back to a horse-and-wagon, small-town world.
Depends what you are using it for and whether you’re intending to operate the line to make money or for
These are interesting possibilities. We’ve entered into a territory whose existence has long been predicted (and the predictors dismissed as Chicken Littles) and there’s not a lot of guidance as to what will happen. Opinions are freely offered, but for what it’s worth no one in the railroad business I know of is predicting any substantial decline in the volume of import-export traffic via North American West Coast ports, except one that follows general business cycle trends. In other words, a recession that knocks off 10% of volume will be equally felt – the West Coast ports will not lose business at a higher proportion than all North American ports.
No. It means the ship burns less fuel to get to Prince Rupert than it does to Southern California. But there’s a number of other tradeoffs. The big question is the final destination of the boxes. A ship calling at Prince Rupert needs to have virtually every box on the ship destined for Chicago or points east – it can have a few for Calgary or Winnipeg, which are small markets, but zero for anything in the U.S. west of the Mississippi. It doesn’t save much fuel to have the ship only unload some of the boxes there, then travel to Los Angeles to unload the rest. That means that in Asia, the ship has to load only boxes for Chicago east, and that means the ports it starts at in Asia have to be able to generate that kind of volume at the right time. That takes space at the port, it takes absorption of inventory costs, it takes infrastructure at the factories. It’s not simple by any means to generate the logistics planning and execution, much less the cost tradeoffs.
Then when the ship leaves, it needs to have enough boxes to fill it up from Chicago east, hopefully destined for the same ports it started at.
Los Angeles is one of the largest load centers in the world. Even though it might take more fuel for the ship to travel there, it pays off in economies at the ports, the factories, the distribution centers, the railroads, the ship loading/unloading planning, the return moves, the container cycles, and many other costs. It took a tremendous volume threshold to be established before Prince Rupert began to make economic sense, and it’s competitive nich
Ive read on another forum that some of the politicians in southern California are now pushing for a levy on imported boxes. This may push some inbound containers further north as well.
The Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach have at least since 1977 imposed fees on containers coming over the dock, regardless of whether they were international or domestic in origin. The fee per 20-foot container in 1977 was $20 at POLA, today it’s $193.20. The most recent fee hike took effect this month at both POLA and POLB, $35 per container loaded onto trucks (not containes loaded onto rail) to raise $1.6 billion to replace 17,000 older high-emissions trucks serving the docks with new low-emissions trucks.
The fees at POLB and POLA are de facto infrastructure fees, imposed to internalize the costs of operating the ports onto the users of the ports, who are in many cases not local users, rather than externalizing the costs onto local taxpayers who may not derive benefits from the ports. The success at POLB and POLA of instituting these taxes will not so much drive business away from these ports as provide an umbrella for other ports to institute their own fee hikes to pay for their infrastructure needs, too. Every West Coast port in order to grow significantly needs to raise billions of dollars; the fee is simply a method of charging the user rather than expecting the benefits of the port to trickle to the state or national taxpayer, and taxing them to pay for the infrastructure. I think rather than expecting the fees to drive business away, the fees will be absorbed, and other ports will do the same shortly.
The fees at POLA and POLB were imposed by the port commissions, which is probably not “politicians” in the sense you meant, Dale. Most ports are autonomous. Though their boards might be elected or appointed, they are not truly an extension of state legislatures or the state executive in the manner in
Why is it, with the current rise in fuel prices, many people who are reportedly “in the know” about these things talking about the increase being permanent? On the other hand, there are other sources that I read and listen to that have people, also reportedly “in the know” that the price of oil is “riding a bubble” that is soon to burst, and the prices will moderate… Now, they didn’t say we would be back to 1.10 a gallon for gas, but we would be back to a more “reasonable” price, whatever that is supposed to mean.
Could it be, that with the price of oil being so high, that “cheap imports” may be on the way out?
I was thinking that the general population up here views taxes spent on infrastructure as a sound investment, and the ports are important to the economy. If some of my tax dollars were going towards dredging or port expansion, it would not bother me at all.
You have no takers because it would take ten years or more just to cut through all the government red tape, and even then they’d probably put the kibosh on serious attempts at coal fired steam locomotive production due to climate fraud. Remember, this is the same government that just banned incandescent lightbulbs, and still to this day won’t lift the ban on OCF/ANWR drilling - “…duuuhhh…it’d take ten years to get that oil to market anyway, so why start now? Duuuhhhh…”. If ANWR were in any other country, even if it were in Canada, that oil would be flowing today, and it wouldn’t have taken them more than a few years to get it into production. The USA is the only country on this planet that has taken such great pains to economically eviscerate itself.
So much for the free market determining production outcomes here in the US of A.
The beauracracy is the only thing keeping you from poisoning yourself, although if you took the pulverized coal dust 1/8 of a teaspoon at a time over the course of several months you might be able to handle it without serious health effects!
Again, if this decision was left up to the free market, we’d have coal-fired steam locomotives in regular revenue service within a few years, based soley on the long term price differential between coal and petroleum.
Or perhaps it is your awareness of the red tape hurdles that prompted you to make this bet?
As an aside to this, If we had a free market I wouldn’t have to stock up on good old Edison light bulbs because I absolutely HATE those CFL light bulbs and everything they stand for.
Me too. I will have to calculate how many incandescent bulbs I will need for the rest of my life and how much space it will take to store them. I’ll bet the incandescent bulbs just sell like crazy as the cutoff point approaches. I wonder if the ban will ban owning them or re-selling them.
Nobody’s trying to ram them down your throat, guys. You’ll still be able to get all the indies and specialty bulbs you want for years and years. Neither the big utility companies nor the federal government is putting limits on traditional light bulbs. But I have to put in a word for the CFL’s. The newest ones (which my friend Chuck calls the “Dairy Queen type”) give a bluer, more realistic light than incandescents, and for 22 watts’ worth of power can provide more illumination than a 100-watt light bulb. Go to some place like Menard’s or Home Depot and you can see they’re not all that much more expensive anymore. Also (with summer coming in, this is particularly important), because they are so much more efficient, they give off less heat (less wasted energy expressed as heat). I have two of them burning right now just behind me on the sofa bench behind where I am typing, and they’re more than enough light for me (and I am a person who likes a STRONG reading light!). All for just a bit more than a 40-watt bulb.
Yes, I suppose there are a lot of idiots running around trying to “green” things who may overplump for the new bulbs. But to me, saying that one hates CFL’s and “everything they stand for” is like saying, “I hate the Internet and everything it stands for.” I
My guess is that coal will become the source for liquid transportation fuels. There are a couple technologies for extracting hydrocarbons from coal. The hydrocarbons can then be further refined, and perhaps blended with oil products, to make an array of fuels.
So, coal fired steam engines? I doubt it. Coal as a source for diesel fuel. I’d count on it!
Well that is news to me. I must have heard 1000 times that congress has banned the incandescent light bulb by 2014. It is said that they will no longer be on the store shelves. When you say we will be able to get all the incandescent bulbs we want for years and years, how will we do this when congress has banned them and ordered them removed from store shelves?
Regarding what CFLs “stand for,” that to me is the most insidious part. I have no problem with people trying to save energy according to their own will, but CFLs stand for telling other people how to live their lives. And they are just the tip of the iceberg. This vision ultimately includes government limits on our use of motor fuel, heating fuel, electricity, water, and waste disposal for starters.