I am hoping someone can help me. I have a few questions about what equipment costs to railroads.
What is the cost of a new locomotive?
What is about the average cost of a freight car?
I read somewhere that it costs $100 to lay just one foot of rail and ties. Is this correct? I understand it adds up quickly.
Thanks in advance.
This was covered at length in an issue of Trains within the last year or so - get one and take a look at it if you can.
Pending review of that, I’ll suggest the following, subject to the usual caveats, such as 'It all depends on . . . ’ and ‘What size/ specification ?’, etc., being chief among them:
What is the cost of a new locomotive? Around $ 2 million each - based on NS purchasing like 350 main line units for around $700 million this year, if I recall correctly.
What is about the average cost of a freight car? Figure $ 100,000 each, give or take, esp. depending heavily on type and ‘bells and whistles’. [This figure I am the least confident in.]
I read somewhere that it costs $100 to lay just one foot of rail and ties. Is this correct? That’s as good as any other figure for 1 foot of single track [2 rails] =
The number I use with our passengers to illustrate the cost of replacing a tie is $70 - roughly $35 for the tie and $35 to install it. It may not be totally accurate (updates are welcome!), but it goes a long way toward reaching your $100. In fact, when it comes to installing track, once you factor in the ballast below and the rail above, the cost may actually be above $100. Well above.
MC can probably give you a pretty good idea.
IIRC, locomotives are coming in over $1 Million a copy now.
Like automobiles, railcars are going to be all over the place, depending on what kind of car you’re talking about.
The fully allocated cost of installing a new, hardwood crosstie is around $105. That includes the green tie itself (cut and shaped), the application of wood preservative, transportation, and installation. Add to that the cost of removing the old tie the new one replaces, and disposal costs of the old tie, and the figure is a little bit higher.
Railroad maintenance: 'tain’t no cheap proposition.
On Locomotive builders you would have the GE and EMD. GE are cheaper than EMD but EMD produces quality locomotives. The 2 million price tag per locomotive is too high. It should be lower if you have all the whistle load it to the locomotive. Axles,Gevo, Cab Comfort. etc…
I seen locomotives we coolers, air condition, and extra features.
I suspect that the suggestion that EMD builds better quality locos than GE would be disputed by GE and many of the railroads that buy them. First cost is, of course, important, but it’s far from the only thing that railroads look at. Buying a lesser quality loco because it’s cheaper can be a false economy.
Add to all of this the cost of maintaining the right of way. Railroads use a number of roughly $10,000/mile to maintain a track. This includes: inspections, repairs, tie/rail replacement, brush clearing, weed killing and all sorts of other miscellaneous costs.
Another aspect - not commonly thought about or mentioned, though - that the railroads consider when making their purchasing decisions is that they want to keep at least 2 major locomotive builders in business. Otherwise, if 1 of those builders would become defunct, then there would only be 1 - and no competition on price - and then what incentive would there be to improve quality or performance, etc. ? So decision a decision to favor builder A on the basis of price alone for the current order could conceivably backfire if builder B then goes out of business. Therefore, at least some railroads appear to split their orders between EMD and GE on a strategic basis to assure that they both remain viable business entities and competitors.
Also, with regard to locomotive costs - from a News Release -
at http://www.bnsf.com/media/news/articles/2009/01/2009-01-21b.html
‘‘The Company [BNSF] also anticipates acquiring approximately 350 locomotives at a cost of about $675 million. These locomotives are about 15 percent more fuel efficient than the locomotives they will replace.’’ [emphasis added - PDN]
A couple/ three weeks ago RWM and I got into a debate regarding this figure, in the context of the thread on the tunnel closure and detours for the Montana Rail Link’s Mullan Pass line. This $10,000 figure is not out of line for industrial track and lightly-used branch lines, excluding heavy concentrations of turnouts [switches], grade crossings, and major bridges, tunnels, and the like, and no major signal /communications infrastructure, etc.
However, for main lines of the MRL class - with tunnels and a lot of cuts, fills, rockwork, bridges, etc. - I was suggesting using $25,000 per mile, whereas RWM thought it should be closer to $75,000. Subsequently, I took a look at BNSF’s [at least somewhat similar to MRL] on-line copy of its R-1 Annual Report for 2008 to the STB, and extracted and divided total M-O-W costs (a really big
There’s a serious measure of truth in what Paul North writes above. Don’t discount it!
Mr. North’s comments brings to mind something that happened during the Michael Walsh, CEO years at Union Pacific Railroad (1986-1991). Mr. Walsh allegedly got ticked-off at what he perceived to be the low quality of product being produced by locomotive builders General Electric and EMD. In fact, Mr. Walsh made some serious public pronouncements that if those two builders didn’t get their act together soon, he was prepared to buy engines from KOREA!
Apparently the legendary Jack Welch at G.E. heard his comments, because it wasn’t very long afterwards that the folks at Erie, Penn. started turning out more reliable and fuel efficient engines.
[quote user=“Paul_D_North_Jr”]
A couple/ three weeks ago RWM and I got into a debate regarding this figure, in the context of the thread on the tunnel closure and detours for the Montana Rail Link’s Mullan Pass line. This $10,000 figure is not out of line for industrial track and lightly-used branch lines, excluding heavy concentrations of turnouts [switches], grade crossings, and major bridges, tunnels, and the like, and no major signal /communications infrastructure, etc.
However, for main lines of the MRL class - with tunnels and a lot of cuts, fills, rockwork, bridges, etc. - I was suggesting using $25,000 per mile, whereas RWM thought it should be closer to $75,000. Subsequently, I took a look at BNSF’s [at least somewhat similar to MRL] on-line copy of its R-1 Annual Report for 2008 to the STB, and extracted and divided total M-O-W costs (a really big
Yes, a large measure of truth. PC, then early on, Conrail used to used GE orders just to keep EMD paying attention.
Yes, I looked at BNSF 2008 annual report and divide their $1.5B maintenance cost by 23,000 miles of owned track you get $65,217 per mile. That seems a bit steep but if you look at the amount of work just done on our track here in the Twin Cities it might be closer to the truth for mainline, first class track. I find this is equivalent to one maintenace employee per mile of track. How is that for a rule-of-thumb.
Not bad for a rule of thumb - but you need to take into account all that really expensive track maintenance equipment/ machinery, which is so productive that it replaced another couple of employees per mile. And the materials that are installed by those employees and equipment - from the ties (see above) to the ballast at $15 or so per ton = $50,000 per mile, to the rails, which can run around $20 per foot = $200,000 every few years for that item alone.
I believe I used about 41,000 track-miles for my calculation, by adding up the entries in Line No. 57 - Grand Total of BNSF’s Schedule 700. - MILEAGE OPERATED AT CLOSE OF YEAR on page 74 of its 2008 R-1, at - http://www.bnsf.com/investors/transportationreports/08R1.pdf - less the 2 categories of switching tracks. However, on closer review tonight, I see that includes almost 9,000 track-miles of trackage rights (Line No. 16 for ‘Class 5’ = ‘‘Line operated under trackage rights’’, per the instructions and definitions on page 73). However, the 23,000 miles of owned track is just ‘route-miles’ or ‘Miles of road’ in column (c), per the total in Line No. 11. I would prefer to add the about 8,000 miles of 2nd and other main tracks and sidings, etc., for a revised total of about 31,000 track-miles.
For costs, I believe I excluded yard and switching tracks, as well as signal expenses, for an adjusted total annual M-O-W cost of about $1.35 Billion. Doing the math again come sout to about $43,500 per track-mile per year, which still seems within reason to me - though of course, 'Your Mileage May Vary".
I’m unfamiliar with the EMD situation; however I believe that Bob accurately described what occurred between UP and GE.
The following is a quote from a September 1993 article in The Wall Street Journal by William M. Carley entitled “GE Locomotive Unit, Long an Also-Ran, Overtakes Rival GM”:
“Railroad officials, by the late 1980s, were complaining bitterly to GE. One example: Michael Walsh, then chairman of Union Pacific Railroad. . .flew to GE’s locomotive works here and lectured a gathering of hundreds of workers to improve qualilty. And he told GE that if quality didn’t improve, the Union Pacific would place a big order with Japanese companies to encourage them to start marketing locomotives in North America.”
The article cites the resultant improvements as “a lesson on how well the aggressive strategies of GE Chairman Jack Welch work in practice”.
From the RA article: FRA class 4 track (80 mph pass/60 frt), >30 MGT, $63-102k/mile. FRA class 5 track (90/70), >30MGT, $71-114k/mile.
Don, thanks much for that reference and the extracts. [tup]
It’s the August 2009 issue, the article on pp. 25 - 27 by Tom Judge, Engineering Editor, entitled ‘‘Hot Trains, Cold Calculations’’, as part of the SPECIAL REPORT ON HIGH SPEED RAIL - Incremental HSR.
Here’s a direct link to the article [I hope it works]:
http://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/sb/ra0809/#/27/OnePage
or just try this link to the entire issue:
http://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/sb/ra0809/#/0
Interesting info ! Thanks again.
So I guess the $65K/mile cost is not too out of line. I am sure that much is spent on heavily used lines (like the famous 603 switch that gets trains out of the Northtown yard back onto the main track, and the crossovers at Hoffman Avenue in St. Paul – where there is always someone working on something). But, it averages out to this number. Wonder what the Europeans spend to maintain their passenger rail?
Of course they save money in Europe since they only have to maintain it by the kilometer which is 5/8 of a mile![:)]
It would also be interesting to know how much more work can be done by mechanized crews of today compared to the manual labor of 100 years ago.
[(-D] [tup]
Generally - huge, it boggles the mind, and with much bigger/ heavier/ higher quality materials, and more complex/ difficult assemblies, too - such as having to deal with CWR and grade crossings, etc. Just off the top of my head, I wouldn’t be surprised for it to have increased by a factor of as much as 4 to 10 time as much per man-day for the number of tie replacements and feet of rail replacement, and maybe 10 to 20 times as much for tamping, surfacing, and lining, etc. Sometime when I have more time it would be fun to compile that data. First question, though - What were the productivity standards of 100 years ago ? . . . [%-)]
But you know, for construction of raw new track on a prepared subgrade - even today, it’s not all that much faster than those guys did on that famous day - April 28, 1869 - when, ‘‘In 12 hours, the Central Pacific work gangs — Irish rail-handlers and Chinese support crews — laid 10 miles and 56 feet of track.’’ [from the website for the National Park Service’s Golden Spike NHS 'Site History, Chapter 2, at: