I was sriving to work on I-85 this morning when I got to wondering just how many interstates have major rail lines paralleling them and how the affect each other. I know NS’ Crescent Line folllows 85 almost it’s entire length and yet 85 still has heavy truck traffic.
Here are some others:
I-95 is paralleled by the Florida East Coast from Jacksonville to Miami and truck traffic seems less dense. CSX formaer ACL follows 95 from Jacksonville to Washington but there is heavy track traffic. The Northeast corridor also follows 95 and probably removes a fair number of cars.
I-26 follows NS "W’ line for most of it’s length in South Carolina but there is still a lot of trucks on it.
You almost need to define what you mean by “parallel”. For example, I-80 is probably the busiest coat-to-coast truck route, and UP’s overland route for the most part “parallels” I-80 if you’re talking about origin and destination points (for example Chicago to San Francisco). However, along the way, the overland route diverges quite a bit at a number of points with I-80, but the start/end destinations are the same. The point is that most places where trucks go, trains can go to. A great way to learn more about this is to enable the transportation layer in Google Earth and look at rail tracks vs. highways.
around Bowling Green the csx toledo branch(former nyc) borders I-75.There is a diamond at the North Baltimore exit(rt 18) where it crosses the east west B&O main.Further south on 75 the toledo sub comes into play around shawnee and piqua and sidney and you go over the csx indy line at sidney ohio.When you get south of Dayton the ns line comes into play at moraine.More traffic can be seen further south as you go into cincinnati.In Michigan from flint to port huron I-69 follows the fomer gtw(now cn) close too.hope this helps. please pay attention to the road while driving.
The Interstate highway system was basically a way to improve on existing highways (it’s pretty easy to see which ones followed which anywhere), but those quite often (at least as often as topography would allow) followed the principal rail routes.
However, the Interstates were far more damaging to railroad freight service than the slower roads had been. For now, I doubt that you’ll see a significant reduction in OTR trucks, regardless of how many stack trains do or don’t travel a given route–but just try to imagine how crowded the roads would be if those trains weren’t there!
Also you need to Remember this with OTR trucking you get ablity to have Door to Door service. With Railroads how many times would that car be handled between say La to say a small town like Springfield MO. With Trucks it is shut the doors and Go til you get there.
That’s exactly right. It’s more about accommodation of growth. The Crescent Corridor won’t drain I-81 to a great degree more than it will allow VA to forgo adding lanes any time soon.
OK, counterpoint… - I-74 between Bloomington, IL and Champaign, IL, the former Peoria & Eastern/NYC/PC/CR/N&W/NS line that is mothballed between Mansfield and Bloomington(Dean) and hasn’t seen a train in 20 years, the remainder only sees 3-4 trains/wk…
Actually, I-80/U.S. 6 parallels the ex-RI Chicago - Omaha mainline of the IAIS while U.S. Highway 30 hugs the ex-CNW and UP portions of the “Overland Route”.
I remember back in the mid-'90’s I was westbound on I-15 between Vegas and the LA basin when I hit the bottom of Mountain Pass and where the UP main comes close by after hitting the bottom of Cima Hill. I got there just as the rear end of a WB stack train rounded the bend and came parallel to me. My speedometer was at 80 the entire way to the outskirts of Yermo and I was just keeping up with the guy. Twenty miles or so at 80, he was hauling. Of course my speedometer may be off a mile and hour ot two and I suspect her was doing 79, and my ETT for that date says 70 MPH for that stretch. In any case, he was smoking hot. I lost him at Yermo wher he changed crews.
Interstates follow what used to be Federal Highways and Federal Highways follow what used to be old roads and those old roads are formed where the trails were that people took to get from one place to another (all the way back to some old Indian trails). The route is always what is deemed at the time it is selected to be the easiest to build and use. Same for Railroads… So it seems only natural that Railroads and Interstates will somewhat parallel each other. Sometimes there is not enough traffic to utilize (and make economical) the first route built and the others are then never completed, so you will find Railroads where no roads exist and roads where no Railroads were built. But where the traffic is great enough, more than one transportation media will exist in parallel with others.
After the oil embargoes of the 1970s, the Department of Defense decided it better identify essential rail lines to make sure they didn’t disappear in the “rationalization” that was ironically taking place as we queued up at the gas pumps on alternate calendar days. The Strategic Rail Core Network (STRACNET) was thus named and mapped. This network generally has the same reach as the Interstate Highway System, at least paralleling the road system at the multi-state level, if not more closely on a regional or local basis.
In 1999, former FRA Administrator Gil Carmichael proposed upgrading a non-specified core network of rail lines to high-performance, high-capacity design standards. He called it Interstate II.
In 2007 the National Assn. of Railroad Passengers identified a 40-year vision plan for passenger rail development – the Grid and Gateway map – that shares many of STRACNET’s routes, plus about another 5-6 thousand miles that are more relevant to intercity passenger markets.
In 2009 the Millennium Institute published a study that called for developing an oil-free transportation network – using a core network of electrified rail lines, powered by renewable energy – to shift nearly 80% of over-the-road trucks to trains in most non-local markets. Conventional intermodal would max out at about 15% diversion of domestic shipments, requiring much faster open-technology intermodal trains that match mid-range trucks in speed and reliability to divert the other 65%.
Refine all these core rail network route maps in the interest of sustainable mobility, post Peak Oil, and one comes up with the North American Steel Interstate System.
In August, the North American Steel Interstate Coalition launched its website with the mission to:
"Promote policies at the federal, state and local levels to assemble a core national network of high-capacity, grade-separated, electrified rail lines as the backbone of an oil-free, eff
To add to what Steam Forever is saying, early trails often followed streams and rivers, not only because there was water for cattle and humans, but also if there were any mountains in the way, the grades were likely to be less severe due to the water having worn a path through the terrain over time.
There are plenty of examples of this in the west including the Royal Gorge, Columbia Gorge, Feather River, etc.