Blueprint America Correspondent Miles O’Brien looks at the contemporary needs, challenges, and solutions for transporting vital cargo across America, and how those decisions affect the way you live, work, and travel.

So as Congress begins a major rewrite of the nation’s transportation laws, many are asking if it is time to redirect freight traffic off congested highways onto more environmentally friendly and fuel efficient railroads. Sounds good, but there is a catch. Unlike highways that receive public funding, railroads are private. Should taxpayers sink public money into a private railway system? And where should the money come from?

Freight yard in New Jersey

Though the competition for investment dollars is heating up, the two systems depend heavily on each other — a train hitched with 250 trailers needs 250 trucks to move that freight to its final destination.

To try and figure out who should pay the freight, O’Brien travels to a trucking school in Central New Jersey, where he learns to back up a big rig, to Bayonne, New Jersey, where massive amounts of consumer products come to port every day, and to Washington, DC, where transportation policies are under debate.

Back in April, Blueprint America reported on serious congestion on freight rail lines in Chicago, which happens to handle about a third of all freight that moves across the country. We also looked at a billion-dollar-plus plan to ease that bottleneck — and that local, state and Federal officials were missing only one thing to get it done: money.

Today, The Wall Street Journal reports that the plan — known as CREATE — has just scored about a third of a billion dollars in federal subsidies.

Alongside investments by the railroads themselves, that’ll move the plan forward quite a bit. And freight railroads won’t be the only winners. As we reported, one of the most expensive elements in the plan will untangle commuter and freight lines near several busy junctions. That will help speed along commuter trains, and will ultimately allow Chicago-to-St. Louis regional trains to scoot along a little faster.

No word on whether any of the money will help suburban communities pay for the grade separations they want as more freight trains are routed around the city.

Canadian National on the rails

The town where I grew up – Highland, IN – was criss-crossed by freight rail lines. A two-track right-of-way ran not more than a hundred yards from my house; the same lines ran past the high school. Another line bisects the downtown area. And one of Canadian National’s (CN) main lines cuts across the southern edge of town.

So I have a little experience with the issues Blueprint America covers in our most recent story for The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. I know what it means to wait with the engine turned off while a freight train crawls by. I also know that certain communities are more likely than others to bear that burden.

Highland was pretty lucky: The neighboring town, Griffith, was the site of one of the busiest railroad junctions in the country. The downtown area of the nearby city of Hammond, where my father grew up, was frequently boxed in by trains waiting to clear a junction there. The joke was that if you’d lived in Hammond for 20 years, you’d spent a decade waiting for trains.

Hammond and Griffith, with all of their trains, were seen as less-desirable places to live; their per-capita incomes and property values were lower than Highland’s. People didn’t want to live near that many trains. So I can, in a sense, understand why people in Barrington, IL – home one of the wealthiest ZIP codes in Illinois – have been howling in protest ever since Canadian National decided to re-route a couple dozen trains a day from its mainline to a belt line that it purchased last year. As a University of Chicago study pointed out, the shift in train traffic is likely to impact wealthier communities while easing the burden on poorer towns – like Griffith, IN; South Holland, IL; and Chicago’s troubled South Side.

Canadian National has good reasons to make the change. As we reported in our last piece for the NewsHour, freight trains move through Chicago – one of the nation’s worst freight bottlenecks – at an average of nine miles an hour. And while the City of Chicago, railroads, and federal authorities have developed a plan to ease that congestion, it won’t be complete for years. So CN moved to do what it could now.

The railroad didn’t have many options. Notice that when I wrote about Highland, above, I wrote about some of the train lines in past tense. That’s because a lot about the railroads has changed in the Chicago area. The lines that ran past my house and Highland High School have been removed and turned into a rails-to-trails parkway. Dozens of other tracks have been abandoned. That’s part of a national trend: Track mileage in the U.S. peaked before the Great Depression, and has declined ever since. Railroads and communities have also invested in infrastructure to separate road and rail traffic – that’s what happened in downtown Hammond, for example. So fewer Americans today are waiting for freight trains to pass.

Of course, that’s on average. The re-routing will be tough on folks in Barrington – and the 32 other towns along the line that will see more trains. Some anti-CN activists are saying that the traffic problems are already worse than the railroad is telling federal regulators (CN says its reports to Washington are accurate). The towns want infrastructure to keep road and rail traffic out of one another’s ways – bridges over tracks, or underpasses beneath them.

Some municipalities – like Griffith, right next to my home town – negotiated settlements with CN, usually for less than 10 percent of the cost of new infrastructure (The rest will be paid by taxpayers). Two municipalities – Lynwood and Aurora, both in Illinois – got something better: Regulators at the Surface Transportation Board (STB) ordered CN to pay the bulk of the cost of new bridges or underpasses. As we report, CN has gone to court to overturn those orders, arguing that railroads traditionally pay no more than 10 percent of infrastructure costs because new “grade separations” primarily benefit highway users – so highway users (i.e. taxpayers) should bear the brunt of the cost.

Then there are municipalities like Barrington, which got neither a negotiated settlement nor a federal order. Members of the STB thought that was a raw deal: One thought the Board should have set a higher bar when considering CN’s request, while another urged the board to pay more attention to community concerns. Nonetheless, board members couldn’t find consensus – the board’s mandate, after all, is primarily to ensure that railroads remain competitive – and didn’t order CN to pay for more infrastructure.

Some members of Congress want to make sure that doesn’t happen again. House Transportation and Infrastructure committee Chairman James Oberstar (D-MN) sponsored a bill last year to force the STB to pay closer attention to community needs (Rep. Pete Visclosky [D-IN], who represents my home town, was a co-sponsor). The bill failed in committee, but Oberstar’s staff says he’s likely to introduce it again this year – even though it’ll be too late to prevent a similar change in rail routing from affecting his own district.

Regarding our recent piece on freight rail, a viewer commented:

“[Karr] neglected to mention that in Western Europe
most trains are electric, which accelerate more quickly, and don’t
use oil.”

The viewer is right about the basics — electrified trains are powerful, and depending on the source of electricity, can lead to less pollution.

Surprisingly, it was a U.S. railroad that proved the viability of electrified freight rail. Its story says a lot about the way we’ve approached big infrastructure projects over the years.

Late in the 19th Century, The Milwaukee Road found itself in an unenviable position: Five other railroads had already traversed the continent. The remaining available routes connecting the Plains to the West Coast across the Rockies were… less than ideal. The route that was most logical for the Milwaukee Road included a steep climb through the Rocky Mountains near Yellowstone Park, and its locomotives would have to operate in brutal winter cold – extremely difficult conditions for the steam locomotives of the day.

But the Milwaukee Road also found itself in a position to take advantage of new technology. Its five transcontinental competitors thought of trains as the old-fashioned way — the way in which engineers
had been thinking about them since the days of George and Robert Stephenson in Britain. In other words, trains had to haul their own power supply with them, carrying the coal (or wood or oil) that provided the energy, as well as a way to turn that energy into motion.

The alternative was to use the fuel to generate power in one location and transmit that power to the train, which would then only have to turn the power into motion. The Stephensons’ rival, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, tried to make that work, but his pneumatic system was a very inefficient forerunner to electricity and his line abandoned central power generation after just a year.

By the late 19th Century, electrical traction had advanced enough to make this all possible. So the Milwaukee Road dammed waterways near its tracks and installed hydroelectric turbines to generate electricity. It mined copper in the Rockies, and built overhead wires from that copper to carry power to its electric locomotives. What’s more, the railroad helped to pioneer a system in which trains generate energy as they apply their brakes while descending from the mountains –- power that could be pumped back into the overhead wires to help other trains climb the mountains.

All in all, it was a brilliant scheme. Despite its late start, the Milwaukee remained competitive. More importantly – at least from the perspective of this story – it inspired awe and attracted engineers and entrepreneurs from around the world who examined its design and engineering, then rushed home to implement its lessons on other lines.

What happened later wasn’t pretty. Competition from trucks and other railroads put pressure on the Milwaukee Road. In the late 60s, several of its competitors merged, which put even more pressure on
the line. By the early 70s, the railroad had deferred maintenance on the line to the point where it was difficult to compete at all. Finally, in 1973, its board of directors went against the advice of consultants and voted to replace the electric locomotives with diesel units. It also voted to pull down the overhead wires – an
attractive proposition, given that a copper shortage suggested that the line could sell the wires for $10 million as scrap.

It didn’t help. Oil prices soared, which made the diesel option much more expensive. Copper prices fell, which meant the Milwaukee Road generated only $5 million. By 1977, the railroad had filed for bankruptcy and abandoned its tracks from the Rockies to the Pacific Coast.

The Milwaukee Road proved that electrified freight railroads were practical and efficient – as long as management was willing to keep up maintenance on the generators and distribution wires. While European railroads adopted the technology, it’s not the path that other U.S. railroads chose. And even though some freight-rail advocates –- like our viewer and Washington Monthly journalist Phillip Longman –- think electrification would be a good idea today, industry officials disagree. First off, the investment would be huge –- hundreds of billions of dollars nationally. Second, one of the ways in which freight rail has maintained its profitability has been by stacking freight ever higher –- double-decker intermodal cars and triple-decker car carriers. Long story short, it’d be very difficult to build and maintain overhead wires that could accommodate today’s tall trains.

In the Midwest, Chicago has been a freight rail hub for around 150 years. In the old days, some lines brought raw materials to the city –- like cattle to the stockyards –- while others carried finished products to market. The city’s rails are still laid out that way: a couple of lines come in from the west and a couple of others from the east. Even though Chicago still handles about a third of the nation’s freight, a lot of it has to stop there -– wait there –- and shift from one railroad to another.

As a result, traffic on Chicago’s rails is even slower than traffic on its roads: A 2002 study found that freight trains pass through the city at an average of just nine miles an hour.

At the same time, the community of Barrington, IL, an outlying suburb in the Chicago area, has had freight re-routed to pass through the city. Residents are not too happy. Still, the shift in train traffic is likely to lessen the congestion of freight in the City of Chicago.

And while the City of Chicago, railroads, and federal authorities have developed a plan to ease freight train traffic, it won’t be complete for years. As a result, the freight carrier Canadian National did what it could and moved some of its trains away from the metropolitan area.

Correspondent Rick Karr reports.

In the Midwest, Chicago has been a freight rail hub for around 150 years. In the old days, some lines brought raw materials to the city –- like cattle to the stockyards –- while others carried finished products to market. The city’s rails are still laid out that way — a couple of lines come in from the west and a couple of others from the east. Even though Chicago still handles about a third of the nation’s freight, a lot of it has to stop there –- wait there –- and shift from one railroad to another.

As a result, traffic on Chicago’s rails is even slower than traffic on its roads — A 2002 study found that freight trains pass through the city at an average of just nine miles an hour.

A sign advertising Pabst Blue Ribbon beer lights up the surrounding freight cars parked in Chicago’s South Water Street freight terminal. || United States Library of Congress – 1943

There is no agency in Washington, D.C. responsible for untangling, modernizing, or maintaining the nation’s freight rail system –- or for paying for those improvements. Federal support for improving freight has to come through the back door –- tacked on to other transportation projects.

The Obama Administration’s plan for the expansion of high-speed passenger rail in several key corridors – including Chicago and the Midwest – is likely to improve the speed of freight as both kinds of trains share the same tracks in much of the country.

Correspondent Rick Karr reports.

The community of Barrington, IL, an outlying suburb in the Chicago area, has had freight re-routed to pass through the city. Residents are not too happy. Still, the shift in train traffic is likely to lessen the congestion of freight in the City of Chicago.

And while the City of Chicago, railroads, and federal authorities have developed a plan to ease freight train traffic, it won’t be complete for years. As a result, the freight carrier Canadian National did what it could and moved some of its trains away from the metopolitan area.

Correspondent Rick Karr reports.

The Takeaway, on Public Radio, talks with Rick Karr, correspondent for Blueprint America, about his report on the nation’s ailing freight-rail system airing on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.