The Scourge of the Long Train
The Scourge of the Long Train
I read a very long report on long trains so you don't have to.
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A couple of weeks ago, I spent two hours stuck in Delaware on an incredibly delayed Amtrak trip. So it was with interest and more than a little rage in my heart that I recently read a report on long trains and the effect they’re having on communities, workers, and public rail transportation across the U.S.
When I say long trains, I mean very long trains. Congress told the Department of Transportation to partner with the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine on a report examining the impacts of manifest trains, as they’re known, that cover a minimum of 7,500 feet, or about 1.5 miles. Today, some train lengths almost double that, reaching 14,000 feet, or about 2.6 miles. “Manifest” simply means they carry a mixture of different freight rail cars, which makes them harder to control due to differing weights and constantly changing cargo.
In recent years, there have been several high-profile train crashes that have been directly or indirectly blamed on the length of the trains, the safeguards in place for operating them free of incident, and the extent to which their crews were working in suboptimal conditions, including one in East Palestine, Ohio, that received significant media attention.
There has also been quite a bit of anecdotal reporting on long trains blocking rail crossings at critical points across the United States, resulting in emergency vehicles losing access to certain parts of the towns they cover, and pedestrians, including school children, needing to dangerously crawl over and under trains.
The report does nothing to assuage the fears of those who look at long trains as a real public policy problem. Indeed, it shows how corporate power, consolidation, and lack of concern for local communities has caused a stew of dangerous conditions and issues that Congress and regulators need to solve.
I’ve written about this before, but as a refresher, the deregulatory zeal that gripped both Democrats and Republicans from the 1970s onward did not exempt railroads. Today, there are just six Class I railroads in the U.S. — the class composed of the largest railroads — which is down from 63 as recently as 1976. More than half a million railroad jobs in 1980 became fewer than 150,000 today.
This rampant consolidation has led to shoddier service, as railroads focused on squeezing every last cent they could out of the system, rather than building it to absorb external shocks, a dynamic that was most evident during the coronavirus pandemic. Railroads call this “precision scheduled railroading,” and it’s led to fewer, heavier, longer trains, and lagging investment in the freight rail system. Between 2010 and 2021, railroads spent $50 billion more on buybacks and dividends than they spent on rail infrastructure, according to the federal Surface Transportation Board.
As is almost always the case, consolidation has led to adverse impacts for the people who rely on and interact with a particular industry. The report shows that those longer, heavier trains are associated with an increase in derailments and a higher likelihood that a derailment will dump toxic materials into a neighborhood. Despite the Class I railroads refusing to provide data to help the report’s authors, “a review of publicly available data on train traffic indicates that the average length of manifest trains has been increasing coincidental with an increase in the rate of derailments of interest,” it says.
So that’s bad news, and it’s also coincided with a drop in the workforce available to both operate and service those longer trains, as the number of workers in both categories has declined since 2015.
But long trains can affect communities even when they stay on the rails, such as when they block crossings — and when a train is miles long, the likelihood that it simultaneously blocks several or even all of the crossings within a single municipality goes up, obviously. And this doesn’t just occur once a train is underway. It also happens when long trains are being assembled in rail yards where they don’t really fit.
There is no solid, verified data on the number of blocked crossings in the U.S., so the best the report’s authors had to go on was incidents reported to the Federal Railroad Administration, as well as in-person reports from communities affected by chronic rail blockages. Even that anec-data, if you will, paints a pretty grim picture, especially in the Midwest, as shown below.
Included in the report are testimonials from local leaders in Indiana, Illinois, and Maryland explaining the negative effects blocked crossings have on their constituents. For example, the village manager of Bensenville, Illinois, described needing to build a second fire station so that there was one on each side of the train tracks, after fire trucks faced serial delays due to blocked crossings.
In perhaps the worst anecdote, negative media coverage of school kids climbing over a train that was blocking a crossing in Hammond, Indiana, cajoled the railroad Norfolk Southern to address the problem, “but such actions proved to be temporary.” So the kids are apparently back to clambering through parked trains in order to get to class.
The kicker here is that states and cities are powerless to address blocked crossings, because courts have ruled that only the federal government has the power to do so, an issue known as “preemption.” While states have taken the lead in regulating other aspects of railroad safety in recent years, blocked crossings is an issue Congress has to address. Which is a bummer, because a railroad regulation bill has been bogged down there for quite some time, with no clear path out of the muck that I can see.
Finally, coming back to where we started this trip, long trains make life harder for Amtrak. Though Amtrak technically has preference on the lines it shares with commercial rail carriers, it often can’t get around very long trains, because those trains are too big to use the existing pull-offs (which are kind of like the shoulder of the road, but for a train) that allow trains to pass each other. Long trains literally don’t fit in the pull-offs, so Amtrak trains get stuck behind them for mile upon mile.
In a functional public policy environment, a report like this would result in concrete action on the part of lawmakers, especially since it was Congress that ordered it to be written in the first place. Making it even easier, the report concluded not just with a lot of “do something” pleading, though there is plenty of that, but with a set of specific ideas for bolstering safety, worker training, and data collection.
Alas, the perverse reality in Congress is that the highest profile issues are the least likely to be resolved due to the incentives built into the two-party system. States legislatures, meanwhile, are blocked by preemption from taking some of the potentially most impactful action, and of course only have reach limited to their own jurisdictions.
So if you are concerned about the impact of long trains — or experience those impacts in your day to day life — maybe send the report (or this writeup of it, which has the benefit of being much shorter!) to your member of Congress, and ask them to please get on it.
SIMPLY STATED: Links to a few stories that caught my eye this week.
There’s been some great reporting recently on how tech corporations use nondisclosure agreements to keep new data center construction under wraps, and refuse to pay for the increased energy those data centers require.
The Federal Trade Commission released a new report explaining “how the tech industry’s monetization of personal data has created a market for commercial surveillance … with inadequate guardrails to protect consumers.”
A new law in California will make is easier to cancel unwanted online subscriptions.
Tennessee officials are raising the possibility of breaking up Ballad Health, a giant hospital conglomerate with facilities across Tennessee, Kentucky, North Carolina, and Virginia.
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— Pat Garofalo
Fortunately, my region built a series of train overpasses that allowed me to stop being late for work every time a long train passed through town.
In your post’s opening sentence, you mentioned that the Amtrak train you were a passenger on in Delaware was delayed a couple of hours. However, you did not explain the reason for that. For all I know this could have been due to a mechanical or electrical issue. I wish you would have clarified.
Next, you stated something to the effect that these long freight trains are often too long to fit into passing sidings and, I presume Amtrak trains due to their being shorter then would be required to occupy the siding and conditioned upon the Amtrak trains in question being fully in the clear within said siding (their ends clear of the respective foul point, in other words), the long freight occupying the main line can then be on its merry way again. If this is the case, then I would agree that this could cause affected Amtrak trains to be delayed.
However, should an affected Amtrak train enter said siding before the arrival of an opposite-moving long freight at these locations, the long trains can proceed moving past on the mainline at these locations without they, themselves, having to stop. And once the long freights are in the clear, the said Amtrak trains can exit said sidings and be on their merry way.
You also mentioned Precision Scheduled Railroading. The idea with Precision Scheduled Railroading as I understand it is railroads that have put this approach into practice, have implemented this as a means to make operations more efficient. All well and good.
Now, should two of these especially long trains moving in opposite directions on single track require moving past one another, neither able to fit into a passing siding because both are too long, they can get past each other but, in railroad jargon this necessitates what is referred to as a “saw-by.” It’s a very lengthy process - it’s very time consuming. (Full disclosure: I don’t know how it is performed exactly, but I have read about it once. If I recall correctly, “saw-bys” were once relied upon to get long trains moving in opposite directions on single track sections of railroad track where passing sidings were located on the Kansas City Southern).
The answer to Amtrak delays, as I see it, is to bar them from freight railroad lines and place them on their own lines. Barring this, double track the freight railroad lines that host Amtrak. Neither seems very realistic though.