Western U.S. railroads tout efficiency, future developments
(The following story by Mike Hall appeared on the Topeka Capital-Journal website on August 30, 2010.)
TOPEKA, Kan. The Union Pacific Railroad is spending more than $11.5 million improving its track between Topeka and Herington, part of $2.6 billion it will spend systemwide this year on improvements and maintenance.
Investments like that are part of the reason the railroad can move more railroad cars where they are needed, two railroad officials said Monday in Topeka.
Robert W. Turner, the railroad's senior vice president-corporate relations, was in Topeka with Benjamin W. Jones, director of public affairs for Kansas and Missouri.
After they met with representatives of the Kansas Grain and Feed Association, they participated in the presentation of a "Union Pacific Safety Spike" award to the Kansas Highway Patrol, then they made a visit to The Topeka Capital-Journal newsroom.
"This could really be the start of a new golden age of rail," Turner said.
Steve Forsburg, spokesman for BNSF Railway Co., when contacted in his Fort Worth office, said his company agrees things are looking up for the railroad industry.
"American freight railroads are the most efficient in the world," he said. "U.S. railroads carry 43 percent of the freight tonnage in the nation."
Forsburg noted the other 57 percent of freight is shared by the trucking, pipeline, air freight and inland waterway industries.
He credited a number of factors for that success, including federal deregulation in 1980 and the development of the intermodal (shipping container) method of transporting relatively small loads of consumer products quickly.
Turner pointed to a number of railroad developments:
The money spent on repairing and replacing track assures train speeds can be maintained to get goods to their destinations in time to meet customers' needs.
For most of this year, the averaged freight car was "turned" four times a month, meaning it carried a load to one destination and was off-loaded to free it up for another load in about a week's time.
"If you can cycle a car four times a month instead of three times a month, that's a 33 percent increase in capacity," Turner said.
The new technology that allows an engineer in the leading locomotive to remotely control one or more pusher locomotives in the middle or rear of a train allows for more cars per train. That increases the fuel efficiency of the train by 4 to 6 percent, and trains already had been shown to be at least four times as fuel efficient as trucks.
Customer satisfaction has increased significantly through the years.
The increasing use of "shuttle trains" also is improving efficiency. A shuttle train differs from a "unit train" in that the locomotives remain with the unitized string of cars as the cars are unloaded at the destination. Those locomotives then are available to depart for the return trip as soon as the cars are unloaded.
Carrying freight by train takes trucks and cars off the tax-supported highways and puts the freight on the railroad-funded rails.
