Trains Talk

What happened to the railroad recovery?

Fred Frailey — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 22:56:00 GMT

In mid August, after a severe traffic slump brought about by the worst recession in decades, railroad carloadings showed new signs of life, rising about 6 percent. And that bump-up in business held steady — too steady, it turned out.

If the economy is coming out of its long funk, rail carloadings should have continued the rise begun three months ago. But they did not, hovering between 610,000 and 615,000 units (including trailers and containers) week after frustrating week.

The latest report from the Association of American Railroads shows a new upward jump, to 622,000 loads. Granted, a 1 percent rise is not much to celebrate, but it may herald a break from the lull we’ve experienced.

Looking back to the week ending August 4, which railroads and which commodities reaped the biggest improvements? Biggest winners are the Canadian railroads. Canadian National’s loads are up 19.6 percent, and Canadian Pacific’s 16.4 percent.

Kansas City Southern is next, up 10.1 percent, reflecting a 15.8 percent improvement in its severely depressed Mexican operation, and a 6.9 percent gain in U.S. carloadings. Gains by the other roads: BNSF Railway 3.8 percent, CSX 4.1 percent, Norfolk Southern 5.4 percent, and Union Pacific 5.7 percent.

Among commodities, motor vehicles (35 percent), grain (33 percent) and metals (18 percent) scored the biggest percentage gains. But loadings of coal, by far the biggest traffic source other than intermodal, were unchanged.

We’ll know in the next week or two whether the latest gains in traffic will be sustained and maybe even improved upon. It’s been a rotten year in the economic life of this country. When better days begin to come our way, it's safe to predict that they’ll show up first in railroad carloadings. — Fred W. Frailey (ffrailey@gmail.com)

Rush Loving on Why Buffett Bought BNSF

Matt VanHattem — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 19:14:00 GMT

Guest post from Rush Loving

Two weeks ago, when Warren Buffett announced his purchase of Burlington Northern Santa Fe, a number of journalists seemed surprised that anyone would want to buy a railroad. "A railroad might strike many people as a bit old-fashioned-more 19th century than 21st," said The New York Times. Some TV network reporters referred to railroads as if they still were in the 1800s.

Nevertheless, they all were quick to explain that Buffett was gambling on the U.S. economy-and putting his money on U.S. workers rather than somebody in China or Pakistan, and they were right. Wick Moorman, chairman of Norfolk Southern, calls Buffett's purchase a vote of confidence in the industry. "It's the culmination of what's been going on in our industry for a number of years," Moorman said yesterday.

He's dead-on right, but, alas, the American public, like many journalists who do not cover transportation, has no comprehension of Moorman's point. Most Americans-and their legislators-are woefully ignorant of how vital the railroad industry is today and how big a role it plays in our daily lives. In fact, I'm not sure if some railroaders are totally aware of it.

Some of the blame-probably a lot of it-lies on the men who used to run the nation's major roads. Many of them did not believe in advertising, especially institutional ads where you tell the world who you are, what you do for the public and your many strengths. Except for Norfolk Southern, the industry stopped running institutional ads more than 20 years ago. In recent months CSX has taken up the cause again, and, under the leadership of Ed Hamberger, the Association of American Railroads launched a vigorous advertising and public relations campaign in the past few years to educate the American people and the men and women who make policy in Washington.

The have an uphill battle. The industry's image of backwardness and impoverishment dates from the 1970s when over-regulation was choking them to the point of bankruptcy.

The turnaround began when the Staggers Act was passed in 1980 and the railroads were deregulated. Since then the roads have been transformed into one of the most vibrant industrial groups in the land.

Since 1980 the seven largest railroads have merged into four major systems. Many of us privately lamented the mergers because it meant the end of some grand old names of railroading like the MOP, Norfolk and Western and Chessie. Yet consolidation strengthened the industry.

In the years since the carriers have eliminated thousands of miles of track and duplicate facilities and have made better use of their employees. Railroad productivity has shot up 144 percent since Staggers was passed. Employees are 439 percent more productive. And the railroads themselves are financially strong for a change.

Rail intermodal traffic now is a direct gauge of imports, retailers' inventory build-ups and consumer spending. Since Staggers was passed, intermodal business has quadrupled from 3 million trailers and containers a year to 12 million.

Trucks used to be the railroads' biggest competitors, but now companies like J.B. Hunt use high-speed express trains of rail flatcars to move their rigs between the Mississippi valley and the West Coast. UPS now is the industry's largest single customer. In fact intermodal shipments now account for nearly as much rail revenue as coal, which, since the industry's early days, has been the cornerstone of the railroads' wealth.

It's a good chance that almost everything in a home moves by rail at some point in its lifetime. In one year the railroads carry 1.3 million carloads of paper products and lumber, including the wood used to build homes and apartments. They haul 1.7 million carloads of wheat and other agricultural products, and on top of that they carry 1.5 million carloads of food products, everything from beer and orange juice to French fries and frozen chicken.

Railroads transport more than 70 percent of the coal utilities use to generate our electricity, and they carry 70 percent of all U.S.-made motor vehicles, to say nothing of auto parts. Even clothes, electronic goods and appliances are shipped in containers that the railroads move.

It's the story of an incredible turnaround. Today the railroad industry is a solid, consistent earner that directly reflects America's economy. And that's why Warren Buffett is buying.

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See Rush Loving Jr.’s plan for Amtrak in the March 2009 issue of Trains. A former associate editor of Fortune magazine, he served as chief spokesman for the Office of Management and Budget in the Carter White House and has been a consultant to numerous transportation companies.

Related:

Blog: The seduction of Warren Buffett, by Fred Frailey, November 5, 2009
Trains News Wire: BNSF boss: Berkshire deal came together quickly, November 4, 2009 (magazine subscription required)
Trains News Wire: 'Oracle of Omaha' to buy all of BNSF, November 3, 2009 (magazine subscription required)

How to kill a freight train

Fred Frailey — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 21:30:00 GMT

What do you get when you cross a rules-obsessed road foreman of engines with an engineer skilled at finding locomotive defects that don’t really matter? A train that can’t move. I witnessed just such an event recently.

The moment I enter the lead locomotive, I wish I hadn’t. The engineer sits idly in the conductor’s seat. In the engineer’s chair is a trainee on his final qualifying run, while the road foreman of engines lords over both of them, then over me. Are those steel-toed boots I'm wearing? Yes. Where are your protective lenses? I put them on. Your earplugs? Here. Your reflective vest? The general manager didn’t issue me one. Turn off your cell phone (I already had). Little Caesar, we have here.

I immediately notice a habit of the road foreman. Say something to him, and he silently stares you down as if you are an idiot. I can play the stare-down game, too. So I make some ordinary remark. He looks at me and says nothing. I meet his eyes and say nothing, too. After 15 or 20 seconds, he blinks and replies. I run him through it again. The third time, Little Caesar begins responding immediately and we get along better.

Our four-unit, 55-car train of empty rock hoppers stops at a siding at 1:10 p.m. The conductor meets us in a Jeep. We're to pick up a 52-car train of loaded coal, including that train’s three locomotives, and leave with a 10,000-ton train. It takes us 40 minutes just to sandwich the coal train’s three motors in the middle of our quartet of locomotives. The engineer then announces that he will inspect the locomotives we had just picked up.

At 2:20 p.m., 70 minutes into this stop, the engineer reports two of the three additional locomotives inoperative, one because its bell won’t ring, the other due to a nonworking sander. He wants a mechanical truck summoned from 30 miles away. “I’d just slap a ‘non-compliant’ tag on each of them and keep going,” says the road foreman to me. Instead, he goes back with a packet of waterless hand cleaner, with which he hopes to unstick the clapper on the nonworking bell.

After a bit the road foreman returns. The bell still won’t ring. But with a note of triumph in his voice, he announces that the piece of paper documenting the airbrake test of the coal train, left the night before in its lead locomotive, is not dated. Therefore, he said, we must repeat the air test on that long cut of cars. I suggest he call the off-duty conductor at home and have him certify the validity of the air test. That idea is rejected at once.

It is now 3 o’clock. We’ve been here almost two hours. We still need to perform the air test, attach the coal cars to the front of our train, wait for a mechanic to arrive to fix appliances on the two locomotives, and decide what to do if he cannot repair them. At this rate, we will never get out of here.

Knowing that I am wasting my time, I say goodbye and hitch a ride elsewhere. But I get to thinking. Federal Railroad Administration inspectors can sideline any locomotive if they so desire, because no piece of machinery that big and complex is ever in perfect condition. Plus, there’s a rule, somewhere, against everything. So I ask: Can’t we just agree on a zone of reasonableness and get on with running the railroad?

Postscript: That evening I encounter the conductor of that snake-bitten train. He says they were relieved by a new crew halfway through their run. And still later I speak with the conductor who filled out the air-test slip the night before. He says he made several mistakes writing the slip, so he started a new copy and forgot on the second try to add the date. “Why didn’t [the road foreman] just call me?” he asked. Indeed. — Fred W. Frailey (ffrailey@gmail.com)

Chili’s restaurant and high speed rail … who knew?

Angela Pusztai-Pasternak — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 15:12:00 GMT

So there I am sitting down to dinner last Friday night at my daughter’s favorite dining establishment, Chili’s. Our hostess presented my girl with her menu, which doubles as an activity book. I’m not sure how often Chili’s changes the activity book theme, but this was the first time I saw this one on transportation.

Chili’s recurring characters all took charge of a mode of transportation. Hal flies a jet that uses a rocket engine, Sunny drives a solar car, Pepper explores the ocean in a deep-sea submersible, and Chip is the engineer of a super-fast train.

Kids love trains, so the choice was not surprising in and of itself. However, the public still seems to think kids only like/understand steam trains, even though most railroads haven’t run a steam engine in 50 years (yes, I know they operate on tourist railroads, etc. — I’m merely referring to the general perception).

Inside the activity book is a game called Tic-Tac-Train. The instructions read: Super-fast trains carry lots of people very quickly. Soon, they may criss-cross the country! Many cities plan to build them to reduce traffic, pollution, and energy use. Use the criss-crossing trains below to challenge a friend to some super-speedy tic-tac-toe!

Can you believe it? I was thrilled to see the concept of high-speed rail being introduced to kids. Chili’s succeeded at writing something succinct, positive, and optimistic. My daughter reminds me to turn the water off while I’m brushing my teeth, to turn the computer off when I’m through using it, and to shut lights off in rooms I’m no longer in. (I’m not sure who the mom is here, and I’m pretty sure I’m paying the bills.) So, putting the environmental spin on high-speed rail really speaks to her, as I’m sure it does to other kids, too. By the way, she also got a matching kid’s cup featuring Chip in his super-fast train, which came with her meal. Cheers!

Introducing Photo of the Day

Jim Wrinn — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 19:49:00 GMT

Railroad photography just keeps getting better. It’s always been great with passionate photographers, great optical equipment, and the most thrilling subject on the planet (in motion, lighting conditions never the same twice, equally fascinating up close or in panorama). But today it just seems that the digital revolution has just made a great art form even better, and Trains is going to showcase more great railroad photography on our Web site.

Starting today, our Photo of the Week feature becomes Photo of the Day. This will enable us to share more of the great images you send to us through our FTP site (www.contribute.kalmbach.com) as well as via CDs and slides send to our office. We’ll also reach back into our massive black and white and slide library to draw on some of the great images from yesterday.

I’m excited about this change, and I hope you will be too. I got my first 35mm camera as a Christmas present in 1977, and I took my first railroad action pictures two months later at age 16. I love railway photography, and now we’ll all enjoy more images that you provide us! So, get out there and enjoy your photography, submit it to us, and look for your shots at our new Photo of the Day!

Enjoy a free tour of TrainsMag.com, including News Wire, this weekend!

Matt Quandt — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 21:16:00 GMT

From noon Friday, November 13, through 8 a.m. CST Monday, November 16, all the great features that are available only to registered users or Trains magazine subscribers will be available to everyone, including you. For free!

Find out what you've been missing! Check out these exclusive benefits:

Trains News Wire — Get caught up on the day's railroading headlines written by Trains staff members, featuring about 30 stories a week!
TrainsTube Videos — Watch Trains editors interview industry experts in our special one-on-one sessions.
Photo of the Day archive — Browse the collection of past photos
And more!

Then, if you like what you see, come back on Monday, November 16th* and register on TrainsMag.com for free or subscribe to Trains magazine right now.

*During the times mentioned above, you will not be able to register for a new account or log in to TrainsMag.com with an existing account. Reader forum users will be able to post as long as they've logged in and have a cookie set prior to the times mentioned above. The site will be back to normal and open for new registrations at 8 a.m. CST Monday, November 16th.

TRAINS cover breaks new ground

Matt VanHattem — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 20:39:00 GMT

by Matt Van Hattem, Senior Editor

If you’ve ever stopped to glance at the cover of a fashion magazine (admit it — we all have), you may also know that the “photo” is often a composite of different pictures of the same model, knit together seamlessly with the magic of photo editing software.

At Trains magazine, we usually strive for realism on our covers. That doesn’t mean we won’t, say, remove a patch of dirt from the lead engine’s nose. But to do much more would mar the integrity of the photo and incur a lot of letters from sharp-eyed readers. They know railroading too well — and they can spot a fake a mile away.

That makes the cover image for the November 2009 issue of Trains (at right) all the more revolutionary. Not only was the train not real, but the “image” was actually a composite of three different photographs, and some imaginative photo editing from our art director Tom Danneman.

Why take this path? We felt it was the most exciting way to get across the idea of something that U.S. railroading has not done in over a quarter-century: Run mainline freight trains hauled by electric locomotives.

There’s been a lot of debate about U.S. electrification recently, and in the November 2009 Trains author Scott Lothes does an excellent job examining the issues and assessing what it might take to string catenary wire over today’s busy freight lines.

Scott’s good work presented us with a challenge: How do you illustrate something that doesn’t exist?

One idea was to go retro, and show a classic electric-hauled freight on the Pennsylvania Railroad or the Milwaukee Road — U.S. railroads that disappeared long ago.

But our November issue was devoted to technology, and what’s happening today. So a historic photo on the cover wouldn’t convey the overall tone of the issue.

Another idea was to show a European or Asian freight train under wire. (Scott talks about the incredible investments made by Russia and China in electric-powered freight trains.) But the article’s main focus was what it would take to see this technology here in America, and we wanted to keep that front and center.

So we embraced the third alternative: A fantasy mainline unit train under wire, but something that looked recognizably “American.”

How do you create such a thing?

Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor was the place to start. The HHP-8 electric locomotives from Bombardier that pull Amtrak’s Northeast Direct trains have a distinct look. Could we somehow show one hauling a freight train?

The Corridor sees mainline freights under wire, albeit hauled by diesels. Would it be possible to combine photos of a Northeast Corridor passenger and freight train?

Tom Danneman gave me the parameters: Get two pictures — one freight, one Amtrak — in the exact same location, on the exact same track, and at the exact same time of day.

Sounds simple, right? Wrong.

For one thing, the photo still had to have the “breathing” room a magazine cover needs for the Trains logo plus our cover lines.

Now to find a photographer. I asked two good East Coast shooters if they had images already on hand that we could combine. No such luck.

One of the photographers, Michael S. Murray, scored a Photo of the Week on our Web site of a Norfolk Southern freight on the Corridor in Delaware (magazine subscription required to view). Could he get a passenger train there? Not really, he said. The problem is the Amtrak trains typically use a different track.

Still, Michael liked our idea and sent in more images from different public locations for Tom and me to look at. (It’s important to note that Michael never compromised safety or the railroad operations.)

However, either the locations were too busy for the cover (too many bridges or other background distractions that would not allow you to read the cover lines), or the trains were on different tracks, which would make the photo editing difficult and the final image look too awkward.

Time was running out. We were about to give up.

Then Michael sent a photo of Norfolk Southern train 67V (at right), an empty unit train that hauls crushed stone, rounding the Northeast Corridor’s big curve at Eddystone, Pa. I showed the photo to Tom. He agreed — the composition and location worked perfectly. Could Michael get a shot of an Amtrak train there?

He didn’t have one on hand, but quickly went back on a summer afternoon to make some. He sent several Amtrak images from his trip that day, and we found a perfect match for the freight.

Now it was time for Tom to apply his artistry.

“I had only one thing to worry about,” Tom explains. “Jim Wrinn, Matt, and I were thinking that Union Pacific would be a good railroad to have on the cover, and since we knew the electric would be towing a unit train, what better backdrop than one that resembled a UP line in Nebraska or Wyoming?

“For that, I dug into my own collection of photos, and chose a backdrop that I thought looked quintessentially Nebraska. I ended up using a portion of a photo that I had taken on the BNSF Railway out in the Sandhills of Nebraska. The barren, treeless landscape could be almost anywhere in the western plains.”

Tom adds: “I also used some photos from my own collection for the Union Pacific herald, numbers, etc.” 

Only one question remained: Could everything be stitched together realistically?

“The biggest challenge was working around all of the wires and catenary to have the Nebraska sky and scenery showing behind the train,” Tom says.

So there you have it: Instant cover! In truth, the whole process took about a month. Along the way, we had a lot of support from editor Jim Wrinn and our publisher, Kevin P. Keefe, who let us run with the idea and take a risk.

Before we went to press we showed the image to Michael Murray. “A thing of beauty,” he said. “If this hobby were golf, I’d feel like I just won the Masters.”

Editor's note: Watch a video of how Danneman combined elements of the three images to arrive at the final cover.

The seduction of Warren Buffett

Fred Frailey — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 21:37:00 GMT

I’ve been puzzled by the buyout of Burlington Northern Santa Fe. Warren Buffet has said many times that railroads make lousy long-term investments. “It [railroading] will never be a fabulous business,” he said once again last year. “It’s too capital intensive.” Then the chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway turns around and makes the biggest investment of his life by buying the 77 percent of BNSF (parent of BNSF Railway) that Berkshire doesn’t already own. What’s gives here?

I think Matt Rose got to Buffett, as he has gotten to so many people since replacing Rob Krebs as chief executive of BNSF late in 2000. Rose is simply the best Class I CEO out there today, and one of his distinguishing qualities is dealing with people. He finds good people, enthuses them, gives them a long leash to carry out their responsibilities, and holds them accountable for the results. Other railroad CEOs do this, but none better than Matt Rose, or for a longer period of time. And his latest people-handling feat, most likely, was to cause Warren Buffet to eat his own words and see Matt Rose’s railroad as a good long-term investment, despite everything that Buffett had said to the contrary. What a hat trick!

I’m going to reconstruct a chain of events. We begin on the afternoon of Thursday, Oct. 22. After the stock market closes, BNSF reports, not surprisingly, that earnings for the third quarter of 2009 were 30 percent below those of a year earlier, before the recession had started in earnest. Rose also delivers a not-so-rosy outlook for the rest of 2009. The next day, BNSF’s share price falls $5.50, to $79, a rather severe 6.5 percent drop.

The railroad’s share price had slowly been recovering from a drop off its all-time high of $114, set in June of 2008, reaching above $86 as recently as Oct. 19. But now here it is again in Wall Street’s penalty box. From Oct. 23’s $79, the price in days that followed drifts toward $75.

Rose told reporters this Tuesday that it took only 10 days from the time a buyout of BNSF by Berkshire Hathaway was proposed for it to be approved by the railroad’s board of directors, on Nov. 2. Count back 10 days from Nov. 2, and you go to Friday, Oct. 23, the day of that $5.50-a-share drop.

It seems obvious to me that Rose and Buffett hit it off from the time of Berkshire’s first investment in the railroad in 2007. BNSF never opposed Berkshire’s encroachment, nor did Berkshire try to exert any form of control over the railroad. Rose probably appreciated the frank advice he got from Buffett and enjoyed giving the older man an inside look of how a railroad is run. Rose must also have given Buffett his own vision of what BNSF could become over time. Like I said, Matt Rose has no peer in this business when it comes to getting people to think his way without their realizing it.

So on Oct. 23, what happened? Let’s just imagine. Rose and Buffett meet each other (Buffett was in Fort Worth that day). Well, says Matt, don’t you just love the lack of faith that institutional investors have in us? Buffett replies that big investors always think short term and always will, which is why they make so many mistakes. Buffett then raises the possibility of buying all of BNSF. Rose seizes the thought. Here’s your chance, he tells Buffett, because Wall Street just gave you another 6.5 percent price discount. You like bargains. Wait much longer and the economy will really begin to recover. Then my railroad won’t be so cheap. Your point is well taken, says Buffett; I’ll get back to you. And very shortly afterward, he did.—Fred W. Frailey (ffrailey@gmail.com)

Related:

Trains News Wire: BNSF boss: Berkshire deal came together quickly, November 4, 2009 (magazine subscription required)
Trains News Wire: 'Oracle of Omaha' to buy all of BNSF, November 3, 2009 (magazine subscription required)

Goin' to the end of the line

Andy Cummings — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 22:15:00 GMT

The towns along Minnesota Northern Railroad’s Warroad Subdivision could form the backdrop for Garrison Keillor’s stories, or provide set locations for the Coen Brothers’ movie Fargo. Tall gray grain elevators provide the only vertical relief; each fall, they fill with the bounty of the fields that stretch north into Manitoba, and south until they transition to marshes on the Red Lake Indian Reservation. In summer, Warroad sees its share of visitors in the form of boat-towing Twin Citians who make the eight-hour trek to fish for walleye on Lake of the Woods. Across the lake lies the Northwest Angle, the northernmost point in the lower 48 states, which would be part of Canada but for a surveyor’s mistake.

I got to know this part of the world in summer 2002, when I worked as an intern reporter for the Thief River Falls Times and Northern Watch newspapers. The area intrigued me. Far from any city, the towns of Roseau (pop. 2,758) and Warroad (pop. 1,656) seemed to thrive. Roseau is home to all-terrain vehicle manufacturer Polaris, while Warroad hosts Marvin Windows and Christian Hockey, a major manufacturer of hockey sticks.

One sticky July day, I got an invite from Minnesota Northern’s general manager, George LaPray, that I couldn’t turn down: He asked if I’d like to ride the line on a rare mileage special as a guest of the railroad. George was hosting the special for Clark Johnson’s High Iron Travel, and he didn’t have to ask me twice. My friend Bill Becker, then a Thief River Falls-based CP engineer, followed me in his truck to Warroad. We spotted my car there, returned to Greenbush, and boarded the train.

Now, I can see where, for some folks, crossing one of the most obscure branch lines in the country at 10 mph might be boring. But I love obscure branches, and with car Montana’s superb open observation platform, Bill and I got to ride with a gentle breeze blowing across our faces. We waved to passing cars at crossings and enjoyed conversing with people who’d come from across the country to bag “mileage” on the Warroad Sub.

After I climbed off the train at Warroad, engineer Howard Devine and conductor Tim “Brock” Broekemeier cut away from the observation cars and coupled to a loaded cullet car that Marvin had released. After I snapped this photo, Bill and I followed the “mixed train” back to Roseau, where it tied up for the night. It was a magical July day, one I’ll never forget.

I only tell the story today because, about a month ago, I wrote this story for TRAINS News Wire on the railroad’s application to cut the line back from Warroad to Roseau, a 20-mile retrenchment. Traffic has been falling, with just 49 cars moving to Warroad last year. Fortunately, Roseau is home to a unit-train-shipping elevator, which will hopefully keep the surviving part of the branch vital for years to come.

My generation of railfan has been lucky, in that most of the rail lines we’ve gotten to know and love, if anything, have been upgraded since we were young. As the industry has gotten stronger and more profitable, trains got longer and rails got heavier. Still, there are lines just like the Warroad Sub all across the country that gain and lose traffic with the vagaries of the marketplace. Do you have one of these in your back yard? What will its future be? Will there be a role for 10-mph branches at all two decades from now?

My all-time favorite rail photo

Fred Frailey — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 20:07:00 GMT

The world is at war. Our nation has just emerged from the Great Depression and is fighting for its survival as a free people. Yet, life still goes on. Santa Fe’s twice-weekly, all-Pullman Super Chief, headed from Chicago to Los Angeles, is stopped for servicing at Albuquerque, N.M. Water and diesel fuel from tank cars are being pumped into the bowels of the twin locomotives. Passengers step out for a break; some walk up to the head end. Everyone wears a hat. The engineer approaches to take this train on its next lap, to Gallup, N.M.

Jack Delano (1914-1997) came to the U.S. with his parents and brother from Kiev, Ukraine, in 1923. An accomplished musician (viola) and classical composer, he developed an interest in photography that led to a job at the Farm Security Administration. One project he undertook was to document the lives of railroaders, and in March of 1943 he traveled the length of the Santa Fe Railway, by freight train. At Belen, N.M., Delano took a break, went to nearby Albuquerque and captured on 4x5-inch Kodachrome this timeless image of an instant in the life of a streamlined train. That’s Delano in the bottom photo.

I see this photograph (at right) every day. It’s the image that fills my monitor when I boot up my computer. I never grow tired of looking at it.

You can download this image from the Library of Congress at or at http://commons.wikimedia.org.

Two wonders of the railroad world

Fred Frailey — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 14:36:00 GMT

Talk about awesome. Talk about vertigo. I’m at the side of a dirt road in Iowa, looking straight up. And what I see is weathered spider steel on the right and massive concrete superstructure on the left. Engineering wonders, a century apart. Either one is enough to take your breath away. And here they are, side by side, reaching toward the sky. This is what I’d set out to see this morning, only much better than I’d imagined.

I was in Omaha for the Missouri Pacific Historical Society’s annual meeting and had an extra day to kill. What to do? I decided to head east across Iowa on U.S. Highway 30 and keep going until I got bored or reached the Kate Shelley Long Bridge — whichever happened first.

I didn’t get bored. Here’s what you see in western Iowa: Oceans of cornfields. Prosperous-looking farmhouses (there must not be any poor farmers left in Iowa, nor any poor bankers who loan them money). Neat, handsome villages and small towns, kept that way by the wealth that agriculture spawns. And a whole lotta trains.

Union Pacific in these parts impressed me even more than those farms and towns: Concrete ties on both main tracks, 50-mph crossovers on switches with movable-point frogs, track good for 70 (79 if it’s a business-car train). The railroad was busy this day, too. I met 10 westbound freights in the 30 miles between Missouri Valley and Denison, Iowa. Say what you will about Union Pacific, but it is not afraid to spend money on its infrastructure. And speaking of infrastructure. . .

The Kate Shelley bridges, one of them 109 years old, the other two months new, soar into the sky above the Des Moines River about four miles west of Boone, Iowa. I’ll give you directions: In Boone, cross the UP tracks heading north on Marion Street, take your first left and stay on that road. You will cross the Des Moines on a long, one-lane wood-plank bridge that makes your heart stand still. Good luck.

The real Kate Shelley one stormy night in the summer of 1881 witnessed the collapse of a bridge over Honey Creek, taking a Chicago & North Western freight train with it. Knowing that an eastbound passenger train was soon due to pass, and with only a lantern to light her way (it quickly blew out), she crossed the existing wood bridge over the Des Moines River on hands and knees and ran another half-mile to the station in Moingona, where she warned the night operator of the bridge collapse. He stopped the oncoming train, and a legend was born.

The Kate Shelley Long Bridge named in her honor by C&NW is believed to be the longest (2,685 feet) and highest (185 feet) double-track bridge in the world. It takes your breath away when you come upon it. But in August the rails were cut at each end and high fences erected to keep trespassers off. The new bridge that went into service adjacent to the old one is even more awesome, though slightly shorter and five feet lower. To call it massive is almost inadequate. Its steel deck plates are supported by huge concrete columns, five of which are braced towers. This is infrastructure as only Bill Wimmer, recently retired as Union Pacific’s VP-engineering, knows how to do.

Was it worth driving three hours in each direction to reach these bridges? Oh gosh, yes. To see two wonders of the railroading world one beside the other, the most productive farmland in North America and a parade of UP freights. . . what’s not to cherish?

Where to build high-speed rail

Fred Frailey — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 15:14:00 GMT

I don’t harbor much hope that our $13 billion commitment to high speed rail ($8 billion now and $1 billion each of the next five years) will be spent rationally. The Federal Railroad Administration is analyzing applications for more than $50 billion in projects. Because there will be more losers than winners, political log-rolling is almost guaranteed.

But wouldn’t it be nice to put the money to work where it would do the most good? In that regard, Eugene Skoropowski has a great idea. Skoropowski, executive director of the Capitol Corridor Joint Powers Authority that runs Amtrak service between San Jose and Sacramento, Calif., recent wrote this to friends:

“Forget population, forget density, forget distance. If there is a large travel market between two major endpoints, then rail ought to be looked at seriously. Then the ‘art’ will be determining the technology/speed necessary to capture a substantial portion of that travel market on rail and the most cost-effective level of investment to capture that market (very high speed, higher speed, conventional speed etc.).”

A great suggestion, Gene, and It turns out that the data exists. A “national household travel survey” in 1995 (updated in 2001) lists the most heavily traveled city pairs. Here are the 10 busiest, and my comments:

Los Angeles-San Diego — Already served by more than a dozen Amtrak round trips a day.
Las Vegas-Los Angeles — Planning for a high speed train using private funding is already well along.
New York-Philadelphia-Washington — Amtrak desperately needs new catenary to support 150-mph speeds, plus new high speed tunnels in Baltimore.
Los Angeles-San Francisco — California is already committing $9 billion toward this corridor.
Sacramento-San Francisco — Amtrak’s spectacularly successful Capitol Corridor needs more cars, trains.
Dallas-Houston — Talk about a crying need! This market is totally forgotten by Amtrak.
Portland-Seattle — A budding state-supported Amtrak corridor could use more investment.
Norfolk-Washington — Virginia is missing an opportunity by emphasizing a Raleigh, N.C.-Richmond corridor.
Los Angeles-Phoenix — Another market Amtrak ignores.
Dallas-San Antonio — The Texas Eagle hardly qualifies as high speed rail.

So these are the places people really travel. It seems to me that California (the state we all love to hate) deserves some credit and federal support for putting $9 billion on the table. Amtrak does, too, if it will replace the 70-year-old catenary that holds down speeds between New York and Washington. The Las Vegas-LA people aren’t asking for federal dollars, to my knowledge. LA-San Diego and San Francisco-Sacramento already are served heavily by Amtrak.

That leaves, among the top ten city pairs, five forgotten or underserved rail markets: Dallas-Houston, Portland-Seattle, Norfolk-Washington, Los Angeles-Phoenix and Dallas-San Antonio. Along with LA-San Francisco and New York-Washington, these five city pairs offer the most opportunity for getting the biggest bangs for the taxpayers’ bucks. When the grants are awarded, supposedly early next year, let’s see whether my cynicism was warranted.

Why your next Amtrak train will be on time (or else)

Fred Frailey — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 18:14:00 GMT

Imagine that you’re the VP-operations for a big U.S. railroad. One day your office door opens and standing there is the person you least like to see, the VP-law. He or she sits down uninvited, right in front of your face, and says, shape up, Bunky, or we’ll be paying Amtrak instead of the other way around.

What am I talking about? I’m talking about the sensational improvement in on-time performance by Amtrak trains over the past two years. My sources at Amtrak cannot recall the time its trains did better on host railroads. And the threat of government retaliation for late Amtrak trains is the most likely reason for the improvement.

In fiscal 2007, 69 percent of Amtrak’s trains arrived on time. In 2008, on-time performance rose to 71 percent. In the fiscal 2009 year that just ended, it was 80 percent.

The improvement was more dramatic on long-distance routes and most notable of all on routes that had been chronic underperformers. Here are four examples:

Texas Eagle (Chicago-San Antonio) improved from 18 to 75 percent on time.

Sunset Limited (Los Angeles-New Orleans) zoomed from 27 percent OT to 79 percent.

California Zephyr (Chicago-Oakland) went from 30 percent to 60 percent on time.

Coast Starlight (Los Angeles-Seattle, and shown here on San Pablo Bay near Oakland) improved, too, from 61 to 82 percent on time.

If you think I’m focusing on Union Pacific-dispatched trains, you are very perceptive. UP does many things right, but until the past year, running Amtrak trains over its rails in a timely manner was not one of them. But look at how it got religion.

CSX, another recalcitrant host railroad, began its dramatic turnaround a year earlier. For fiscal 2009, its OT numbers are Auto Train 89 percent (versus 82 percent in fiscal 2008; that’s it crossing Powells Creek in Virginia in the top photo), Silver Meteor 72 percent (versus 67 percent), Silver Star 68 percent (versus 45 percent), Capitol Limited 71 percent (versus 33 percent) and Cardinal 45 percent (versus 31 percent). The Capitol Limited is operated jointly with Norfolk Southern.

On short-distance trains, the Kansas City-St. Louis River Runners over Union Pacific improved their arrivals dramatically, from 19 percent on time in fiscal 2008 to 74 percent this past year. Big disappointments are the trains to and from Michigan points. Their on-time percentages went from 26 to 44 percent — better, but a long way from good.

Why is this happening, you probably wonder. Three reasons, and I’ll name them in what I feel is their ascending order of importance. The freight railroads are under seige in Congress, fighting off threats of increased regulation. They need late Amtrak trains on the minds of members of Congress like they need an epidemic of swine flu among their employees.

Second, there are fewer freight trains out there getting in the way of Amtrak trains. I would guess about 20 percent fewer freight trains than a year ago. That’s a big difference.

Third and most important, legislation signed into law last October permits the Surface Transportation Board, if it chooses, to fine freight railroads that cannot maintain an 80 percent on-time record for Amtrak trains over two consecutive three-month periods. The fine can equal the economic damage to Amtrak caused by the late arrivals, and it would be payable to Amtrak.

Appreciate the irony of freight railroads rather than U.S. taxpayers subsiding Amtrak. This is a possibility now, and the real reason your next train has four in five chances of arriving on time.

Kudos to Alex Mayes for these two spectacular photos.--Fred W. Frailey

Who were the 10 best railroad CEOs? (My turn)

Fred Frailey — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 18:44:00 GMT

In Part 1, you read the challenge put to the Lexington Group in Transportation History: Name the men who really got it right in railroading the past half century. In Part 2, you read the picks of the moderators of this discussion, David DeBoer and Jim McClellan. Now it’s my turn.

Once again, the rules: Nobody is eligible who left the railroad scene before 1960, or who still runs a railroad.

I think Dave and Jim did an outstanding job framing the environment in which railroading existed in the past 50 years. And for the most part, I like the people they named.

But they forgot about someone who should have been at the top of the list, because he made happen and let happen a slew of practices that are commonplace today but unheard of 30, 40 and 50 years ago.

I’m talking about Ed Ball, the cantankerous, hardheaded, opinionated, gnome-like, five-foot-six chairman of Florida East Coast Railway during its tumultuous transformation from a rundown property to just about the most productive railroad in North America. He presided over FEC almost in his spare time, for $1 a year, because as overseer of the Alfred I. duPont Testamentary Trust he also controlled St. Joe Paper, some of Florida’s biggest banks and a great deal of its land. But it’s for his influence on the railroad that he’ll be remembered most, and not everyone will have pleasant memories.

First of all, he broke the unions’ grip on his Class 1 (at that time) railroad by running his trains right through a bitter, violent strike that began in 1963. Those who came back to work did so on his terms: hourly wages and three-person (later two-person) crews who ran the length of the railroad rather than over just one-third of it.

Other railroads, afraid of the unions, ostracized Florida East Coast for decades. Left to its own devices, it pioneered one revolutionary development after another. Ultimately, the industry ended up embracing virtually all of FEC’s breakthroughs, including those two-person crews and extended crew districts, plus concrete ties, cabooseless trains and rear-end brake-security devices. And it’s because Ed Ball would not be intimidated by anyone that it all came to happen.

Ed Ball died in 1981 at the age of 93. I am not sure I would have liked him had I met him. I do respect what he accomplished. This man belongs on my list.

Now let’s hear from you. Who do you think were the best railroad executives of the past half century?—Fred W. Frailey

Who were the 10 best railroad CEO’s? (Part 2)

Fred Frailey — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 20:43:00 GMT

In the first installment, I told you about the question posed to the Lexington Group in Transportation History by Jim McClellan and David DeBoer. They described the challenges facing railroad leaders in the past half century, grouping those challenges under four headings: new markets and distribution systems; technology and productivity; finance; and industry structure and public policy. The best CEOs made breakthrough contributions to the industry in at least one of those areas. So who would they be?

Jim and David listed their own choices for Best of Breed. It turns out they agree on six of the 10 names:

Bill Brosnan (top photo), Southern Railway. McClellan: “Two reasons. He took on the Big John covered hopper case to reduce grain rates. The case went on for years, and Southern was not a rich railroad. He won, of course. And he pioneered mechanized track maintenance.”

David Goode (middle photo), Norfolk Southern. DeBoer: “Goode had the cojones to take on CSX and came away with half of Conrail.”

John Kenefick, Union Pacific. McClellan: “The holding company wasn’t much interested in railroading. Kenefick went to New York and said they had to bid on Missouri Pacific or be forever marginalized in the West. He got his board to go along with him.”

Jervis Langdon, Baltimore & Ohio and Penn Central. McClellan: “One of the innovators. At B&O, he was one of the first to offer rates on unit coal trains. As a Penn Central trustee, he authored the report urging it be pared down to its core routes. This set off the reorganization of that region’s bankrupt railroads by the U.S. Railway Administration.”

Louis Menk, Burlington Northern. McClellan: “Had the BN merger of 1970 failed, there would have been no more that followed. He made it work. Later, he got BN into the Powder River Basin, fighting his own directors to get it done.”

Al Perlman, New York Central. DeBoer: “He was there early in the game on intermodal, and a developer of multilevel automobile cars.”

David DeBoer’s other choices were:

Stanley Crane, Conrail. “The actions he took at Conrail were decisive in bringing it to profitability. And he was very influential in Washington with deregulation.”

Robert Krebs, Santa Fe and Burlington Northern Santa Fe. “His capital money went into the right places. And from the time he was a trainmaster for Southern Pacific, he was a huge supporter of intermodal, when it was not very popular.”

Donald Russell, Southern Pacific. “Getting rid of the passenger business took a lot of grit. He was also an early intermodal guy.”

Hays Watkins, CSX. “The East is what it is today because of him. He put Al Perlman in a box and shipped him away to the Penn Central. Perlman wanted to control Baltimore & Ohio, and Watkins outmaneuvered him, slamming the door on that idea.”

Jim McClellan’s other choices:

Paul Tellier (bottom photo), Canadian National. "He changed the culture of that company completely. Before Tellier and privitization, CN was the biggest bureaucracy in the world. At meetings to which other railroads sent one person, CN would send 17."

Robert Downing, Burlington Northern. “You have to give Bob part of the credit, as BN’s vice chairman, for putting those railroads together successfully and then getting BN into the PRB coalfields.” Technically, Downing doesn’t qualify because he was No. 2 at BN. But McClellan made the rules, and I guess he can make the exceptions to those rules.

Jim Hagen, U.S. Railway Administration. “As Conrail’s CEO, Jim was more of a caretaker. His great contribution was running USRA, which put Conrail together. He also moved the peg on deregulation.”

Ed Jordan, Conrail. “As Conrail’s first president, he told Congress the railroad would forever be on government life support unless the industry were largely deregulated. Deregulation owes a lot to him.”

Okay people, have at it. Did DeBoer and McClellan get it right? What would your own list look like? I’d like to see it. Remember, your nominees had to be in charge of a railroad in 1960 or later, and not still be in the top job today.

In a future blog, I’ll tell you the one name that everyone forgot. — Fred W. Frailey