Two railroads, two trains, two outcomes

Updated March 1, 2013

I am just back from two transcontinental train trips, one after the other, from Chicago to Seattle on Amtrak’s Empire Builder and from Vancouver, B.C., to Toronto on VIA Rail Canada’s Canadian. I enjoyed both experiences — in each instance, the well maintained equipment, the good food, the winter scenery, and the excellent on-board service from motivated employees. What amazed me were the two host railroads, BNSF Railway and Canadian National Railway. Both are extremely busy, handling up to three dozen trains a day across the prairies, and both are subject to extreme winter weather. That said, it’s as if I jumped on this trip from Mars over to Saturn.

Canadian Pacific handed the Empire Builder over to BNSF in Minneapolis on time. By the time we got to Grand Forks, N.D., 319 miles later, we were 81 minutes late. And we remained 70-90 minutes late as far as Havre in central Montana. Then our train began narrowing the gap, to the point that leaving the state we were on time. Approaching the end of the trip, the Builder waited its turn through the 7.9-mile-long Cascade Tunnel, losing 65 minutes. Still, we got to Seattle only 21 minutes late.

My seat-of-the-pants math tells me that we met or overtook a BNSF freight train every two or so sidings. This is a busy single-track railroad, made more so by the oil-drilling boom in western North Dakota and eastern Montana that results in trainloads of drilling supplies coming in and trainloads of crude oil going out. Figure the train density at 35 a day.

Yet the passengers aboard the Empire Builder probably never noticed the railroad frenzy outside the windows. What is there to notice when you never stop for traffic and seldom even slow down? The one time we made way for a freight was outside the Cascade Tunnel. Otherwise, some awfully gifted BNSF dispatchers in Fort Worth threaded us through the tangle as if the office car of Matt Rose carried our train’s markers.

A nice outcome, in other words. Maybe I’m just lucky.

The Canadian departed Jasper, Alta., 530 miles from Vancouver, on time. I should have taken as a bad omen that we stopped 40 miles later to pick up two passengers who had dawdled too long in Jasper’s souvenir shops and got left behind. As I went to sleep that second night, we were being held out of Edmonton, Alta., and matters went downhill from there.

By 6 the next morning we had gotten only 150 miles east of Edmonton, to Chauvin, Alta., where we waited for 45 minutes for two westbound freights to pass, one of them consisting almost entirely of empty lumber cars (I guess the recession is over). We entered Saskatchewan almost three hours late and left it east of Melville almost five hours behind. Day three was more of the same, leaving Hornepayne, Ont., that evening seven hours late. On day four, thankfully, the Canadian reached Toronto just six and a quarter hours off schedule. Yes, just. I felt grateful for that bit of rubber at the end of the schedule.

The Canadian’s slow schedule permits it to go through the siding for most meets with freights and still come out pretty well at the other end. But no good ending comes when you halt for 30 to 60 minutes, time after time. That was our fate.

The explanation for all this is pretty straightforward. Canadian National was hammered in January by extraordinarily cold weather, the most brutal in the prairies since 2009 (the temperature in Saskatoon didn’t go above freezing in 2013 until February 12), and hasn’t recovered. It hasn’t recovered, first, because CN tried and failed to run summer-sized 10,000-foot trains; second, when it downsized train lengths to get airbrakes to work it didn’t have enough employees to operate its trains, and third, business is just booming. The day we paused at Melville to change engineers, so did 36 freight trains. I’ve never in my life seen so many tank cars, almost all of them placarded as carrying crude oil. The impact of weather and traffic is clearly seen in the charts showing CN's average train speeds and terminal dwell.

CN spokesman Mark Hallman says his railroad is working through the operational challenge.

This brings us to my question, the point of all this: What responsibility does a host railroad have to people traveling over its rails? On the face of it, BNSF appears to take the Empire Builder seriously, whereas CN doesn’t seem to remember that the Canadian is even there. The issue I raise is a lot like the ones you debated in CSX fillets the Auto Train for supper and Let’s try this again: CSX vs. the Auto Train.

I put my question to five of my traveling companions aboard the Canadian, all railroading professionals, two active and three retired from senior positions. From one, a Canadian, came this response: “I think that the graphs show that we were treated without prejudice and maybe even with a bit of preference.” I had told him that CN’s premier intermodal trains were running 12 to 24 hours late. “We arrived less than seven hours late. I call that a preference ride.”

From the second person, an executive of a U.S. railroad, came this: “To me, the question is: Are they getting us over the road the best they can, given what else is out there? Overall, the answer was yes, with the notable exception of Saskatoon,” where we waited for a freight to pull out of the yard ahead of us and then backed into the station because the usual route was blocked. From the third, a retired Class I CEO (blessed at the end of his remarks with a sense of humor): "I am not sure that they treated our train any worse than the rest of the traffic on the line. The freight operation looked messed up. I heard it was due to the cold (shorter trains=more engines and crews}.  It has  been cold in Canada before. If it is a line capacity  problem,  they will need to rethink the traffic mix.. Maybe the oil we saw was volume that  the operation plan had not taken into account. This commentary has no basis in fact."

From another retiree of high rank, who is never one to mince words: “What we experienced on CN would not happen, at least to that degree, on any of the big four U.S. Class I’s. While most railroads would prefer not to have passengers, it is a commitment they take seriously. CN doesn’t treat VIA any different than it treats any tenant on its lines, i.e., as a second or third class citizen. These are the same people who told us that their locals have priority over other railroads’ priority intermodal trains, and dispatched the line accordingly. It is a cultural issue.”

And from Jim McClellan, late of Norfolk Southern and half a dozen other employers: "As ugly a railroad operation as I have ever seen. They are running things too close to the edge. Frankly, I did not care about the late train. The Canadian is largely irrelevant in the scheme of things. But to see a freight operation in such distress is depressing. Yes, it has been cold. Yes, they had to run smaller trains. Yes and yes and yes to all the things railroaders say to say, 'It is not my fault.' " Whew! Is that damning, or what?

Now my take: I am on record as saying that a late train is a reward to me — more railroad pleasure for the same low price. So I cannot complain. But more than six hours late? This messes with the plans and schedules and bank accounts of the more than 300 people who rode that edition of the Canadian and the 131 who saw it through to the end. I give Canadian National a C- only because its own trains were even later. The traffic-clogged route, particularly between Edmonton and Winnipeg, simply begs for more people, more infrastructure, and better transportation management.

On the other hand, this could all soon be moot. Canada’s ruling Conservative party is proposing to slash VIA’s operating subsidy in half. — Fred W. Frailey