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There's a number of issues here. I don't want to try to summarize the Chicago issue of Trains done two years ago, and if you're interested in Chicago, doing without that issue is like trying to build Boulder Dam without concrete. (Maybe if you had a 900-ton beaver with a 200-foot tail and a big pile of sticks ... ) One of the economic principles of railroading is "distance makes money, terminals cost money." A terminal cannot generate income, it is purely overhead. Thus a railroad spends the least possible money on terminals. When the terminal also includes an interchange with another railroad, the costs and complexities grow by an order of magnitude. Now there are in effect two or more abutting terminals, each a gigantic money pit, that each have to coordinate the interests of two or more railroads, interests which will be congruent on through traffic and divergent on terminating and originating traffic. It's quite schizophrenic, and there's no way around it -- economics only apportions competing interests, it doesn't make them go away. Because Chicago historically was more of a origin/destination for traffic than it was a waystation for traffic, there were very large economic disincentives for each railroad to spend money building efficient connections to the other railroads at Chicago. These connections weren't going to be used very much in relation to the use each railroad was going to get from its own main line leading to and from Chicago. So the historic pattern was to build enormous capacity right up to the city, and skimp when it got into the city, leaving somewhat of a moat between the railroads n the city itself. Whether one likes that or not, these companies would have been irrational to do otherwise. A company must spend most of its money on the things that generate most of the revenue. Today, Chicago still is a huge consumer/originator of traffic. In terms of intermodal lifts each year, it is the number one city in the world, bigger than Hong Kong, Shanghai, Rotterdam, or Los Angeles. So a lot of the traffic going to Chicago is never going to come out the other side. That traffic creates zero incentive for bypasses or connections through the city. Moreover, that very huge weight of terminating traffic pulls a lot of the through traffic into Chicago with it. That's because traffic comes in trainloads, if it's to be moved at a profit, and trains that are short-tonnaged increase costs more than they increase revenues. Suppose, for instance, Fresno, California, acting as a collecting point for a broad territory in the Central Valley, generates for BNSF enough carload traffic every day to fill a train for Chicago and eastern points, but about 50% of that traffic will stop somewhere in Chicago or its environs. Each Chicago car could conceivably end up on any one of the Class Is, belt lines, or short lines serving Chicago, or about a dozen different railroads -- and many of those railroads have several lines into Chicago. How do you handle this traffic? Your three simplest choices are: 1. Originate one train a day at Fresno, run it into Chicago, break it down there, then deal with getting the eastern carrier cars through Chicago to them. This is essentially the cheapest in terms of labor, but creates some serious delays in Chicago for the through cars. The terminating cars will do pretty well, though (back to favoring yourself first). 2. Originate one train a day at Fresno, run it to Galesburg, hump it, and when there are enough Chicago cars for yourself, run it, enough eastern carrier cars for a full train to NS, run that to NS connection, and ditto for CSX. But NS and CSX have more than one place they go out of Chicago, so Galesburg is going to have to classify the train into blocks for CSX or NS (each block requires its own bowl track). Conceivably this train could bypass Chicago, if and only if there happens to be some junction where CSX or NS can split the blocks apart without backtracking. Then CSX and NS are presented with the problem of sitting on that block until they get full tonnage, or combining it with other blocks from other railroads, or its own Chicago customers, to build a full train for each of its major destinations. That's beginning to sound like a yard, and if that yard is not in Chicago, it's either going to be sending cars backward to a junction in Chicago to get on the right line, or it will only be handling some of the blocks. So CSX or NS are going to have to classify this BNSF traffic at some point in Chicago, or just east of there. Conceivably, Galesburg could build, say, full trains for CSX-Selkirk, CSX-Queensgate, CSX-Evansville, etc.. Now, instead of Galesburg having one track in the bowl for CSX it empties out every few hours, or five tracks for CSX it empties out every 24 hours, it has just given over five or more tracks to CSX that won't empty out for several days. And instead of the cars dwelling in the yard for maybe 24 hours until there's a full trains' worth for CSX, the cars can easily dwell for 72, 96 hours, or more until enough accumulate for a train. (And customers like slow transit times how much?) You could run short-tonnage trains, but your crew costs go through the roof on both your road and on the connection, too, unless you're planning to simply substitute the interchange track for the bowl track, and after three or four days when a train's worth accumulates, CSX comes over and pulls it. If you hold the cars in Galesburg until a full train for a destination accumulates, you also start really increasing your equipment costs, too, because the cars aren't moving -- you just increased the number of cars you need to haul the same amount of freight. Empties will still be needed back in Fresno in the same number every morning. 3. Originate two trains daily at Fresno, one Chicago, and one east, and either double the crew costs to advance the cars at the same schedule -- chewing up twice the mainline capacity on which you can't run something else, or hold the cars in Fresno for 48 hours, average, instead of 24, which sucks up yard space in Fresno, runs up equipment costs, delays freight, etc. What I'm trying to illustrate with this conundrum -- which is multiplied 10,000-fold by all the permutations of all the different main lines leading to Chicago -- is that there are no easy solutions. Any choice made has huge consequences. If Chicago consumed or generated no traffic, it would be less of a problem, it would look a lot like North Platte, Nebraska, except instead of having in effect five main lines entering from the west and three from the east, it would have 20 or so main lines converging. Dwell times would be pretty bad no matter what you did. However, because Chicago generates and consumes traffic, there's no way to get around running a lot of the trains into the city. And because each of the 20 or so main lines are sending traffic to each of the other 19 main lines, the logical place for a single yard -- to avoid backtracking -- is as close to the core of the city as you can get. If you don't put the yard there, then you start needing two, three, four yards, each one of them its own money pit, and the traffic flows instead of being ganged into one for maximum main line efficiency start getting fractured into several flows, requiring a lot more main track, crews, locomotives, etc. There are very few traffic flows anywhere in the U.S. that go through Chicago (or could go around it) that are large enough to generate a through train every day, not without tolerating some enormous dwell times in yards. Only the unit coal trains that continue on to Detroit or Ohio or Northern Indiana are truly through trains, along with a very few intermodal and carload trains -- and most of those through carload trains are really Galesburg-Elkhart trains, or the equivalent, which means those cars have lots of dwell they're already carrying. It must be acknowledged that there are several hundred important origin-destination points and several thousand minor origin-destination points in the U.S. and Canada that send significant traffic to and through Chicago every day. Together, their business add up to 1,200 or so freight trains. While that sounds like a lot, individually by origin-destination pair, they each break down to flows of 5, 10, 20 cars a day. That many cars is not enough to build a train that can be operated at a profit. Railroads make money by assembling many shipments into one collection called a train. Each of those individual shipments is yoked to every other individual shipment. If you want to run cars one at a time, and avoid all this problem with yards, connections, bypasses, terminals, interchanges, dwell time, etc., the transportation world already has a solution for you: it's called a truck. You'll gain time and certainty, and pay more in rate. If you want a low rate, you subordinate the independence of your single car to the interdependence of a train, and pay more in time, uncertainty, and unreliability. Unless you as a shipper can generate your traffic in unit-train quantities, you cannot expect the independence of movement of a truck at the low cost of a train. OS
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