Eastern Railroad Discussion > WSJ: Why Railroads Are Making Freight Trains Longer and Longer

"Pressure from investors and competition from trucking drive railroads to add cars to improve efficiency. But some say the trend is misguided and, potentially, a safety hazard."

Nothing really new in this article but the graphic and photos are decent.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-railroads-are-making-freight-trains-longer-and-longer-1529055002?mod=hp_lead_pos9

Link requires paid subscription

atsf616 Wrote:
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> Link requires paid subscription

True.

The freight train is now on track to stretch up to 3 miles long, with 200 cars or more. And it’s being powered, in part, by an unusual energy source: the activist investor.

Companies have plenty of reasons to keep adding train cars. Long trains save on fuel and crews, reducing the cost of rail transportation.

Longer trains also decrease the volume of trains through communities and improve productivity, said Raquel Espinoza, spokeswoman for Union Pacific Corp. And fewer trains on the network frees up track space for other traffic.

“Railroads thrive on economies of scale,” said Christopher Barkan, professor and director of the railroad engineering program at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, Ill. “Longer trains are the most important advance in achieving economies of scale in the past quarter century.”

A confluence of pressures—from the long-term decline of coal deliveries to competition from trucking to activist investors—are forcing railroads to improve efficiency and cut costs.

In a nod to activist investors, who have pressed for improved operations and the return of capital to shareholders, major railroads now report average train length with quarterly earnings. CSX Corp. , for instance, in April said its average train length rose 5% in the first quarter from a year earlier, a signal to investors and analysts that the railroad is gaining efficiency.

Operating trains that are double the length of standard size trains involves mastering the distribution of weight and pulling force. The longest, heaviest trains may have four locomotives in front, two in the middle and two at the end.

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https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-railroads-are-making-freight-trains-longer-and-longer-1529055002?mod=hp_lead_pos9

One lesson of American capitalism is wages + benefits paid are growing more slowly than return on capital. Fewer people + more technology represents a major shift in returns, and who gets them.

Longer trains, eight locomotives per train, more boxes, etc.

The challenge for rail labor is locking in a share of these gains over the long run.

Posted from Android

(Continued)

Some critics say the railroads are moving in the wrong direction, given the demand for faster, more frequent deliveries of smaller batches of raw materials and goods. Long trains take longer to assemble and disassemble in freight yards and can lead to delays on main lines.

“Every time I see one of these trains, I think this type of operation is destroying our ability to compete in the freight marketplace,” said Edward Burkhardt, president of Rail World, a railroad consulting and investing company, and an advocate for short, fast trains.

And as these superlong trains test the limits of physics, concerns are growing surrounding safety and the impact on the communities they pass through. Long trains can block multiple crossings, delaying emergency vehicles and other motorists, as they take 5 minutes or more to go from front to back through a crossing,

“I used to think that 100 cars was a long train,” said Norman Schmelz, mayor of Bergenfield, N.J., which is located on a busy CSX freight route. Now, he sees freight trains twice that size. “Waiting for them to pass seems an eternity,’’ he said. “They go on forever.”

A high-profile accident with a long train last year has caught the attention of regulators. The National Transportation Safety Board said train length, car arrangement and operation are a part of its investigation into the derailment of a 178-car CSX freight on a mountain grade in Hyndman, Pa., in August 2017. The Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, has launched a study into the safety and other issues related to longer trains.

In response to Hyndman and other accidents, CSX has recently hired a firm to audit its safety and also added a senior safety executive to its management team.

John Gray, senior vice president of policy and economics at the Association of American Railroads, said that the long trains represent a fraction of all freight trains and that 95% of trains are shorter than 10,000 feet.

What’s more, he said, railroads are taking advantage of the nearly $100 billion spent on rail infrastructure and equipment over the past several years. The spending included high-horsepower locomotives and upgraded track strong enough to withstand the extreme forces that can pull a long, heavy train off of the track on tight curves.

Some railroads are adding remotely controlled diesel locomotives at the end or in the middle of superlong trains so that locomotives are both pulling and shoving at the same time. Distributing the locomotive power reduces the heavy loads on the couplers that can break a train in two, improves train handling by reducing slack action and makes brake applications quicker and smoother.

....

Seems like the law of diminishing returns applies at some point. Trains too long to fit in sidings so they tie up more railroad. Yards jammed with trains that don’t fit. Trains that take so long to get to their destination that the cost to dogcatch crews goes up.

Surely someone has done some studies of rail networks and how to optimize flow. I wonder if the railroads consider these models or just see “longer trains means fewer crews” and stops there. I would like to think that the spread of analytics and data-driven decision making applies to railroads, too, but I wonder....

Posted from iPhone

Jared Hamilton
Scott Depot, WV

Short trains vs long trains was a standard theme of John Kneiling in Trains. Nevertheless the advocates of long trains have tended to win during the last 50 years, and I don't see that changing. Long keeps getting longer despite the difficulties.

I would think that the decline in coal traffic might free up space on formerly clogged mainlines, get rid of some slow-moving obstacles, and maybe create an opportunity for running shorter, faster trains that serve customers needs better.

But evidently not.

Coal trains often avoided humping and intermediate yards.

Posted from Android

chessie2101 Wrote:
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> Seems like the law of diminishing returns applies
> at some point. Trains too long to fit in sidings
> so they tie up more railroad. Yards jammed with
> trains that don’t fit. Trains that take so long
> to get to their destination that the cost to
> dogcatch crews goes up.

I did some calculations for a gig a few years ago. The proposed solution was longer trains to handle the expected increase in freight to move. Infrastructure capacity would not change in the proposed solution. I worked out trains the infrastructure would accommodate vs the size of the trains. Each train would indeed carry more freight, but the infrastructure would accommodate fewer of those trains. When the smoke cleared, the ability to accommodate freight decreased, not increased, with the proposed longer trains.

TAW

Agree, 'economies of scale' is very powerful while 'the point of diminishing returns' is not always obvious. Additional trackwork, additional crew and terminal delays due to problems with excessively long trains, cost of constructing longer sidings and double track play into it as well. Even the additional cost of more studies plays into it.

The bottom line is a powerful thing, but so would be finding the 'right size'.

TAW Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I did some calculations for a gig a few years ago.
> The proposed solution was longer trains to handle
> the expected increase in freight to move.
> Infrastructure capacity would not change in the
> proposed solution. I worked out trains the
> infrastructure would accommodate vs the size of
> the trains. Each train would indeed carry more
> freight, but the infrastructure would accommodate
> fewer of those trains. When the smoke cleared, the
> ability to accommodate freight decreased, not
> increased, with the proposed longer trains.

The railroad industry is getting back to some old bad habits which I had thought were gone for ever.

Jack

Is this really anything new. Considering the long stack trains they have run out west u.p. BNSF in mountan areas at that.

Posted from Android

Blocked crossings will eventually lead to re-regulation and new regulations on the railroads.

Michael

yes Wrote:
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> Is this really anything new. Considering the long
> stack trains they have run out west u.p. BNSF in
> mountan areas at that.

That is a bit of a special case where you have a whole lost of containers going a long distance between point A and point B.

Doing it for manifest trains where cars need to be classified at places along their journey is a bit different.

Jack

I have thought that longer trains may not be the best solution, see "Law of Diminishing Returns." When something
goes wrong, it takes longer to find it and fix it, tying up the track and capacity. I find it interesting that
TAW did some serious research on this and found out longer trains are not necessarily a good solution. Just MHO.

Nick Tharalson,
Marion, IA



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/17/18 13:01 by ntharalson.

It's all about GREED!

Posted from Android

As a movie put it, "The point is, ladies and gentleman, that greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right, greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms; greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge has marked the upward surge of mankind. And greed, you mark my words, will not only save Teldar Paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA." (Substitute your favorite railroad for "Teldar Paper".)

The railroads could take a lesson from containership carriers.  This link-  https://www.americanshipper.com/main/fullasd/msc-maersk-slowing-ships-modifying-rotations-71661.aspx  sent to me by mearsksealand, says Maersk and MSC, two of the largest, are slowing ships and adding ships to current strings to make their schedules more reliable.  A quote from MSC, "It is more important to be regular and for ships to arrive on the published day of the week."  They are getting these additional ships by dropping less-profitable routes.  They can also improve schedules by removing port calls.  Also, port terminals are causing delays handling megaships.  Industry stats show only 2/3 of containerships were arriving on time.  They also spend more money on fuel when a ship has to go faster than it's design speed to get back on schedule.

Per ble692, UP increased QRVWC train size to 3x3 with 10,000+ tons, but have dropped back to the usual 3x2 9,000 tons.  Apparently the extra 10 cars wasn't worth the extra cost of yard delays at each end and an extra unit.  You can see the pickle the railroads are in- the longer train average looks better to investors, but at some point it is at a higher cost.

mapboy