If you look at speeches by railroad presidents, they can have a soporific sameness. We hit all the usual themes—rail’s role as a superior transportation alternative, the danger of regulation, and the scale of the continuing investments in our business. If you close your eyes, it can be difficult to tell who from which railroad is actually speaking.
So I accepted this invitation with the idea of saying something different. This conference has had the same theme for many years, and I’m just not sure there is much new ground I could cover when it comes to passenger trains on freight railroads. Fortunately, however, Norfolk Southern is in a different, maybe unique, position regarding passenger trains because we rely on access over them—primarily Amtrak—to reach some of our largest markets. So my intent today is to turn your conference topic on its head and instead talk about: Freight Trains on Passenger Railroads.
Norfolk Southern operates over passenger railroads—Amtrak and commuter operators—to reach more than $1 billion of revenue. Our customers accessible only via passenger lines include automobile plants, major coal export terminals, chemical complexes, crude oil receivers, power plants, and grain over Amtrak to reach feed mills on the Delmarva Peninsula. And let me tell you, the revenue from that last market isn’t chicken feed.
Railroading on passenger lines poses unique challenges for freight carriers. Passenger carriers usually own infrastructure because at one time, there wasn’t much freight on the line—otherwise the freight carrier would have kept it! Sure, the Northeast Corridor is unusual in this regard, and has its own story, but even there the history is basically the same. Over time, the passenger operator has, naturally, focused on optimizing the route for passenger trains. And that means the infrastructure isn’t necessarily suited for freight trains, especially if more freight shows up, or wants to move in bigger, heavier cars. Freight trains put different strains on passenger track—I am no “track guy,” but have heard enough about, for example, superelevation to understand the tension between speed and tonnage. And now we have some of the same issues between passenger and freight versions of Positive Train Control.
So how do two different businesses manage to co-exist, while each is trying to grow, when freight rail is the tenant? After all, “supply”—unused or new right-of-way—is not growing, and passenger facilities like stations mean that there is often less room to add freight facilities on passenger lines. And demand is up for both freight rail—Norfolk Southern hauled more than 9% more units in September than it did a year ago—and the public’s interest in new passenger rail operations seems bottomless as well. For example, Norfolk Southern is tracking 35 separate passenger expansion or new service proposals on our lines.
Thinking about the future of freight trains on passenger railroads, there are three strategies to consider.
To start, interoperability is critical. That may sound elementary, but just because different trains share the same track gauge doesn’t mean they are interoperable. According to legend, the U.S. railroad gauge is based on the width of a horse’s hindquarters, but that doesn’t mean we see the same farm wagons—some carrying passengers and some freight—running up and down the Northeast Corridor.
Fortunately, conventional passenger rail and freight rail can reasonably share the same infrastructure, and have done so as each has evolved over almost two centuries. In fact, sharing infrastructure is critical to the cost-effective provision of both passenger and freight rail over some of these routes, as our experience on the Northeast Corridor shows. And share we do.
I already mentioned what we move over the Northeast Corridor—coal, chemicals, chicken feed—all of which are essential to the economies of Maryland, Delaware, and many local communities on the eastern side of the NEC. The contribution NS makes to maintaining this access is itself not chicken feed. In fact, Norfolk Southern’s single largest trackage rights cost—both in absolute dollars and on a per-car-mile-basis—is paying Amtrak to use the Northeast Corridor. Our payments are more than $20 million per year, even more remarkable given that our longest regular haul on the NEC is less than 40 miles.
The challenge comes in when we introduce different technologies. For example, light rail and “true” high speed rail—in the European sense—are big consumers of right-of-way and land and usually preclude shared infrastructure between passenger and freight. While light rail and high speed rail certainly have their place, planners may want to consider in some cases if conventional passenger rail solutions couldn’t address the same transportation challenges while continuing to allow interoperability with freight trains. But that’s not to suggest all the challenges of sharing infrastructure are passenger-caused—for example, freight’s desire to go higher, heavier, and even wider also raises interoperability issues, potentially frustrating passenger operations. So there are trade-offs on both sides.
Second, I would propose that we try and look to—if not over—the horizon. The greatest long-term constraint on both passenger and freight growth is right-of-way, and I’d propose that expanding the footprints of corridors—especially shared passenger and freight corridors—is the most forward-looking step we can take. For example, there may be freight-only corridors that are single-track now, but could accommodate passenger traffic if they were double-tracked. But even as that freight corridor becomes a shared passenger corridor, all we are doing is likely postponing a day of reckoning when either the passenger user or the freight user feels a capacity squeeze. And if it is a passenger-owned corridor, it is usually going to be the freight user who is unable to grow or relegated to windows and other service-unfriendly restrictions.
So the capacity crunch can be averted, or at least deferred far into the future, by acquiring land adjacent to existing corridors. While these long-term investments can be tough to justify in capital-scarce times, this land is surprisingly available. And land acquisition can be on either side of the corridor—a forward-looking corridor plan can provide for existing tracks to be shifted to accommodate new tracks. The same thing goes for corridor encroachments—the longer these encroachments are allowed to exist on seemingly unneeded land, the more difficult and expensive they are to remove.
Another focus should be chokepoints that constrain the growth of freight business on passenger lines and vice versa. These chokepoints exist for a reason—they are usually difficult and expensive to fix. Otherwise, they would have been fixed long ago. But if you think about it, these difficult and expensive rail infrastructure projects may be better able to compete for limited public resources if they have both a compelling freight story and passenger justification. A great example is Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor bridge over the Susquehanna River at Perryville, Md. This bridge—originally built in 1906—is not only a critical link in the Northeast Corridor and used by more than 70 passenger trains a day, but also provides Norfolk Southern’s primary access to Baltimore. The bridge is speed-restricted, like a stoplight on an interstate highway, and is a chokepoint that consumes capacity and limits train movements over a wide radius. Amtrak, Norfolk Southern, MARC—whose commuter trains also use the bridge—and other stakeholders have been working on a new vision for the NEC and a new bridge. Given the expected cost of more than three-quarters of a billion dollars, it will take all of us pulling together to pull this off.
In an age where the United States seems to be in a perpetual “mobility crisis,” our rail networks—both passenger and freight—are success stories. Our rail networks are moving more people and goods, more cost-effectively, with a small environmental impact. Continuing that success story into the future means we need to be creative about how we wring the most use out of our networks, including freight trains on passenger railroads.