Now, many Americans, including environmentalists, are somewhat familiar with all the nasty but necessary stuff railroads move from sea to shining sea, through amber waves of grain—crude oil, coal, hazmat chemicals, etc., etc. But do they know that much of the food they consume, or the raw materials that go into producing it, moves by rail at some point in its farm-to-dinner table journey?
I suppose the good people at the AAR, perhaps a little tired of endlessly citing safety statistics like “99.997% (or is it 99.996%?) of all hazmat shipments reach their destination without incident,” needed a bit of a break. Thanksgiving is just around the corner, and Christmas season—traditionally associated with trains, and train travel—is almost here. (Actually, for retailers, it started the day after Halloween, but this is not a rant on rampant commercialism. I suggest you watch “A Charlie Brown Christmas” for my take on the Holidays.)
And so, we have some rather interesting and useful extrapolations from the AAR on how the railroads help us in grabbing that second, or third, helping.
“As we go into the holiday season, we wanted to give you some quick facts on how the rail industry plays an important role in moving the food we eat,” AAR spokesman Ed Greenberg wrote (as he munched on a healthy salad no doubt consisting of lettuce and other produce transported in a refrigerated boxcar—maybe one of those Trinity Rail 72-footers BNSF bought a few years back).
“Every year, the nation’s freight railroads move about 1.7 million carloads of food products, in addition to approximately 1.5 million carloads of farm products. Each year, the railroads ship approximately 757 million pounds of poultry, enough to put a 10-pound Thanksgiving turkey on more than half of U.S. dinner tables; approximately 2.1 billion apples, enough to make 357 million apple pies; approximately 34 million tons of wheat, enough to make 82 billion loaves of bread; approximately 525,000 tons of potatoes, which makes up a lot of mashed potatoes, or, put another way, enough to make 7.3 billion orders of fries; and approximately 65 million tons of corn.”
That’s pretty impressive. Don’t forget all the kitchen appliances (stoves, microwaves, refrigerators, etc.) used to prepare all that food, shipped in intermodal containers. Or all those finished motor vehicles shipped in autoracks that enable us to drive to the supermarket and buy all that food, or shop for gifts in overcrowded malls. Or even the widescreen TVs, again shipped in containers, that we depend upon for holiday entertainment—like the football games and zillion-times-repeated specials on the Hallmark Channel. So next time you find yourself snoozing in front of the TV after indulging in L-tryptophan-laden turkey, watching another turkey of a New York Jets game, think of the railroads.
For the record, I would like to know how many re-gifted Christmas fruitcakes are shipped to unsuspecting relatives via rail in United Parcel Service intermodal containers. These stale desserts don’t have to be frozen, as they are wrapped heavily in a layer of impenetrable clear plastic—which most likely got its start as a shipment of crude oil in a railroad tank car (hopefully a CPC-1232-spec car) unit train, followed by a plastic pellet load in a covered hopper, followed by . . . . well, you get the picture.
Best wishes for a happy and healthy Thanksgiving.