Projects And Transportation > Railways & Waterways

Booming growth on freight railroads

(1/117) > >>

KJP:
I wonder if this seemingly innocuous project could provide impetus for trackwork that would begin to open up a Lakefront Bypass for freight trains (see http://www.urbanohio.com/forum2/index.php?topic=10544.0 or
http://www.urbanohio.com/forum2/index.php?topic=3384.msg95259#msg95259 )...
______________

http://www.cleveland.com/news/plaindealer/index.ssf?/base/cuyahoga/1146558822175410.xml&coll=2

Historic brownfield new home for trucks
Tuesday, May 02, 2006
Joan Mazzolini
Plain Dealer Reporter

Cuyahoga County provided a $1 million loan Monday to develop the site of John D. Rockefeller's first oil refinery, south of downtown Cleveland, to help a trucking company expand its freight distribution facility.

KJP:
http://www.cleveland.com/business/plaindealer/index.ssf?/base/business/1151138187251370.xml&coll=2

Shippers hop aboard
Sunday, June 25, 2006
Peter Krouse
Plain Dealer Reporter

Have you noticed a greater number of freight trains rum bling through Cleveland in recent years?

Chances are you have. Perhaps on the Norfolk South ern line as it crosses Chester Avenue in Midtown, or maybe along the CSX track as it runs parallel to the Norfolk Southern near University Circle.

Shippers across the country have been putting more and more freight on trains as the economics of hauling by rail have become more favorable.

noozer:
What this article doesn't say is that by addressing the critical need for increasing capacity on our rail system, it will also enable many of the passenger rail projects (like the Ohio Hub and Midwest Regional Rail) to move from the planning table to reality.  Clearly a federal rail infrastructure development and funding bill is needed.

KJP:
Here's a map of the U.S. rail system that may be of interest... The colored lines not only indicate which lines are owned by which companies, but which lines are double-tracked (ie: has continuous sections of two parallel tracks like a two-way street). We here in Cleveland are fortunate to have two double-tracked rail lines -- CSX Transportation's and Norfolk Southern's east-west mainlines. Among other functions, they serve as a bypass route for Pacific-Atlantic ocean container traffic that can't go through the Panama Canal because the ships are too large. But I digress...here's the map:



While this map is slightly out of date, as more and more sections are seeing double track built/restored to handle booming rail traffic growth, it still saddens me that we lost so much capacity from the 1950s into the 1980s. Imagine the map having three times as much double-tracked rail lines as there are now...

Robert Pence:
That illustrates one of the problems with US transportation policy. Railroads pay property tax on their infrastructure, including right-of-way, track and signaling systems. The business-school graduates who have taken over much of railroad management have no comprehension of the realities of railroad operations, including seasonal and cyclical traffic patterns, and a major component of their cost-control activity has been the removal of infrastructure they see as redundant, especially double track.

A notable casualty was the former Pittsburgh, Fort Wayne & Chicago Railroad that was a major link in the PRR, later Conrail, New York - Chicago mainline. It once carried a lot of traffic, and prior to 1990 it carried two Amtrak trains each way, each day (Broadway Limited and Capitol Limited). It also served as a backup for the former NY Central route through South Bend in the event of major track work or accident-caused interruptions. One night when the Lake Shore Limited was detoured through Fort Wayne, I saw three Amtrak trains at Fort Wayne's Baker Street station at one time!

CSX got that route as part of the partition of Conrail, and removed the second track and the signaling system, and turned it over for operation to Chicago, Fort Wayne & Eastern, a RailAmerica operation. In its current state it can only handle local feeder traffic instead of supplementing the Water Level Route farther north.

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page