I have written several postings related to Various topics including the military, Voting, the economy, religion and etc in America. A list of links have been provided at bottom of this article for your convenience. This article will, however address additional issues in these topics.
Off the Rails: How America Can Revitalize Its Railroads
The story of railroads and other forms of public transportation in the United States is that of an astronomical rise followed by a woeful stagnation. Prior to 1950, the United States had a higher per-capita rate of public transportation use than Germany. In 2010, however, Germany’s per-capita use of public transportation amounted to seven times that of the United States. Even in major urban areas like New York City, annual subway ridership has remained roughly the same since 1946, despite an explosive increase in population. Conversely, nations like Japan, Switzerland, and China have highly-developed public transportation systems and railway infrastructure that allow for rapid economic and social development. What happened to the railway system in the United States, and how can the nation get back on the right track?
A Quick Snapshot of Rail in the United States
Prior to the rise of the automobile, the United States had built one of the most advanced public transportation systems in the world. Railroads linked the country together, transforming the way Americans in the 19th century talked about the nation—from a plural “these United States” to a singular “this United States.” The government invested in massive infrastructure growth while the country enjoyed an economic boom. However, as suburbs sprang up around the country and the cost of the automobile declined, rail and bus lines were underfunded and fell into a vicious cycle of being outcompeted by cars: fewer passengers led to cuts in service to save money, which pushed more riders away. Now, 45 percent of Americans have no access to public transportation, and passenger rail is backlogged with an estimated $45.2 billion dollars of repair work needed to return its infrastructure to a good condition.
Automobiles are now the primary transportation method for most people in the United States—however, they are far less sustainable than rail. A typical passenger vehicle emits 404 grams of carbon dioxide (CO2) per mile, while national rail emits 66 grams of CO2 per mile. It is clear that sustainable transportation is essential for a decarbonized nation, and robust railways will be critical to reviving the public transportation system. When considering public transit investments, advocates urge the consideration of environmental justice, such as making rail cost-accessible and ensuring communities of color are not disproportionately impacted by rail construction. More public transit lines also lead to a decrease in air pollution from highways, which has been a primary environmental justice concern for decades.
Currently, American rail is dominated by freight transport, with nearly 140,000 miles devoted to freight rail. While more passenger rail is needed to create a more robust public transit system, freight rail must also be improved for a sustainable transportation future. Increasing fuel efficiency, electrifying trains, and leveraging automation are only a handful of ways that freight rail can become more sustainable. Battery-electric and hydrogen-powered trains are also long-term, zero-emission locomotive solutions, with the former hitting tracks across the country. Electric locomotives are already in widespread use for passenger trains.
Light rail, heavy rail, and high-speed rail are all rail systems designed for public transit. Light rail (such as streetcars and trolleys) generally provides regional transport in suburban areas between business districts and runs on electricity, immediately decreasing carbon emissions. Heavy rail (such as subways and metros) operates most efficiently in dense urban areas. High-speed rail, like Amtrak’s Acela line in the Northeast corridor, operates at speeds over 125 miles per hour, with some trains running at 220 miles per hour. These rail lines connect transit centers over large distances and run on dedicated tracks, reducing delays. All forms of passenger rail are needed in a thriving public transit system, and all can be improved to provide efficient and sustainable transportation.
The United States has a long way to go until its rail infrastructure rivals that of Asian and European countries. The previously mentioned Acela high-speed rail line, running between Washington, D.C., and Boston, Massachusetts, was built on existing rail lines dating from the mid-19th century, which limits its speed. Meanwhile, countries like China have been investing heavily in modern rail infrastructure and are now reaping the rewards. Chinese high-speed rail serves 98 percent of major urban areas, and the nation’s 23,550 miles of high-speed rail is long enough to connect New York and Los Angeles at least eight times.
The Future of U.S. Rail
Not all hope is lost. The number of passenger rail systems in the United States jumped from 58 in 1999 to 98 in 2019, and transit ridership increased over 52 percent. Although many rail projects have been delayed because of funding issues and the COVID-19 pandemic, 2022 heralds the opening of dozens of public transit expansion projects across the country, from a rail line in Honolulu to light-rail subways in San Francisco, along with new bus lines and streetcars.
And more is yet to come. Over the next five years, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) (P.L.117-58) will invest $108 billion for public transit and $102 billion for rail, representing the largest rail investment since Amtrak’s creation. The American Public Transportation Association breaks down the IIJA as it relates to public transportation, providing funding apportionment tables and analyses of the law’s impact on passenger rail and public transit.
Through this phase of new construction, experts emphasize the importance of keeping rail and other public transit systems affordable. As a consequence of having underfunded public transit agencies, the cost of building rapid rail transit in the United States is significantly more expensive than in most other countries. Some of these costs can be alleviated through gathering more data about construction projects and streamlining permitting processes. While the sticker price of rail projects may seem large, investing in rail will create jobs, increase economic activity, improve mobility, and reduce the United States’ reliance on foreign oil.
The dismal state of modern American rail is not set in stone. Previously, the United States had thriving railroads that facilitated economic growth and connection. Recent investments in public transportation will begin to catalyze the revival of U.S. infrastructure, and building on that momentum will allow for sustainable and accessible modes of transportation for all Americans.
Efficiency and the Decline of American Freight Railroads
Over the last two years, the crisis of America’s supply chains, the push to expand public passenger rail service, and the urgency of the climate crisis have put America’s freight railroads in the limelight. These corporations own almost all rail infrastructure in the United States — infrastructure which policymakers are increasingly recognizing as critical to the efficient and environmentally sustainable movement of goods and people. However, what has been said about today’s railroads has rarely been flattering. The media and advocates have increasingly taken railroads to task for their labor practices, their approach to passenger expansion, and above all, their fascination with productivity, which these commentators see as impeding the industry’s prospects for growth and change.
The core of observers’ argument is that railroads’ emphasis on cost efficiency is leading them to restrict their growth, cut capital spending, and excessively raise rates on shippers with few other options. The two main drivers of this trend, per these voices, are carriers’ interest in their operating ratios, and the ascendance of an operating philosophy called Precision Scheduled Railroading (PSR). The operating ratio, defined as the ratio of a business’ expenses to its revenues, is said (with good evidence) to drive a relentless focus on cost-cutting, and on the pursuit of solely highest-margin sorts of freight. PSR takes this efficiency ethos and elaborates a productivity-oriented operational strategy which in its basic form advises the use of consistent, scheduled operations and strong network planning to wring efficiency out of rail networks — in faster traffic movement, but also in fewer yards, locomotives and employees, and lower levels of capital investment.
Critics lay much of the blame for the industry’s interest in these philosophies at the feet of Wall Street analysts, equity firms and hedge funds which have agitated for their implementation. They argue that financiers are strangling the industry, extracting windfalls from short term productivity improvements that compromise the industry’s long run ability to compete for freight. Wall Street’s role is indubitably important, but focusing solely on the role financial markets play in shaping today’s railroading crisis elides a deeper and more complex history of railroads’ productivity, for the last century of American railroading has been defined by the industry’s dogged pursuit of highly specific imaginations of efficiency. Evolving from the early 20th century milieu of increasing regulation, progressive reform movements, rising operating costs, and a policy context which has systematically neglected railroads’ role in the nation’s transport system, efficiency-oriented managerial strategies dominated railroading by the 1920s, defining the industry’s traffic losses to trucks, and the evolution of the network following the 1970s railroad crisis. Today’s struggling network, then, embeds the accumulated infrastructural and institutional momentum of a century of productivity management; it is this deeper history, whose roots span the actions of government and business, that America must confront to remedy our railroad struggles.
Beginnings
The roots of today’s regime of railroad efficiency lie in the accounting tools available to railroad managers in the 1860s. Being the first large corporations, railroads led the development of the modern managerial, statistical and accounting tools which undergird modern corporate capitalism. The balance sheets and command structures they pioneered became standards of the corporate world, but in their early years, were incomplete. Early railroads did not have any rigorous means of calculating the total value of their assets, so rather than adopting return on investment as their key metric of financial performance — a sensical choice in a capital intensive industry — carriers and their managements turned to the operating ratio, or the ratio between expenses and revenues, as their yardstick of corporate success. Reported widely in the financial press, the operating ratio became ingrained in railroad management and financing as an easy-to-understand metric of a roads’ success, and retained that central position even after carriers began tabulating the value of their assets in the early 1900s.
The operating ratio might have allowed managements an easy means of assessing performance, but it incentivized a cost-efficiency mindset in railroading. To minimize the ratio, railroads pushed to cut costs and pursue traffic whose cost of operation was minimal relative to its earned rate. As today, industry commentators around the turn of the 20th century critiqued ratio-centric railroading as causing railroads to artificially constrain growth, passing up potentially remunerative traffic because it was not profitable enough.
It would be easy to understand the continuity between railroads’ history and their present as manifesting entirely through the persistent use (and persistently negative consequences) of the operating ratio in assessing and financing railroads. The persistent use of this metric is certainly relevant to our current crisis, but the long-run impacts of efficiency-oriented railroading cannot be understood solely through the operating ratio, for the most lasting consequences of efficiency in railroading have been associated with the ways in which the pursuit of efficiency manifested in railroad operations.
Efficient Operations
In the closing days of the 19th century, the railroad network was maturing. From a focus on financing, routing and constructing new routes, railroad managements increasingly turned to the optimization of the sprawling networks they had built. When they did so, their efforts were shaped by the lens of the operating ratio, and thus by the pursuit of efficiency. This turn to efficient operations began when the management of the Great Northern, a carrier in the process of forging a transcontinental route from Minnesota to Washington, decided to structure their operating philosophy around heavy trains. They instructed superintendents to ensure that each car and each train was loaded to its maximum capacity before allowing it to depart. The essential insight of this approach was that railroads needed “to secure the maximum units of revenue (ton miles and passenger miles) with the minimum units of expense (train miles)” by carefully “securing the greatest train load consistent with safety and good service.” The results of this approach were striking: the GN’s heavy trains allowed the railroad to post high profits and a low operating ratio, catapulting the line onto financiers’ lists of the best managed and most profitable carriers around.
The fragmented structure of railroad ownership, the preexisting currency of efficiency in railroad circles, and the rise of railroad rate regulation ensured these productivity-oriented methods would diffuse across the industry. Carriers entered the 1900s faced with rapidly rising labor and fuel costs, which put pressure on their profitability. Even before regulation, railroads struggled to raise their rates, as nearly all traffic-dense corridors had two or more railroads competing for freight. The 1906 passage of the Hepburn Act only worsened the situation, as it gave the Interstate Commerce Commission the power to set maximum rates. In this universe of diminishing margins, a managerial philosophy of cost control seemed eminently attractive — and to it, dozens of railroads turned. The pages of industry trade journals like Railway Age were littered with glowing reports from managers handling traffic growth without increasing the numbers of trains they ran, often accompanied with discussions on how to build infrastructure and buy rolling stock to support further load improvements.
In the 1910s, the industry’s understanding of productivity grew in their scope and power. Driving this shift were not the managers of railroads themselves, but rather a set of progressive reformers empowered by the temporary nationalization of rail carriers during the First World War. Through the preceding decade, industry critics had become increasingly vocal in their conviction that railroad productivity efforts did not go far enough. Future Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis famously defeated an industrywide rate increase in 1910 by claiming railroads could save $1 million a day by implementing improved productivity controls, simultaneously worsening the industry’s financial situation and strengthening the links between productivity and profits. When railroads were nationalized, these reformers gained key positions in the railroad administration, and used their power to implement efficiency reforms. They standardized equipment designs, implemented infrastructure sharing agreements and, most importantly for this story, forced railroads to include speed in their definitions of productivity by introducing time-based metrics like “gross ton miles per train hour.”
These new measures informed a shift in efficiency emphasis, which placed the reduction in train delay alongside increases in train weight as key to success. To avoid having to reduce trains’ weights to increase their speeds, railroads sought to speed up slow processes in their networks, striving to minimize the amounts of time trains spent picking up traffic, collecting orders from dispatchers, waiting for other trains to pass, and otherwise. To that end, carriers developed managerial strategies (like centralized planning of train operations to reduce variability) and new technologies (like centralized traffic control to reduce time losses to junction operations), and saw their speed productivity increase markedly through the 1920s. These changes further cemented the centrality of productivity to railroad management, substantiated the savings achievable through such a focus, and critically, defined a language of efficiency which elevated train weight and train speed as the key metrics of managerial success in the industry.
Momentum and Decline
The importance of railroads’ turn to productivity management, and their shifting conceptions thereof, lies not just in the intellectual threads flowing backwards from our current railroad crisis, but in the ways those threads have informed railroad strategy and policy. Each productivity-minded investment, operational shift and personnel promotion carriers made through this era conferred momentum on a vision of productivity as a salve for railroads’ issues. Railroad managements, and the policy landscape in which they acted, inscribed productivity into the industry’s reality and self-conception — an emphasis poorly suited to the era’s challenges.
The defining change to the transport landscape in the twentieth century was the ascendance of the truck. Buoyed by advancements in internal combustion technology, by the untold billions spent by federal, state and local governments to improve roads throughout the century, and by a regulatory regime which gave them more freedom than railroads, trucks began siphoning off railroad traffic in the 1930s. They did this largely by offering superior service. Trucks cut shipping times, and offered more flexibility and tailored service than railroads — all qualities that only increased in value as technological changes in production, anti-unionism, government subsidy, and the new locational freedoms allowed by trucks caused industry to decentralize through the middle third of the 20th century. This allowed trucking firms to capture high value, high-revenue freight. By 1950, the combined revenues of trucking firms exceeded those of railroads: though railroads continued to haul more tons of freight than trucks, they were increasingly left with heavy, low-value, long haul traffic. Many understand this shift as nothing short of an inevitability, given the pro-truck, pro-decentralization policy context of the era, and the inescapable fact that trucks’ ability to offer more tailored and faster service rendered them simply a better fit for some forms of freight. However, it is important to not entirely elide railroads’ agency in shaping transport trajectories: their strategies ramified the services offered to shippers, and thus shippers’ choices.
The industry’s focus on particular forms of productivity was inextricable from railroads’ losses to trucking. Railroads exited the Progressive reform era with their operations constructed around the metrics like “gross ton miles per train hour” (GTMTH) and “net tons of freight per train,” increases in which would come from running longer or faster trains. Perusing various carriers’ 1960 annual reports, this focus was readily visible. The Southern Pacific put the railroads GTMTH performance on the report’s second page, the only operational performance metric accompanying the company’s top line financial data. The New York Central extolled the virtues of centralized traffic control, explaining how it enabled shortened schedules between key terminals and yielded significant GTMTH increases. And the Illinois Central quite directly stated their managements’ belief that “economy achieved by improving freight train operation is reflected by increases in gross ton miles per train hour and gross train load.”
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Carriers’ emphasis on length and train speed had merit — railroads faced increasing labor costs in the postwar years, and technological developments like the diesel locomotive facilitated heavier trains — but it elided two key realities of the railroad business. First, optimizing for train speed is different from optimizing for shipment speed and network productivity. Freight railroads in that era operated nearly all their traffic by bringing cars from customers’ facilities to railroad yards, where they would be sorted and then moved and re-sorted from yard to yard until the shipments reached their destination. This might have been an effective model for aggregating complex traffic flows, but as implemented in the 1950s, its reliance on multiple trips through freight yards made it time-intensive. Freight cars in that era spent only 8 percent of their working lives carrying revenue cargo on moving trains; getting them out of customer sidings and freight yards quickly was (and is) significantly more important to the provision of high-quality service than is running trains faster.
This leads to the second point: the mission of the railroad is not only to optimize its own efficiency along a handful of key metrics, but also to provide an attractive transportation service. To compete with trucks’ compelling offer, railroads needed to provide fast, reliable and flexible service. To do so, most agreed they would have to run frequent and tightly scheduled trains which would minimize the amount of time traffic spent in yards as they traversed railroad networks. A handful of carriers pursued versions of this strategy, and successfully clawed traffic back from the roads with short, fast freights. But industrywide, competitive responses were weak. To the extent that railroads improved their offers, they did so through bespoke trains operating on a handful of corridors in a network. For the rest of their traffic, railroads chose to reduce train counts and aggregate shipments into fewer, longer trains which often just shuffled cars from one yard to the next. Consequently, in a time of rising competition, rail freight continued to move slowly. From 1940 to 1960 the number of miles freight cars traveled in a day — the productivity metric showing how fast traffic, as opposed to trains, moves — remained essentially stagnant. Trains grew longer and slightly faster over this period, but the velocity of freight itself had barely improved. Looking at these statistics, one might be forgiven for thinking that railroads never made any effort to compete at all.
In the early 1960s, railroads began to develop responses to their competitive crisis. However, they did so in a way that reified a narrowed role for themselves in freight transport markets. Two innovations were key to this transition: unit trains and intermodal transportation. The basic theory of the unit train reflected an understanding that railroads faced a network velocity problem. By dedicating entire trains to one large shippers’ goods, and then shuttling those trains back and forth between producers to consumers, unit trains improved shipment speeds, operating costs and equipment productivity by entirely bypassing intermediate handling at freight yards. Trains became supersized trucks, operating point-to-point routes without direct operational integration into other goods flows. Though unit trains allowed railroads to improve travel times, carriers envisaged them first and foremost as a cost-saving and productivity-enhancing device, rather than a service improvement tool. Unit trains originated in coal shipment, where railroads deployed them to head off price competition from barges, slurry pipelines. This came to inform a strategy wherein the unit train would be a tool for railroads to offer bulk discounts to their large customers, helping them keep bulk commodity shipments — of coal, ores, grain, and the like — on the rails. These efforts were successful, and unit trains went on to shape the resurgence of American coal consumption following the 1970s oil crisis, reorganize the grain transportation network, and reduce operational complexity. However, a price-competitive, unit train-centric strategy as railroading’s future ceded large parts of the freight market to trucks. If you were shipping goods in bulk over long distances, railroads could provide extremely cost effective transport; if not, the highway awaited. In an era of industrial decentralization, of consumerism, and of small-lot, bespoke manufacturing, this was a poor recipe for growth.
Insofar as railroads had an answer to the limitations of the unit train, it came in the form of the intermodal service, where railroads would carry trucks on their trains. Such service had existed for decades, but when combined with unit trains during the 1960s and 1970s it became a powerful instrument of productivity. Intermodalism essentially allowed railroads to run unit trains for customers whose shipment volumes alone could not fill entire trains: railroads subcontracted the complex task of collecting and aggregating traffic to trucks, and then ran unit trains of truck trailers or containers on point-to-point routes in dense freight corridors. Reformers often presented intermodal as a natural synergy that allowed shippers to realize both the flexibility of trucks and the bulk efficiencies of trains simultaneously. There certainly was truth to these arguments, and intermodal services have played increasing roles in the freight market. However, giving up on making traditional freight work in favor of an intermodal-centric future was and is tantamount to retrenchment. This sort of simple, high-density and high-productivity railroading would let railroads run the types of trains they loved — and little more. So long as its benefits arose from its attachment to unit trains, its reach would struggle to grow beyond those few corridors where traffic density could sustain solid daily trains. Thus, though intermodal services were often marketed on their speed and reliability, they remained a vision of railroads’ future deeply anchored in carriers’ desire to be more productive.
Austerity
In the early 1970s, the railroad industry entered a period of crisis. The loss of high-revenue traffic to trucks combined with the impacts of rising labor costs, inefficient rate regulations, and excess infrastructure to send several large railroads across the Northeast and the Midwest into bankruptcy. Shippers and passengers watched these developments with alarm, and called on governments to act, spawning a decade of government action to restore the industry to prosperity and utility. In this moment of crisis, when Americans were forced to confront the consequences of the country’s incoherent and pro-highway surface transportation policy, one might imagine a course correction. A new wave of policy could have arisen, promoting rail regulatory reform, and advancing affirmative plans for railroad reinvestment and service improvement to integrate freight rail into a more balanced transport regime. Government, in other words, could have broken carriers out of the productivity-centric and retrenchment-minded managerial regime that it and its investments in roads had helped create. But none of this came to pass. Rather, the expansive federal response to the 1970s railroad crisis worked towards the goal of renewed private profit, eschewing rail’s broader relevance to industrial and social policy for a productivity-driven and austerity-minded reordering of the American railroad network.
This process of government-led retrenchment began with the basic framing of the railroad network as a business to be saved, more than it was a service to be preserved or an industry to be affirmatively expanded. Following the wave of carrier bankruptcies in the early 1970s, Congress passed legislation directing the Department of Transportation to create plans to remedy the issues of the Northeastern railroad network. Though the balance between profit and service would remain hotly contested through the decade, and into the present day, the language of railroad reform bills stressed financial performance above all else. At this historical moment, an ascendant American neoliberalism prescribed a policy approach which would — as Nixon put it — “impose only a minimal and finite financial burden on the taxpayer.”
It was in that lens that bureaucrats developed plans for the network, and strategies for railroad reform writ large. As one might expect for an effort developed in a profit-oriented frame by a bureaucracy heavily populated with former railroad employees, a central theme of these efforts was productivity improvement. In planning documents for the northeastern rail network and in discussions on the rail industry in general, bureaucrats and advisors repeatedly stressed that many of the industry’s problems were traceable to its excess capacity, unprofitable traffic and restrictive labor rules. They were certainly justified in doing so, and further, they were careful to nuance their analysis of productivity with critiques of railroad practice. Reformers asked railroads to conceive of their efficiency differently than they had in the past, discussing how productivity had informed the industry’s failure to meet trucks’ competitive challenge, and drawing up ambitious plans for service improvements that would help railroads better compete. However, government action never matched its rhetoric. Without expansive investments in the railroad network to support these visions, there was little the government could do to affect sectoral change. Even in the Northeast, where railroads were temporarily nationalized to facilitate reinvestment and rationalization, the exigencies of the planned return to profit meant that there were few systematic efforts to encourage the railroad to break fully with productivity-oriented management strategies of old. Fundamentally, then, the actions of the government during the railroad crisis did little to push railroads to think more expansively, and for policy to incentivize and invest more equitably across modes.
Deregulation and Stagnation
The culminating event in the crisis’ arc was deregulation. The slow-changing and truck-favoring regulatory system that surrounded railroads had long been a target of reformers, who highlighted its disproportionately detrimental impacts on the rails. As efforts to revive railroads (especially in the northeast) made little headway, and as the country’s politics pivoted rightwards, rate regulation reform became an increasingly attractive target for legislation. In 1980, the Carter administration shepherded near-complete deregulation of railroad rates through Congress, opening up myriad new commercial avenues for railroads.
Having left the 1970s with few course corrections from government policy, railroads seized deregulation to shape the traffic they carried to their efficiency-driven vision of their own futures, creating the highly profitable but largely stagnant rail network we know today. Deregulation allowed carriers to offer deeper and contract-based discounts to large bulk shippers, demarket unprofitable or marginally profitable traffic and abandon lines more quickly. Over the 20 years following deregulation, the railroad network shrank and traffic shifted towards unit trains and intermodal: railroading’s reality converged rapidly with the productivity-centric vision of managers.
The conventional narrative around the results of these changes is one of rejuvenation and success. Commentators argue that, though railroad managements shrank the network’s scale and scope, the leaner railroads they created were more competitive, driving increased traffic and renewed fiscal health. Reality is, however, more murky. Traffic on American rails did grow following deregulation, but a closer look at the composition of that growth reveals that carriers essentially got lucky. Of the 21 categories of railroad traffic defined by the American Association of Railroads, only 7 grew from 1980 to 2006, when American rail volumes reached their all-time high. Common across those categories was an amenability to unit train carriage, but in the cases of coal and intermodal — the two categories responsible for the most growth — it was the convergence of unit train amenability and largely exogenous market forces which led to carriers’ success.
In the case of coal, rising electricity demand and the aftershocks of the energy crisis meant that utilities continued to build new coal generation capacity well into the 1990s, while clean air regulation caused many plants to switch from Appalachian or Illinois coal, where railroads faced competition from barges, to Powder River Basin coal, where railroads did not. Moving in an endless parade of unit trains from the coal mines in the windswept grasslands of northeastern Wyoming to generating stations across the Midwest and South, coal traffic was a cash-rich bonanza for railroads, helping reverse the fortunes of innumerable carriers and routes through the period.
Intermodal’s success is a similar story. Though railroads had initially marketed intermodal as a premium service for higher-end shippers, the explosion of intermodal traffic following deregulation was in large part attributable to sharply increasing volumes of international container trade. These movements were the stuff of dreams for railroads. Shipping essentially concentrates the freight traffic generated by thousands of factories across the globe in a handful of port districts in a country. This often creates intense congestion and environmental despoilment around ports, but also makes imported containers a natural companion for railroads’ strategic emphasis on high-volume freight movements: their geography is one of heavy and concentrated traffic. They also did not need to move quickly. Container importers generally do not seek speed — these boxes spend weeks on ships, after all — rather striving to minimize costs, furthering their compatibility with railroads’ strategies. It was these international boxes, which in 2007 comprised about 60 percent of American rail intermodal volumes, that fueled the near-tripling of intermodal traffic from 1980 to 2006. In other words, railroads succeeded because their low-cost, heavy-haul service strategy happened to converge with the evolving geography of global industrialism.
What did this incredible fortune in coal and intermodal mean for railroads’ position in the overall landscape of transport competition? Rail carriers entered their crisis because the pro-truck lean of surface transport policy converged with productivity-oriented service strategies to lose carriers their high-margin, service-sensitive traffic at a time of rising costs. The mark of a true railroad recovery, then, would be railroads recapturing more high-value traffic — in other words, increasing their share of all intercity freight revenue. Since 1980, the opposite has happened. From 20 percent in 1980, rail carriers share of freight revenues fell below 10 percent in 2001, and has remained in that range ever since. Carriers’ profits and returns on investment have risen, but the inescapable reality of post-deregulation railroading is that its emphasis on the most productive types of traffic constrain its earning and transportational potential to the segments of the transport market wherein price trumps service.
Today, railroad traffic is shrinking. The long run trend in the American economy towards consumerism and a service economy has not been kind to railroads’ orientation towards price-sensitive traffic. Coal is dying, metals production is declining, and intermodal volumes are embattled as international container volumes wane in favor of domestic traffic. To make matters worse, railroads spent the 2000s pursuing another round of demarketing. Traffic growth and infrastructure reductions increased traffic densities across the network through the 1980s and ‘90s, reducing the amount of slack in the system. Following severe capacity and service crises after mergers in the late 1990s, railroad managements and investors alike pushed for strategies that emphasized profitability and efficiency — often as viewed through the operating ratio — over continued traffic growth. Here, again, governments had ample opportunity to intervene, but despite the growing recognition of the environmental, fiscal and societal benefits of increased rail use, they failed once more to provide systemic support for railroad improvement and expansion. Railroads thus doubled down on their strategy of pursuing the easiest handled traffic, investing billions in new infrastructure for unit coal and intermodal traffic, and longer trains overall, while pushing away their more complex customers. Entering the 2010s, carriers thus had a smaller and less stable traffic base, and a managerial elite for whom productivity was once again at the top of the mind. This produced stagnation: the American economy has grown by 26 percent since 2006, yet railroad traffic has yet to return to the levels achieved in that year.
Conclusion: Where Next?
There is not one single conclusion from the history of railroads’ productivity. Productivity’s definition, importance, and impacts have forever been shaped by the interlocking actions of manifold private companies and public entities; the roots of railroads’ fascination with productivity spread widely. Each of those components — the importance of choosing good metrics, of focusing on costs and service, on remaining attentive to austerity frameworks — themselves stands alone as critical to the successful management of complex infrastructural systems, and each itself merits further exploration. Yet to the extent that there is a broad failure in this story, it is our policymakers’ persistent inability to recognize that and act as if freight railroading is a vital part of the national transportation system. The constant externalization of the freight railroad network, as manifested through the (ideologically frustrating) threads of overregulation, austerity, and underinvestment, has weakened the network, incentivizing these productivity-oriented viewpoints, eventually causing a needless shift of untold quantities of freight onto our highways — where today, they wreak havoc on road surfaces, worsen congestion, and contribute to the emissions heating our planet and poisoning communities along our highways.
The problem we face today in reshaping this system is one of path dependency. 70 years of increasingly truck-centric freight movement has led industry to sprawl outwards and away from railroad lines, while railroads themselves have abandoned much of the infrastructure which once allowed them to run more complex and intensive services. This is to day that the evolution of the built environment has foreclosed more expansive possibilities for railroading, at least in the short run. Remedying this will require a sharp transformation in the nation’s approach to transportation policy. I have detailed my thoughts on what these new approaches might look like in another post, but essential to any strategy must be a transformation of the basic understanding of the ‘good’ in railroading. Productivity needs to be an instrument, and not an end in and of itself; whether indirectly through an altered landscape of taxes and subsidies, or directly through (partial or complete) rail network nationalization, now is the moment for government to create an expansive vision for this nation’s railways.
The government screwed up the American rail system. Now it can make amends.
Bad regulation turned the U.S. rail system from a world leader to an also-ran. Now, Congress has another chance.
President Biden’s commitment to Amtrak is well-known. Which is why his proposed investment of tens of billions of dollars on passenger rail is not surprising. This outlay would begin undoing one of the nation’s greatest mistakes.
A century ago, the United States had by far the largest and best passenger rail network in the world. It was a prime driver of economic growth, resulting from a successful (if sometimes corrupt) public-private partnership that massively expanded rail miles. Then, through egregious governmental missteps, the system atrophied to become a shadow of its former self.
This decline matters. The Japanese and Europeans built world-class high-speed rail networks in the late 20th century, which helped make their companies more efficient and fostered tourism. More recently, the Chinese have contrasted their newly built rail system with the United States’ crumbling passenger service to bolster China’s claim to be on the cutting-edge technologically. China contends it’s now the model to emulate and the world power with which to partner. Significantly, governments heavily subsidized the construction of these systems.
Biden’s plan recognizes the historical role government has played in determining the fate of railroads, as well as the economic importance of connecting Americans via a comprehensive rail network.
The American railroad network, built for both freight and passenger trains, expanded rapidly in the half-century that followed the Civil War. It increased from 35,000 miles to more than 250,000 miles by the start of World War I. This was a bigger system than all of Western Europe, the most economically advanced part of the world at the time. These railroads furthered development of industrial capacity, particularly by driving demand for the two most important resources of the Second Industrial Revolution — coal and steel. They also played an indispensable role in fostering westward migration.
In short, railroads helped the United States become an economic and geopolitical power.
However, this came with costs. Railroad companies chased profits and put their own interests ahead of the public good. With no government regulation to limit them, and a near-monopoly on long-distance travel, railroads in the late 19th century were free to set exorbitant rates. As historian Christian Wolmar writes, “During the final quarter of the nineteenth century, the railroads became, first, disliked and, then, widely resented. … They turned into the rapacious monopolist, reviled by almost everyone.” Poor Americans were effectively barred from traveling by train, while small farmers essentially became the economic hostages of the railroads. It was also quite easy to demonize incredibly wealthy railroad barons like Daniel Drew, Cornelius Vanderbilt and Jay Gould.
The ensuing backlash compelled national leaders to take regulatory action. The problem was that they really didn’t know how to proceed effectively. In 1887, Congress created the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) to challenge the railroad monopoly. But for decades the agency was basically powerless. That changed under the New Deal as Democrats augmented the ICC’s power. They hoped to reverse the inequalities they believed resulted from high ticket prices, but they ended up inalterably weakening the railroads and undermining a key pillar of America’s economic system.
What the New Dealers didn’t seem to realize was that times had changed dramatically. While the railroads had made huge profits decades earlier, and they were still quite large in real terms, their business had become perilous for numerous reasons. First, the massive undertaking of creating a coast-to-coast system had been mostly completed, and there were no new territories to conquer. Second, the need for speedier, more comfortable service was altering railroad operations. This was particularly true as tourism was becoming a critical profit center. Third, railroads were incorporating new technologies, such as all-steel cars and more powerful locomotives. These innovations presented massive new capital obligations that dramatically reduced the railroads’ profit margins.
And then, just as these financial imperatives were reshaping the railroads, the ICC made things even worse by imposing damaging new regulations. The commission’s primary tool was the denial of rate increases, which effectively prevented railroads from making needed improvements to stay competitive. The ICC treated railroads as though they were a monopoly. But while that had been true decades earlier, railroads now faced increasing competition from new actors, most importantly automobiles, trucks, buses and airliners but also electric streetcars, subways and commuter trains.
Despite a temporary resurgence during World War II, by the mid-20th century the railroads had entered into an inexorable slide. They steadily lost passenger miles to airliners and cars.
By the 1950s, “mom-and-pop railroads,” which connected small cities and towns to major trunk lines, had already been closing down for years. At this point, however, the rot began to spread rapidly throughout the entire system. Even as railroads introduced faster and more comfortable trains, airlines increasingly stole customers for intercity travel. An overnight trip from New York to Chicago could now be done in a couple of hours, and regulators at the Civil Aeronautics Board kept airfares artificially low. The construction of tens of thousands of miles of interstate highways, which were mostly paid for by the federal government, also hurt the railroads.
While U.S. leaders heavily promoted cars and airlines, the Japanese and Europeans took a more balanced approach that included underwriting their rail systems. That resulted in development of state-of-the-art train networks, which spurred growth by increasing connectivity and thus boosting productivity within the economy.
By contrast, in the United States it was only after the dramatic failure of the Penn Central Railroad in 1970, the largest bankruptcy in history to that point, that government acted. Congress ultimately created Amtrak to maintain a national train network, but it has sputtered economically for a half-century. This is largely because as a government corporation, Congress intended for it to be self-sustaining, despite insisting upon maintaining routes that lost money. In fact, trains operating along the Northeast Corridor, which today account for 38 percent of all passengers and 56 percent of total revenue, were the only ones that were economically viable. Therefore, making Amtrak profitable was never a realistic expectation. While other nations were investing significant sums on their systems, the U.S. government only did so to the extent necessary to maintain our bare-bones network. This stinginess starved Amtrak of the money necessary to upgrade its system and decrease travel times.
This failure had serious repercussions for small towns for which air travel and interstate highways never adequately replaced rails. Despite having an Amtrak line that passes right through town, Oxford, Ohio, the home of Miami University, hasn’t had passenger rail service since the 1950s. For years, Oxford’s leaders have tried to persuade Amtrak to add a stop in town, which would be an economic boon. In 2017, Amtrak confirmed that Oxford’s resident and student population may warrant a stop and asked the city to proceed with planning for a multimodal transit operations hub. Oxford and Miami University have pledged $700,000 for construction of the needed infrastructure. But Amtrak executives haven’t been able to make a formal commitment yet given the limited funding provided by Congress.
This story could be repeated in hundreds of towns and small cities across the country. Civic leaders are desperate for a connection to the passenger rail network, yet little has been done by Congress.
But pressure has grown thanks to China’s new state-of-the-art high-speed rail system and its desire to compete with the United States for global leadership. In a hyper-connected world, failing to update archaic infrastructure increasingly has geopolitical consequences. Climate change has also enhanced the case for government investment in rail because trains use far less energy than cars and airliners, which combined represent more than 20 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions. Finally, the very towns that have been left behind in recent decades thanks to globalization and deindustrialization stand to benefit from connections to a renewed passenger rail network. Each of these developments explain why rail advocates have recently been pushing for a new Amtrak approach that focuses on service over profit.
The past teaches us that a good passenger train system can help spur economic growth. It also reveals that proper government oversight, which balances the public good against the economic viability of rail services, combined with government investments, are key to creating a cutting-edge system. With the stakes higher than they’ve been in decades, the country can’t afford to get this delicate mix wrong again.
Why Do Americans Put Up With Decaying Infrastructure?
Compared to Europe’s high-speed rail, paved roads, and underground power lines, America lags behind with its unreliable trains, potholes, and overhead power lines. Uwe E. Reinhardt questions why Americans put up with the decaying infrastructure.
“Arriving at a destination on time, something Europeans take largely for granted, is relatively rare on Amtrak,” writes Reinhardt. “Furthermore, the train in Europe or Asia is likely to have traveled at much higher speed. The tracks there are so smooth that one could easily carry an open cup of coffee along several cars or work on the computer.” This cannot be said in America, where cars bump over potholes, trains screech along old rails, and departure times are often inaccurate. Reinhard remarks, “Why and how Americans, who pride themselves on being fussy consumers, have put up with this mid-20th-century rail system is a mystery.”
“Even more wondrous than the archaic subway and rail system and potholes in the streets,” continues Reinhardt, “is the system of distributing electric power to households and factories in large parts of the Northeastern United States.” Power is carried through lines strung on leaning poles, “which are vulnerable to powerful storms, like Hurricane Sandy,” in contrast to most of Europe’s underground and well-maintained power lines. Reinhardt brings up an anecdote in which his visiting friend from Germany “burst out laughing at the abundance of wires in every direction, something he had seen only on his travels to the developing world.”
Why do Americans “put up so fatalistically with this old-fashioned and decaying infrastructure”? Reinhardt calls for a better balance between the private and public sector to bring America’s infrastructure up to 21st-century standards instead of suffering “for days or weeks without light, heat and transportation, verbally shaking our fists at the power companies but leaving it at that.”
America’s Mid-20th-Century Infrastructure
Europeans visiting the Northeastern United States – and many parts of the East Coast — can show their children what Europe’s infrastructure looked like during the 1960s.
Perspectives from expert contributors.In New York, they can take taxis bumping over streets marked by potholes. European children might find it funny. They can descend into a dingy and grimy underground world to ride New York City’s quaint and screeching subway system, if they can figure out where trains go.
They can take the children for a ride with Amtrak from New York to the nation’s capital, giggling as the train slowly heaves and rolls, often in fits and starts, along the rickety tracks. Passengers can be heard joking that the Navy trains its sailors on this railway system, because anyone who can make it through two or three cars without bumping into seated passengers or spilling food on them is fit to go to sea.
If they departed from Pennsylvania Station in New York, they would not have known until 5 to 10 minutes before departure from which track the train would leave. And it might not leave on time. In their home country, the children would have learned that the track from which a train departs is printed in the train schedule. It is the same every day.
At Pennsylvania Station, hundreds of passengers wait in suspense for the announcement of the track and dash to it in a mad rush, running along the train in a frantic search for a seat. In Europe, one would have booked a seat in a rail car that stops at a spot shown on a poster on the track.
Unlike Europe or Asia, where trains typically adhere to the minute to scheduled times, the departure times in Amtrak’s schedules merely represent a promise that the train will not leave before then. The actual getaway might be many minutes or even more than an hour after the scheduled departure time, with any of dozens of different excuses offered. Brakes on the train stuck. Signal switches malfunctioned. Electricity was not available to the train for some reason. A train ahead, on the same track, broke down. And so on.
Arriving at a destination on time, something Europeans take largely for granted, is relatively rare on Amtrak. Furthermore, the train in Europe or Asia is likely to have traveled at much higher speed. The tracks there are so smooth that one could easily carry an open cup of coffee along several cars or work on the computer.
Why and how Americans, who pride themselves on being fussy consumers, have put up with this mid-20th-century rail system is a mystery.
Even more wondrous than the archaic subway and rail system and the potholes in the streets is the system of distributing electric power to households and factories in large parts of the Northeastern United States. Power is often still carried on lines that hang in graceful catenaries of various depths from poles that lean left or right randomly but rarely stand straight. And which are vulnerable to powerful storms, like Hurricane Sandy.
When a German high-school classmate visited me, we came upon the intersection below, less than a mile from the center of Princeton, N.J. My friend burst out laughing at the abundance of wires in every direction, something he had seen only on his travels to the developing world.
In my youth, electric power in Germany’s countryside, where I grew up, was carried on power lines strung from very tall and straight poles. But for decades now, power lines have been buried underground in Germany and most of the rest of Europe.
Malte Lehming, opinion-page editor of the Berlin newspaper Tagesspiegel, noted in his essay “Welcome to America. Take a Number” in The New York Times:
I spent half a day hunting for a store with flashlights in stock, because a storm had knocked out our power. In five decades in Germany I have never experienced a single power failure, because the power lines are usually underground and well maintained.
Imagine that – life without power failures! In much of the Northeastern United States – and perhaps in many other parts of the country as well – lengthy power disruptions are part of the American way of life. In Princeton, they occur somewhere in the township after almost every thunderstorm or snowstorm, as branches snap from trees and take down vulnerable power lines.
Last fall, for example, after a brief storm dumped wet snow on trees, many parts of New Jersey, Princeton included, were without power for about a week. Parts of Connecticut were without power for more than two weeks.
In 1958, the economist John Kenneth Galbraith drew attention to America’s neglect of its infrastructure in his famous book, “The Affluent Society.” Alas, his call for a better balance between private and public infrastructure has gone largely unheeded in this country in the ensuing half-century.
Our country reminds me of the old tale of a frog that allowed itself to be cooked to death after it was put in a pan of cold water that was very gradually heated to the boiling point. Although apparently there is no scientific basis for that tale — biologists say the frog would jump out — we do seem to act like that frog, as our infrastructure ever-so-gradually steadily decays around us.
Instead of setting about to bring our infrastructure up to 21st-century standards – which might, alas, involve more of the much detested public-sector investment — we angrily and yet meekly suffer for days or weeks without light, heat and transportation, verbally shaking our fists at the power companies but leaving it at that.
We are, at most, prepared to stock our households with flashlights and candles and, if we have the money, buy portable generators that can produce a modest amount of electricity, albeit at great expense. How can this be an efficient way of bringing electric power to households?
In so many ways the United States is a great country. The American people are innovative and hard-working, more so than most Europeans. It amazes me that they put up so fatalistically with this old-fashioned and decaying infrastructure.
Modern Decline of Railroads
By the time the 1970s ended, the glory days of railroading were over. Emblematic of the period was the case of Pennsylvania Railroad, which, in 1968 merged with arch-competitor New York Central. The result, Penn Central, went bankrupt in 1970, becoming the centerpiece of government-sponsored Conrail in 1976 — which itself struggled for years before finally landing on its feet.
As the 1960s dawned, steam‘s departure had left a vast void in the railroad landscape. Gone were the mournful whistles in the night, the hiss of steam and clamor of exhaust, the rich smells of hot grease and coal smoke. Lacking such sensory delights, the diesel seemed pale in comparison. Steam locomotives had been manifestly alive. They also had been endlessly various, precisely the characteristic that gave the readily standardized diesel its superior competitive edge.
The demise of steam surely contributed to railroading’s slow, inexorable slide out of the public eye. In the decade’s early years, on the other hand, the fleet of colorful streamliners introduced in the immediate postwar era remained largely intact, speeding across the country behind sleek diesels — Electro-Motive’s E-units, Alco’s PAs, plus the occasional Baldwin or Fairbanks-Morse unit. The feature trains still ran: the Chiefs, Rockets, Daylights, Zephyrs, and Limiteds (named Broadway, Twentieth Century, Panama, Merchants, and North Coast), as well as the ever-popular Empire Builder, Silver Meteor, and City of Los Angeles.
Still, a huge change occurred in the way the nation traveled. What had been a railroad country was now an automobile country. Between 1945 and 1964, non-commuter rail passenger travel declined an incredible 84 percent, as just about every American who could afford it climbed into his or her own automobile, relishing the independence. What changed was not just the way Americans traveled, but also the way they worked, shopped, and played.
Before World War II, the country’s growing urban population was starting to expand into the suburbs, but these by and large were “railroad suburbs” or “streetcar suburbs,” dependent on these transportation modes and essentially pedestrian. The Levittowns and all their postwar kin, on the other hand, were clearly automobile suburbs: scattered, sprawling, without definable downtowns, and not negotiable on foot. Not far behind came the supermarket, shopping center, drive-in this-and-that, and the proliferation of motels. Rail-focused downtowns withered, and with them the hotels and Main Streets that had been their anchors.
As a result, businesses that once needed railway access now gravitated toward highways — particularly the interstates, into which the federal government poured billions of dollars, while simultaneously squeezing taxes from the railroads on rights-of-way and other company assets, including increasingly unused depots.
Branch-line passenger services were the first to go, then secondary services on the main lines. Finally, as the 1960s wore on, the flagships began to fall. One early and dramatic casualty came in May of 1961, with the discontinuation of the Milwaukee Road’s Chicago-Seattle Tacoma Olympian Hiawatha. This was a splendid train, with a full-length dome car, diner, sleepers, and distinctive “Skytop” observation car. Its route was exceptionally scenic, but the ridership just wasn’t there.
Other trains followed — many others. The roll call went on and on, as railroads presented their cases for discontinuance to the Interstate Commerce Commission (then the arbiter of transportation issues) and in most cases got the nod: State of Maine, Ambassador, Pacemaker, Commodore Vanderbilt, Wolverine, Ohio State Limited, Knickerbocker, Maple Leaf, Phoebe Snow, Pocono Express, Owl, Blue Bird, Penn Texas, Golden Triangle, Pittsburgher, General, Admiral, Columbian, Erie Limited, Lake Cities, Thoroughbred, Powhatan Arrow, Cavalier, Sportsman, Southerner, Peach Queen, Pelican, Ponce de Leon, Humming Bird, Dixie Flyer, Havana Special, Green Diamond, Meteor, Sunnyland, Texas Special, Shreveporter, Southern Belle, Colorado Eagle, Royal Gorge, Prospector, Pioneer Limited, Copper Country Limited, Golden State, Shasta Daylight, Lark, Rocky Mountain Rocket, Corn Belt Rocket, Sam Houston Zephyr, Black Hawk, Ak-Sar-Ben Zephyr, Laker, and Winnipeger.
The names represent only a part of the landslide of “train-offs” that the I.C.C. approved in the course of the decade. A number of Class 1 railroads had previously gone freight-only, and more joined the list in this period, including the Lehigh Valley, Katy, Monon, Kansas City Southern, and Frisco lines. Some of the very greatest train names were erased from the Official Guide, including, unthinkably, the Twentieth Century Limited, New York Central’s famous New York-Chicago flyer. On December 3, 1967, it lost its name, and, with it, its cachet, along with its beautiful deep-windowed observation cars (though downgraded overnight service remained on roughly the same schedule over the route).
Contents
- 1960s Decline of Railroads
- 1960s Railroad Mergers
- Rail Passenger Service Act
- Amtrak
- Growth of Amtrak
- Railroad Standardization
- 1960s and 1970s Railroads Timeline
1960s Decline of Railroads
By 1966, less than 2 percent of all intercity passengers were traveling by rail. Worse still, passenger trains faced critical problems in addition to this defection of patrons to auto travel. For one thing, railroads were hopelessly out of date in dealing with those patrons who did remain. They failed to enlist travel agents as valuable allies, and they even refused to accept the major credit cards.
Prevailing railroad work rules reflected century-old conditions and equipment, meaning that crew costs were astronomical. Even the newest equipment was a decade or two old, and more often than not, maintenance had been deferred as economics soured.
Meanwhile, the Post Office was systematically stripping passenger trains of the mail cars (RPOs) that had provided substantial (and increasingly critical) revenues since passenger trains were in their infancy. At the same time, country depots were being boarded up. In 1965, New York City’s Pennsylvania Station was demolished — an act of corporate vandalism that awoke the citizenry to the potential loss of our best buildings and sparked a landmarks preservation movement.
No doubt the most noted, rancorous, and painful of all passenger train-off decisions involved the illustrious California Zephyr, the San Francisco -Chicago service shared by Western Pacific, Rio Grande, and Burlington. By the time the Interstate Commerce Commission had reluctantly allowed this marvelous train to die, public opinion was thoroughly stirred up, and editorial writers throughout the land called to task not only the railroads, but also the federal government, for lack of a balanced and coherent transportation policy that could save long-distance trains.
In June of 1969, Colorado Senator Gordon Allot spearheaded passage of a resolution calling for a federal study aimed at saving the passenger train. This led in time to the creation of Railpax, which would be called Amtrak by the time this quasi-governmental corporation took over virtually all of the nation’s long-distance passenger trains on May 1, 1971.
1960s Railroad Mergers
Though the 1960s were preeminently the decade in which the privately operated passenger train languished and then died, other significant forces were at work, changing forever the face of railroading. For one thing, 1960 kicked off the modern merger movement, with competitors Erie Railroad and Delaware, Lackawanna & Western banding together in October to form Erie Lackawanna. For students of the railroad scene, this amalgamation wasn’t that great a shock. Both names survived essentially intact, as DL&W was commonly called “the Lackawanna.” Lackawanna’s lovely passenger-train paint scheme of maroon, yellow, and gray would adorn all locomotives, but the EL circle-in-a-diamond logo descended directly from the Erie herald.
The next major merger was quite different. In October of 1964, when the Wabash, Nickel Plate Road, and Pittsburgh & West Virginia were merged into the Norfolk & Western, their names, colors, and logos vanished down the corridors of time — as the Virginian’s had earlier, after its acquisition by the N&W in 1959.
In 1967, a combination of Seaboard Air Line and Atlantic Coast Line produced Seaboard Coast Line. Then came the merger that characterized the decade — the disasterous coupling on February 1, 1968, of the Pennsylvania Railroad and New York Central into Penn Central, with the decrepit New York, New Haven & Hartford thrown in later (against the wishes of the principal partners). The newly formed railroad’s locomotive color scheme was basic black with no adornments. This proved all too appropriate. The new logo, an intertwined “PC,” was sometimes called the “mating worms.”
More mergers were soon to come, most notably the creation in 1970 of mammoth Burlington Northern from the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy, Great Northern, Northern Pacific, and Spokane, Portland & Seattle.
In the 1970s, the process of merging would only accelerate. Illinois Central and Gulf, Mobile & Ohio merged to form Illinois Central Gulf, while the Chessie System was created from the Baltimore & Ohio, Chesapeake & Ohio, and Western Maryland lines. In a merger of mergers, Seaboard Coast Line joined with Louisville & Nashville (which earlier had acquired the Monon) and the Clinchfield Railroad to create Family Lines. In 1980, Chessie and Family Lines would come together to form CSX — in effect, a merger of merged mergers.
The greatest combination of the era wasn’t the result of a merger, strictly speaking, but of a government bailout. By the mid-1970s, railroading in the Northeast was in complete disarray. Not only was Penn Central in bankruptcy, but so were Erie Lackawanna, Lehigh & Hudson River, and the “anthracite roads” that had once thrived in eastern Pennsylvania’s hard-coal country: Lehigh Valley, Reading, and Jersey Central. On April Fool’s Day in 1976, these railroads (plus a subsidiary, Pennsylvania-Reading Seashore Lines) were consolidated to form Con-rail.
So the operative word in stories of 1960s and ’70s railroading is “ended.” Passenger trains were discontinued in swelling numbers, and the very concept of passenger transportation by private railroads eventually became obsolete. Great railroad names vanished by the score.
The abandonment of unprofitable branch lines likewise gathered force. What began as a leak in the 1960s would slowly turn into a torrent. Between 1960 and 1980, approximately one fourth of the nation’s route miles were abandoned, as branches were pruned and mergers resulted in redundant trackage.
The last Railway Post Office (RPO) car operated on June 30, 1977, between New York City and Washington, D.C. The last non-urban, heavy-duty, mainline, electrified rail service had ended in 1974, when the Milwaukee Road de-energized its track across Montana and Idaho.
Rail Passenger Service Act
There were, of course, some new beginnings, and Amtrak was perhaps the most notable — a fragile phoenix of intercity rail service rising from the ashes of the languishing streamliners of the private railroads. Amtrak began operation on May 1, 1971, as a quasi-public corporation that had its genesis in the battles over the California Zephyr, as well as other discontinuances and downgradings. If a single individual can be called the father of Amtrak, it’s probably Anthony Haswell, who in 1968 founded the National Association of Railroad Passengers (NARP), a lobbying and advocacy group that remains a critical force in rail preservation today.
With Haswell agitating, the press providing coverage, and the government getting into the picture following the 1969 resolution led by Colorado’s Senator Allot, things began to move. The Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) appointed a task force, while the Department of Transportation (DOT), previously opposed to passenger trains, but apparently in a more positive mood under new head John Volpe, on January 18, 1970, released a preliminary plan for what would eventually become Amtrak.
On May 1, exactly one year before final implementation, the Rail Passenger Service Act of 1970 was introduced, providing for the formation of the National Railroad Passenger Corporation — or Railpax. A reluctant President Nixon signed the bill into law on October 30.
All railroads then operating long-distance passenger trains (as opposed to commuter services) were eligible to join Amtrak. The cost of admission: roughly half of 1970 losses on passenger service, payable in equipment, cash, or services. The benefits offered in return were enormous, as participating railroads would be free of all future passenger-related losses. Virtually all carriers rushed to join, though a few declined. Rock Island, already financially perilous and less than a decade away from total abandonment, simply couldn’t afford the fee, and thus stayed with its surviving pair of short-haul Rockets.
Under the leadership of Graham Claytor (who later served as Amtrak’s president during one of the corporation’s healthiest eras), Southern Railway opted to run its New York – New Orleans Southern Crescent, plus a few lesser trains, on its own. The Rio Grande, not wanting to give Amtrak free rein on its highly scenic, single-track line through the Colorado Rockies], confused Amtrak’s Chicago-to-San Francisco plans by staying out and running its own Denver-to-Salt Lake City Rio Grande Zephyr, using what used to be California Zephyr equipment.
Amtrak
At first, those passenger trains that survived — and about 60 percent did not — ran pretty much as before, but with Amtrak footing the bills. By fall, however, Amtrak had determined to purchase 1,200 of the best available cars from nine of the 20 joining railroads. In time, it would become the direct employer of all of its crews — not just on-board service personnel, but engineers and conductors, too. In 1976, on the occasion of Conrail’s formation, Amtrak took over ownership of the Northeast Corridor — Boston to Washington, plus the spur from Philadelphia to Harrisburg — but otherwise continued to be a tenant on the tracks of the freight railroads.
Amtrak’s first locomotives and cars were all veterans purchased from participating railroads, but within a few years the corporation went shopping for new equipment. These early acquisitions — diesel locomotives, electric locomotives, coaches, and integrated trainsets — all proved unsuccessful.
This shouldn’t have been surprising, since the technology of passenger railroading in the United States had been stagnant for 30 years. The new cars and locomotives appearing in profusion immediately after the war were modestly upgraded versions of prewar designs. Perhaps the one significant exception was the self-powered high-speed Metroliner, which the Penn Central introduced on its New York-Washington speedway in 1969. These tubular cars, built by the Budd Company, were airplane-like, with unnecessarily cramped interiors and what probably are the smallest windows ever built into a modern passenger car anywhere in the world. (Trackside rock-throwers along this largely urban route were a factor in that design decision.)
Unfortunately, when Amtrak needed some new coaches for short-haul service, the only option not involving unacceptable delays and costs for design and retooling were “Metroshells” — Metroliners without their traction motors. Dubbed the “Amfleet,” these cars, 492 in number, have been the staple of Amtrak daytime services since the first one was delivered in 1975.
Off-the-shelf passenger locomotives were no more available than coaches, so Amtrak bought diesels (SDP40Fs from EMD) and electrics (E60s from GE) that were only slightly modified freight-haulers. Both of these designs incorporated six-wheel trucks, and both proved derailment-prone at high speeds, severely limiting their utility. Amtrak did better with its next major motive-power selections, opting for four-wheel-truck locomotives. EMD began delivering a fleet of F40PHs in 1976, and the diesels became the backbone of the Amtrak fleet nationwide for the next two decades. The following year, the corporation ordered the first of what would be a substantial fleet of AEM7s, diminutive but powerful electrics of Swedish design built by EMD and the Budd Company. (Earlier, Amtrak had turned to Europe for inspiration when it purchased six Turboliner trainsets from France, then had an additional seven similar sets built domestically by Rohr.)
Growth of Amtrak
Amtrak‘s improving success with equipment purchases extended to cars as well. In 1975, the corporation ordered from Pullman-Standard the first of what would be an extensive fleet of double-deck “Superliners,” inspired by bilevel cars that Santa Fe had operated on its El Capitan, a luxury coach train. By late 1979, when the Superliners began entering service on the long-haul Western trains for which they were intended, they were two years off schedule. Before long, however, they were running throughout the West and proving popular with passengers.
The Superliners would, in fact, significantly fuel the Amtrak resurgence that began in the late 1970s and gained real momentum through the 1980s. In the ’60s and even earlier, the nation’s Western trains — the California Zephyr, the Union Pacific’s fleet of “City” trains (the City of Los Angeles, City of Portland, and so on), the Santa Fe’s Chiefs, and others — were deservedly considered superior to their eastern counterparts. The advent of the Superliners only heighted the disparity.
Clearances prohibited the operation of these bilevels in the East, where long-distance service was handled by the veteran sleepers, diners, and lounges inherited from the private railroads in 1971. Beginning in 1977, many of these old cars were upgraded and converted to “head-end power” (in which electricity generated by the locomotive replaces steam and axle-generators as the source of power for heating, air conditioning, and lighting). These reconditioned cars, dubbed the “Heritage Fleet,” were actually quite attractive, but they were old.
With this new and refurbished equipment, its own railroad between Boston and Washington, and crews under its direct control, Amtrak grew through the 1970s into a creditable entity. It remained a political football, as it has ever since, but the corporation’s staying power has surprised many critics who suspected that its creation might have been intended as nothing more than prolonged euthanasia for the passenger train.
Whatever else it may or may not have been, Amtrak was unarguably monolithic. Though the corporation chose to preserve many of the great train names from the past, it cloaked all its equipment in “platinum mist” (or, alternatively, natural stainless steel) adorned with red and blue. Gone were the rainbow colors of the private railroads’ trains, as well as their individualized services. Standardization — of menus, accommodations, and services — was the hallmark.
Railroad Standardization
The rash of mergers had a similar effect on the face of railroading in general, and the demise of the weaker diesel builders led to greater standardization in motive-power as well. Fairbanks-Morse ended production in 1963. Alco threw in the towel in 1969. Baldwin-Lima-Hamilton had built its last locomotive way back in 1956. That left General Electric and Electro-Motive Division, the latter still the dominant force in diesel-building.
The look and mix of units on the diesel-ready tracks changed radically between 1960 and 1980. Streamlined “cab-unit” diesels were everywhere, wearing the classy, multicolored schemes created in many cases by EMD stylists. “Hood units” — preeminently Alco’s RS3s (RS for “road switcher”) and EMD’s GP7s and later, GP9s (GP for “general purpose”) — were essentially the same under the skin as the cab units, but with better visibility and easier access to machinery.
The next evolutionary step was to “chop” the short hood for better forward visibility, an innovation of the early 1960s that would typify diesel aesthetics for the next two decades (until the boxy, blunt “safety cabs” of the 1980s). Streamlining and fancy paint schemes seemed superfluous in this hunkered-down era of railroading, characterized by boarded-up depots, abandoned branch lines, and weed-infested rights-of-way. First-generation diesels from all the builders joined steam trains in the scrap yards. Utilitarian “chop-nosed” units in a limited number of basic models from EMD and GE were the locomotives appropriate to this era of dramatically lessened expectations. For much of the industry, particularly in the East and Midwest, where the traffic base had eroded badly, survival was virtually all that could be hoped.
But even in these dark days, when the future looked bleak indeed, railroading had begun to reinvent itself. Diesel standardization, and perhaps the example of locomotive pooling that occured naturally in mergers, led to increased power run-throughs from one railroad to another — an efficient and time-saving practice. Intermodal traffic (trailers and containers on flatcars, otherwise known as TOFC and COFC)-became a significant growth sector, doubling between 1965 and 1980, with the greatest explosion still to come.
Railroads began to exploit other niches with “unit trains” of a single commodity, such as grain or coal. (In 1979, in a rare example of route expansion, Burlington Northern opened its new Powder River Line, tapping rich coalfields in Wyoming.) Centralized traffic control, an idea that was already many decades old, became the norm, along with welded rail.
Railroading is an old-line industry, capital-intensive and labor-intensive, with a thoroughly unionized workforce. Though every gain was won only after a fight, essential work-rules rationalization was begun. The process of eliminating firemen on locomotives, for instance, started as far back as 1964. Crew operating districts, based on divisions that often dated back to railroading’s early days (and thus resulted in operating crews receiving a day’s pay for a few hour’s work) in some cases were revised.
In the final months of 1980, several important events occurred. In December, The Pullman Company was dissolved as a legal entity (though it had ended its staffing of sleeping and parlor cars 11 years earlier), and Northwestern Steel & Wire in Sterling, Illinois, dropped the fires on its refugee fleet of steam locomotives — engines that this huge scrapyard had chosen to operate, squeezing out a last few useful miles before melting them down for razor blades. This was the last daily, non-tourist steam operation in the United States.
Less than two months earlier, on October 14, President Jimmy Carter had signed into law the Staggers Rail Act, partially deregulating the railroads. This event was significant. It was the go-ahead for the railroad industry, however dramatically redefined and slimmed down, to “highball it” once again.
1960s and 1970s Railroads Timeline
1960:
The Erie Railroad merges with competitor Delaware, Lackawanna & Western to form the Erie Lackawanna Railroad.
1963:
After a U.S. ship is attacked, Congress endorses the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, authorizing U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War.
New England’s troubled Rutland Railroad is abandoned. Sections of the line soon reopen as the Vermont Central Railroad and the Green Mountain Railroad.
1965:
New York City’s Pennsylvania Station is razed in December, sparking a landmarks preservation movement that continues to this day.
1968:
Pennsylvania Railroad and New York Central merge to form Penn Central.
1969:
The Pullman Company’s staffing of sleeping cars ends as of January 1.
1970:
In this frenzied time of mergers, Chicago, Burlington & Quincy; Great Northern; Northern Pacific; and Spokane, Portland & Seattle combine, forming Burlington Northern.
The Interstate Commerce Commission reluctantly allows the demise of the legendary California Zephyr.
1971:
Amtrak takes over most passenger-train operations in the United States.
Auto-Train begins service in December, carrying automobiles and their occupants between Lorton, Virginia, and Sanford, Florida.
1973:
A fleet of French-built Turboliners are delivered to the United States, marking fledgling Amtrak’s first new equipment acquisition.
1976:
Conrail begins operation as a result of the consolidation of Penn Central; Erie-Lackawanna; Reading; Lehigh Valley; Jersey Central; Lehigh & Hudson River; and Pennsylvania-Reading Seashore lines on April 1.
1979:
The first double-deck Superliner cars enter service for Amtrak.
Resources
eesi.org, “Off the Rails: How America Can Revitalize Its Railroads.” By Nathan Lee;
homesignalblog.wordpress.com, “Efficiency and the Decline of American Freight Railroads.” By Uday Schultz;
washingtonpost.com, “The government screwed up the American rail system. Now it can make amends.Bad regulation turned the U.S. rail system from a world leader to an also-ran. Now, Congress has another chance.” By Thor Hogan;
planetizen.com/node/59373, “Why Do Americans Put Up With Decaying Infrastructure? Compared to Europe’s high-speed rail, paved roads, and underground power lines, America lags behind with its unreliable trains, potholes, and overhead power lines. Uwe E. Reinhardt questions why Americans put up with the decaying infrastructure.” By Jessica Hsu;
archive.nytimes.com, “America’s Mid-20th-Century Infrastructure.” By Uwe E. Reinhardt;
history.howstuffworks.com, “Modern Decline of Railroads.” By Editors of Publications International, Ltd.;
Miscellaneous(Military, Voting, Economy , Religion and etc) Postings
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