Analysis of Mediarail.be - Signalling technician
Over the last 30 years, the American rail freight industry has witnessed an increase in its modal share, productivity, and profitability. There are some reasons to compare railways in the U.S with Europe, but they are no reasons to reproduce the recipe in the Continent. A brief overview of another world.
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| (photo Ravensong 75 via Flickr CC BY 2.0) |
Economy
Railways boost the national economy, that’s evidence. As Ed Hamberger, AAR president/CEO detailed in 2010: « 70% of new automobiles make their first trip off the assembly line by train. Most of the coal that provides about half of the nation’s electricity moves by rail ». Data shown that coal accounts for about 29% of the ton-miles of surface modes and around 44% of the ton-miles moved by rail, while in Europe, it is less than 3% of the surface modes and around 13% for rail. Globally, in 2009, the rail share of the modal split based on t/km, was 36.8% in the U.S. to compare to only 9.9% in EU. Intermodal trains shipped 10 million units for the first time since 2003.
A brief history
Rail deregulation (the Staggers Act of 1980) changed railroads from being one of the most regulated industries in the United States to a market-oriented system. The Staggers Act relaxed controls on rates, allowed railroads to contract to provide specific services to individual firms, to enter into long-term contracts, and made mergers between railroads and the abandonment of non-profitable branch lines easier. The number of smaller railroads has increased from 212 in 1980 to 550 in 1994. Today, ca 600 railroads operate common carrier freight service in the United States, classified into five groups, on 220.000km of railways lines. There are seven Class I railroads ranging in size from just over 3,000 to more than 33,000 miles operated and from 2,600 to more than 46,000 employees.
Infrastructure
The U.S. railways finance their infrastructure investments on their own. This applies both to the rail network and intermodal terminals. However the public authorities consider certain rail-related investments necessary to ensuring their policy objectives such as reduction of environmental pollution, improved transport safety, relief of congested highways, and promotion of regional development, ports and the domestic economy. Example with Alameda corridor (Los Angeles), the Chicago City project or the Patriot corridor (NS).
Whereas in Europe the capabilities of the rail infrastructure network – maximum train weight and length, axle loads, and clearance gauge – are a particularly critical factor in determining a production system due to the severe restrictions and extreme diversity of characteristics encountered throughout Europe, in North America by contrast, railways hardly have to cope with infrastructure constraints at all, managed with only one language…
Business & track access
Freight railways in the U.S. provide for their own, private rail network. Since, in Europe, networks are state-owned public infrastructure network managers are subject to EU and national regulation. Even though US Class I railways operate large networks, they simply could not adequately reach some customers or markets if they had to rely solely on their own tracks. They can extend their geographical scope through interchange agreements with other railways. In this case, if they seek to supply services to locations off their network they can often rely on trackage rights – the right to operate on foreign rail lines by own locos and staff – or haulage rights – the opportunity to subcontract traction service to foreign railway. That made a radical difference with Europe where each national networks plays alone. The European Commission has designed three legislative packages during 20 years to come up with something that looks like trackage rights, which permits them to ensure a non-discriminatory access for every authorised user. And there are still nevertheless quite political resistance ...
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| (photo J-P Mueller 99 via Flickr CC BY 2.0) |
In practice
Where trainload services are concerned, the regulations applicable in USA are as follows :
- Trackage rights: These rights allow a railway to operate on the lines of another railway by employing its own locomotives and staff. In the (fictitious) example given below, Union Pacific (UP) had trackage rights for the New Orleans-Memphis line of Norfolk Southern (NS) and would be permitted to continue with its own resources all the way to the NS Memphis intermodal terminal.
- Haulage right: This right entitles a railway to carry out rail services on the lines of another railway but must subcontract operations to this company. Our example shows that if UP had no trackage rights for the CSX line to Memphis, UP would have been obliged to have its train operated by CSX locomotives and staff.
The interchange procedures between U.S. railways, by subcontract operations are rather vulnerable to coordination deficits, meaning that the railway taking over a train from another does not always deploy the necessary resources on time. This results in irregularities and delays. For this reason U.S. railways clearly prefer to maintain control of their own trains.
The business model
The liberalization of the rail freight industry in Europe trying to make it possible an “all-inclusive” intermodal business model such as in North America. But even when European railways were integrated companies the business models were much more complex than in North America and essentially centred around a new category of logistic service provider, the intermodal operator.
What is typical for operator-driven “open” block-train services is that intermodal service providers in Europe do not require their customers to enter into a contractual obligation to ship a certain number of units by each service if the capacities employed result more or less from the day-to-day decisions of customers.
The fairly homogeneous business models much more reflect a mentality of many American enterprises. They wish to keep their business simple and understandable for their customers. As say the company BNSF: « Create intermodal rail service for our customers that is easy to understand and use: simple network and simple network offerings ».
A recipe : the full business control
The American railways emphasize that it is crucial for them to control the entire port-to door chain. This enables them to manage the flow of containers on a trade lane so that a regularly high train capacity load factor can be accomplished and resources employed efficiently. To ensure efficient services for example they use « slow » containers (overseas), which are conveying commodities to be delivered within a long time-span, as a buffer-stock to complete trains.
Productivity
In US, the rail wagon is viewed rather as a “commodity” and not as a piece of competition. The loading units shipped by intermodal services are standardised and comparatively homogeneous particularly in terms of equipment. The maximum permitted axle-load of wagons is about 31.8 metric tonnes – against 22.5 tonnes in Europe. The majority of marine and domestic containers are moved on double-stack trains.
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| (photo Michael Kappel via Flickr CC BY NC_2.0) |
The typical loading capacity of U.S. trains and an average gross weight of 8.3 tonnes per TEU (Twenty Equivalent Unit), the gross weight would amount to 2,000 to 5,000 tonnes. While 1340m (750m maxi in Europe) long trains are somewhat the standard in U.S. east coast traffi c, intermodal trains serving the west of the country are usually 1830 to 2440m foot long.
For 1000 tons, the U.S. Class I railroads require 0,28 trains and 1,94 in Europe. That means that the operational revenues per ton-mile are higher in Europe, almost two times more than in the U.S. This is explained by the smaller length of trains which requires more traffic and more line capacity than U.S. The American ratio weight/length combined with longer shipment distances contribute to a higher productivity. Despite the fully use of diesel, the prices of fuel is only the half of Europe, encouraging the non-electrification of tracks. In addition, interoperability barriers in the EU28 are of course nonexistent in the U.S., such as different gauges, signalling systems, and electric systems.
Regular schedules in the U.S. mean that intermodal services are operated five to seven days a week. Some examples :
Los Angeles-Chicago : 3409km, 59 hours, average speed of 58km/h. For its Premium Service level BNSF also offers a 100% on-time guarantee currently on 26 O/D links. This confirms the use of trackage rights mentioned above and the absolute control of the entire production chain, included terminals.
Other example with Norfolk Southern and Union Pacific, which have joined forces to enable transcontinental domestic services for trailers and containers under the brand “Blue Streak”. Services are operated over the networks of the two railways as interline traffic. This product comprises of four service levels.
In fact
It is not easy to compare two different worlds: Europe is a "technical railway mosaic" while American railways were designed in only one technical environment. The failure of the U.S. concept is the massive use of fossil energy and the minimal maintenance of the infrastructure, causing serious derailments as we saw recently in Quebec. But we can learn the lesson plan is to obtain rights internetwork by passing simple contracts and the need to control the entire production model, rather than cooperation which adds the handicaps of each.
(1) The maritime sector requires the opposite: contracts are signed for an annual quantity, sometimes six months.
