Two Years of TransitCon Presentations

So, several months later, I realized that I never posted my presentation from this year’s TransitCon. The talk’s about the (false dichotomy of) improving rail in the US incrementally or in big leaps, and more precisely how the risk of overspending and underdelivering that plagues our project delivery accrues to incremental projects as much as huge ones. You can find the slides here.

And when I went to post that video, I realized I never posted last year’s, either! That talk was about railroad electrification. You can find the slides here.

I should emphasize that in both cases I was speaking entirely in a personal capacity, and not representing any employer past, present or future. If you have questions or want copies of the slides, you can reach me on Twitter or through the Contact Me function of this blog. And of course, huge thanks go out to Hayden and the TransitCon team for putting this wonderful event on!

Some Updates

Well, it’s been a long time! I haven’t had much time or motivation to write, but hopefully that will begin to change some time soon. Famous last words.

Alert observers who for some reason follow me extremely closely may have noticed that my employer has a job listed that covers my major responsibilities–namely, managing the Boston MPO’s federally required budget plan. That doesn’t mean that I’m leaving Boston or MPO work, though! I’ve been at CTPS for almost five years, and I’m taking on some new responsibilities that I’m very excited about, and that I’ll get to in a moment. But first, apply for the position! It says you’d spend 60% of your time working on the UPWP (roughly accurate, though it’s highly concentrated in the January-June band) and 40% as a resilience planner. There’s likely some flexibility in the second element, but it’s a skillset we need on staff badly. I’m happy to answer questions from anyone who’s interested; you can find me on Twitter or through the contact page on this site. The position is open until October 28.

We’re also hiring for two other positions in my work group, both related to outreach and communications:

—Manager of Outreach and Communications, a newly created position, will oversee a small department. This position is open until October 20.

—Public Outreach Coordinator will work for the new manager and pick up much of our important outreach work, in partnership with other staff members.

As for me: I’ll be taking over lead management of the MPO’s Transit Working Group (next meeting on October 12!) and transitioning into the role of being the MPO’s freight planner. Neither of those is a full-time job and I’ll be doing other things, too, but those will be my core responsibilities. Freight in particular is something that, while I’ve had a long-standing interest in it, is relatively new to me, so please send along resources. Anything on general freight and logistics is welcome (I already know a lot about freight rail, which is a relatively minor player in the Boston area these days), but I’m especially interested in examples of public-sector freight planning.

Gratuitous Pretty Picture

The picture at the top of the post features the old Niskayuna, NY train station, built in the 1840s by the Troy & Schenectady. Now an artist’s studio next to the very popular Mohawk-Hudson Bike-Hike Trail. Picture taken in August.

The Mohawk Valley and Freight Sprawl

A new bulletin from my old haunts in Upstate New York got me thinking about how the overlapping dysfunctions in several relatively obscure subfields of public policy and planning combine to produce overall outcomes that are far from optimal.

Earlier this month, Union Pacific announced that it was shutting down its Cold Connect service, which moved refrigerated produce from California and Washington to a massive, and recently constructed, warehouse in Rotterdam, NY, next to Schenectady on CSX’ former New York Central Water Level Route. UP’s statement on the closure claimed that

Since acquiring the Railex assets in 2017, employees diligently worked to grow volumes and create a platform for the future; however, with COVID-19 impacting volume and truck prices, it is no longer sustainable to continue operations.

It’s worth unpacking this statement a little. First, it links the closure to COVID-19, but also blames trucking prices, the artificially low nature of which are a long-term annoyance to railroaders, planners, and sustainability advocates. The idea that COVID-19 would affect volume is perhaps a little strange; unless a significant chunk of the Cold Connect volume was moving to restaurants (plausible, I suppose, but seems unlikely to me) demand is likely higher now than it was in the Before Times, and if anything the supply chain is showing stresses from too much demand, not too little. Finally, the statement says that the operation is “no longer sustainable,” not specifically that it was actually losing money. This hair-splitting is, as frequent freight rail interlocutor @A320Lga theorized on Twitter, characteristic of the current Class 1 freight railroad fad of “Precision Scheduled Railroading,” an operating and business philosophy popularized by the late Illinois Central/Canadian National/Canadian Pacific/CSX CEO Hunter Harrison, which sometimes seeks to drive away not just unprofitable volume but sometimes even less profitable volume so as to add to shareholder value.

So what does the elimination of one conceptually significant, but relatively small freight rail operation have to do with broader trends in American freight and logistics planning? First, as I’ve already noted, UP’s stated reasons for the elimination of Cold Connect refer back to issues of public policy, such as the hidden subsidies to trucking and the incompetent response to COVID-19. Second, the loss of 160+ jobs in Rotterdam is nothing to blink at; though it’s part of the broader pandemic depression, it’s also another blow to a depressed town in a depressed ex-industrial region that in my opinion qualifies as one of the easternmost outposts of the Rust Belt (Connecticut’s Naugatuck Valley and Bridgeport are also Rust Belt, but nothing further east. Fight me.). Third, it’s environmentally damaging–it’s a much-studied article of faith among those in the know that rail is usually the cleanest way to move goods a long distance overland. Finally, one only needs look a little down the road to see how poor public policy and planning frameworks are reinforcing the very pathologies that led to the elimination of Cold Connect.

A little to the west of Rotterdam along the Mohawk River (and I-90, and the Water Level Route, and the Erie Canal…gotta squeeze a lot of transportation infrastructure into a relatively narrow passage), a new warehousing and logistics cluster is growing in the ex-industrial areas of Montgomery and Fulton Counties. Or rather, a couple of different clusters are growing in different places. While this new growth surely represents economic hope in an area that’s been bereft of it for so long that the lack of hope has been featured in the novels of Richard Russo (himself born in Johnstown and raised in Gloversville), it is…not exactly following the practices a progressive planner would recommend for long-term sustainability.

Let’s start with the cluster just southwest of Johnstown, along the Cayadutta Creek. From the air, it looks impressive, home to a giant Walmart distribution center, along with the yogurt producer FAGE, delivery company DHL, and paint manufacturer Benjamin Moore. No longer home to a glovemaking industry or a gelatin plant, perhaps Johnstown is at least benefiting from the relatively low-wage jobs provided by the logistics cluster.

Let’s take a closer look with a different mapping interface, OpenRailwayMap.

Hmmm…it turns out that the cluster is placed just north of the Montgomery-Fulton county line, conveniently giving all of the tax revenue to one county. The cluster is also entirely road-dependent, despite being located only a few miles from a busy freight rail line; indeed, the Walmart warehouse taunts us through its placement directly on top of the abandoned right-of-way of the Fonda, Johnstown, and Gloversville Railroad (the dashed brown line in the above image). Indeed, these two things are related. This cluster leverages a location relatively close to I-90, but just far enough away from the Mohawk that it can’t be easily served by rail (although restoring the FJ&G wouldn’t be too difficult), while conveniently sticking Montgomery County or NYSDOT with the tab for maintaining the roads between the freeway and the warehouses, and minimizing Fulton’s own tab. Finally, as with any major commercial development in Upstate New York, the Walmart warehouse alone sucked up $1.9 million in subsidies. Rivalries between governmental entities and the hidden subsidies to the trucking industry combine to produce a really dysfunctional outcome.

Across the Mohawk, a few miles south and a little east of Johnstown in Montgomery County, we come to the rural town of Florida, New York (not to be confused with the Village of Florida, New York, in Orange County; Google Maps can’t tell the difference), next to but significantly not part of the post-industrial city of Amsterdam.

Here, a huge Target distribution center is joined by a number of smaller businesses as well as a massive Dollar General warehouse (the building shown under construction in the satellite imagery) and potentially soon Amazon.

Perhaps most notably to locals, this area also hosts the baby food company Beech-Nut, a longtime Mohawk Valley fixture that in 2010 moved 20 miles to this site after 118 years in the small village of Canajoharie. This piece from Syracuse.com does a good job laying out all of the fraught emotions and complications involved in that move; while it allowed Beech-Nut to remain in Upstate, and the company has continued its relationship with local suppliers, it involved abandoning a plant that had once been served directly by rail and water, not to mention ripping the economic and civic heart out of the Village of Canajoharie (but them’s the breaks when you’re a single-industry town).

The old Beech-Nut plant is the giant white thing dominating this view of Canajoharie, in case you couldn’t tell.

And the site Beech-Nut moved is entirely truck-dependent. As the crow flies, the Florida cluster is a little over a mile from the Water Level Route and even closer to the abandoned West Shore rail ROW on the south bank of the Mohawk, but it has zero rail (or, for that, matter, water–the Erie Canal can still carry freight!) access. The new Beech-Nut plant, built at a cost of $124 million, benefited from “$104.5 million in state and local incentives, grants and tax breaks.” Public entities have also invested millions in cleaning up the old Canajoharie site (asbestos problems…OK, maybe not the best building to be making baby food in) in hopes of making it usable for a new investor.

So what we observe here are the faint rumblings of a new economy for a disinvested area, but it’s an economy that’s heavily underpinned by public subsidies both obvious (the ones that come from economic development agencies) and hidden (the reliance of the logistics industry on trucking). In addition, the “organizing” principle is not planning of any kind, but a twisted form of Tiebout competition where governmental entities compete in an entirely predictable race to the bottom to offer the most subsidies. New York State competes against other states, but plays an unpredictable role at the local level; counties compete against each other; within the counties, rural towns try to ensure that post-industrial cities will not see jobs return by grabbing new economic activity for themselves. And of course, it is all underpinned by subsidies to the trucking industry that are mostly determined at the federal level. And government in these areas-at all levels–is so desperate to attract economic activity that they can’t or won’t even use the high level of subsidy to demand basic long-term planning principles locating freight and logistics sites near rail whenever possible.

So what are the principles that a more sustainable (in all respects) planning and economic development regime should use when approaching the freight and logistics industry?

1. (and this should be no surprise) The trucking industry should be charged the full social cost of its activities, with a goal of creating mode shift. This single policy change would have huge downstream effects, catalyzing change throughout the industry.
2. If government insists on giving away subsidy packages (which it shouldn’t, but probably will) subsidies should be integrated with transportation and land-use planning to prevent truck-dependent logistics sprawl. The Center for Neighborhood Technology’s Cargo-Oriented Development, or COD, is a useful framework.
3. Brownfields redevelopment and economic development programs are popular, albeit underfunded; one explicit goal should be to modernize old factory buildings and prevent companies from moving to greenfield locations, if possible. I’m sure there are people out there who know more about this than I do, but the current preference for massive, flat, single-level greenfield sites seems less like a physical necessity and more like a lack of creativity and imagination.
4. A truly radical idea by the standards of Upstate NY and probably most of the country: freight and logistics is a regional-scale industry, and tax revenue from regional-scale logistics facilities should flow directly to the state or regional level, rather than flooding municipal or county coffers. Eliminating the twisted form of Tiebout competition that now characterizes logistics planning would almost certainly help to restore the importance and economic sense of place in the industry.
5. Stop giving away useful rail rights of way for trails. Both the West Shore Railroad, a one-time New York Central competitor that ran along the south side of the Mohawk, and the Fonda, Johnstown, and Gloversville both play significant roles in this post. Large parts of both are now trails, and likely inaccessible for freight usage. There are places where rail trails are good, but the right of way should always be under public ownership, and the bar to opposing return to rail service through legal action should be extremely high.
6. Find some incentive for Class I railroads to care about efficient delivery and participate in the modern logistics economy. As the example of UP’s treatment of Cold Express shows, this may be the second-most-important element, after getting trucking pricing right. Precision Scheduled Railroading has introduced America’s largest railroads to the concept of scheduling trains and running them relatively fast, but it has also driven away still-profitable traffic and alienated the railroads from a customer base that already thinks them arrogant and selfish. The public sector needs to find a way to push the railroads to think about running faster, shorter trains, along the European model, to make it possible for them to participate in the just-in-time logistics economy. Road pricing reform can be part of that push, as can strong public policy locating freight-heavy industries near rail. But it’s likely that some rail-specific push will be needed as well.

Let’s end on a happier note. Just another few miles down the road, in Guilderland, the Northeastern Industrial Park occupies a former Army depot that is exceptionally well-served by rail but also flat and open, reflecting its construction in 1941 at a time when the country was still rail-dependent.

The park is switched by SMS Rail Services, which interchanges with CSX on its adjacent mainline and uses the former Delaware & Hudson passenger line to Albany to link the park to a second Class I connection, Norfolk Southern at Delanson (yes, the name of the hamlet is a contraction of the name of the railroad that founded it). This industrial park–which looks like neither the ancient, tall, asbestos-laden building formerly occupied by Beech-Nut in Canajoharie nor the modern logistics sprawl of the Johnstown and Florida clusters–may be a “back to the future” moment for freight and logistics planning.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Bible and Neighborhood Memory

Earlier today Lisa Schweitzer posted a short piece pointing out what she labels as the anti-NIMBY politics of a particular Biblical verse, Isaiah 5:8. You can go over to her place for a range of translations, but for my purposes I like the Hebrew text and translation offered by the essential Sefaria:

ה֗וֹי מַגִּיעֵ֥י בַ֙יִת֙ בְּבַ֔יִת שָׂדֶ֥ה בְשָׂדֶ֖ה יַקְרִ֑יבוּ עַ֚ד אֶ֣פֶס מָק֔וֹם וְהֽוּשַׁבְתֶּ֥ם לְבַדְּכֶ֖ם בְּקֶ֥רֶב הָאָֽרֶץ׃

Ah, Those who add house to house And join field to field, Till there is room for

none but you to dwell in the land

The verse is part of an extended analogy involving a vineyard and the iniquity of the people Israel (both, of course, common themes in Biblical literature, and unsurprisingly often found in close juxtaposition), but its point comes quite close to some contemporary concerns. Isaiah’s critique might easily be read as a criticism of the ancient equivalent of large-lot exclusionary zoning. His concern is essentially that the rich will enlarge their own estates–both urban and rural–at the expense of the poor. Or at least that is the understanding of Rashi:

מגיעי בית בבית. מקרבים בתיהם זה אצל זה ומתוך כך גוזלים קרקע העניים החלשים שבין ב’ הבתים וכן שדה בשדה:

Those who add house to house: They bring their houses one next to the other and in the process steal the land of the weak poor who are between the two houses; and thus also field by field. (translation mine)

The prophet’s concern is not idle; see for example the process of enclosure by which  British elites consolidated their control over the countryside. But one senses in the Isaiah passage, even as it is probably most accurately read to reflect pro-housing policies, also the roots of some of today’s most tenacious anti-housing themes: concerns of “overdevelopment” and even, absurd as it might be to retroject this idea 2,600 years into history, gentrification. So, I think, it’s worth looking a little further afield for some other Biblical texts on the topic.

Before we proceed, it is worth a caution that the Biblical corpus (and I refer to the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, which is my area of familiarity; I claim no expertise in the New Testament) is of course composed of a huge variety of different voices, all with their own perspectives. One of my longer-term projects is a more comprehensive look at planning and development in Genesis in particular, and maybe someday the Bible generally. But, as it happens, in the Jewish calendar we just this past Shabbat read one of the many passages that has something to say  about housing policy and politics, Deuteronomy 6:8-11:

וְהָיָ֞ה כִּ֥י יְבִיאֲךָ֣ ׀ יְהוָ֣ה אֱלֹהֶ֗יךָ אֶל־הָאָ֜רֶץ אֲשֶׁ֨ר נִשְׁבַּ֧ע לַאֲבֹתֶ֛יךָ לְאַבְרָהָ֛ם לְיִצְחָ֥ק וּֽלְיַעֲקֹ֖ב לָ֣תֶת לָ֑ךְ עָרִ֛ים גְּדֹלֹ֥ת וְטֹבֹ֖ת אֲשֶׁ֥ר לֹא־בָנִֽיתָ׃ וּבָ֨תִּ֜ים מְלֵאִ֣ים כָּל־טוּב֮ אֲשֶׁ֣ר לֹא־מִלֵּאתָ֒ וּבֹרֹ֤ת חֲצוּבִים֙ אֲשֶׁ֣ר לֹא־חָצַ֔בְתָּ כְּרָמִ֥ים וְזֵיתִ֖ים אֲשֶׁ֣ר לֹא־נָטָ֑עְתָּ וְאָכַלְתָּ֖ וְשָׂבָֽעְתָּ׃ הִשָּׁ֣מֶר לְךָ֔ פֶּן־תִּשְׁכַּ֖ח אֶת־יְהוָ֑ה אֲשֶׁ֧ר הוֹצִֽיאֲךָ֛ מֵאֶ֥רֶץ מִצְרַ֖יִם מִבֵּ֥ית עֲבָדִֽים׃

When the LORD your God brings you into the land that He swore to your fathers, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, to assign to you—great and flourishing cities that you did not build, houses full of all good things that you did not fill, hewn cisterns that you did not hew, vineyards and olive groves that you did not plant—and you eat your fill, take heed that you do not forget the LORD who freed you from the land of Egypt, the house of bondage.

On the one hand, this is the admonishment of a conquering people, about to take possession of the cities and infrastructure built by their vanquished enemies. On the other hand, this passage offers, like President Obama, a reminder that you didn’t build that, that structural forces of time, history, and economics exist. And it’s a reminder that the housing policy debate sorely needs.

To a certain extent, Moses’ admonishment to “remember where you and your neighborhood came from!” is a warning against the development of what Daniel Hertz has called the “immaculate conception theory of neighborhood origins,” the idea that homes and neighborhoods just magically appear and it’s only new development that’s greedy and not community-oriented. I’ve labeled a related, but somewhat different phenomenon by which neighborhood activists claim all credit for a neighborhood’s success, therefore ignoring structural factors and spatial economics, the “Bootstrap theory of urban development”; fundamentally the two concepts share roots in a deep denial of history.  

As Daniel says:

The problem with the immaculate conception theory is that, like parents swearing that they would never have behaved the way their kids do, it is conveniently forgetful about what actually happened in the past. Taking, just as an example, the kind of housing that Berger romanticizes—the early 20th century bungalow boom—a closer look reveals that it was defined not by mass affordability, efficiency, and respect for traditional communities, but something very nearly the opposite.

This, then, is Deuteronomy’s critique (although, admittedly, it is glorifying as much as remembering with regret a violent, colonialist history): to forget the history, the predominant factors, that got your built environment to where it is today is to become deeply corrupted. Indeed, a couple of chapters later Deuteronomy sharpens this point to include an explicit critique of the idea that כֹּחִי֙ וְעֹ֣צֶם יָדִ֔י עָ֥שָׂה לִ֖י אֶת־הַחַ֥יִל הַזֶּֽה׃,  “My power and the strength of my hand have made this glory for me” (Deut. 8:17, my translation). It would not, I think, be out of line to suggest that somewhere in the ancient tangle of texts and morals interacting with each other Isaiah’s admonishment of the wealthy who use housing and fields to squeeze out the vulnerable is explicitly directed at those who had, indeed, forgotten this exact point.  An ancient lesson, perhaps, but what is the Bible if not a timeless text? Neighborhoods: remember where they came from, always.

Illustration source: http://biblicalwatersystem.weebly.com/cisterns.html. Picked because it’s an example of a cistern in a famous Israelite site that, most likely, the Israelites did not build.

A New Sleeper Train in the Rockies?

Featured image source. 

Prompted in part by experiences like this, I’ve thought a lot about whether Amtrak’s long-distance operations are at all viable. They’re unprofitable, slow, and infrequent, and seemingly constantly under threat–but also generally the most politically popular part of the Amtrak system, since rural elected officials love seeing trains in their districts.

In thinking about the long-distance trains, I often come back to this excellent Sic Transit Philadelphia post. The core of Michael’s theory is this:

I have a developing theory of sleeper trains, which is that they are essentially a point-to-point service. A sleeper passenger who is willing to pay a fare that is going to pay for most, or all, of her costs, wants a train that is leaving in the evening and arriving in the morning. Perhaps a short ride in daylight can cover more another market or two with the same departure, but the basic form is evening-morning. It requires two trainsets to operate the entire service.

The luxury of such a service is that timing can be somewhat loose; trains just need to arrive by the beginning of the business day. From a cost-savings perspective, a one-overnight trip could mean that passengers can eat before and after their time on the train, eliminating the need for an expensive dining car. Michael discusses several potential routes for such a service in his post, and it’s been an occasional topic of discussion on Twitter as well.

This topic came back to me earlier this week when I read Jim Wrinn’s pessimistic take on the future of the former Denver & Rio Grande Western main line through the Rocky Mountains. Apparently, this line, once dominated by coal traffic, is down to a couple of trains per day in each direction, plus Amtrak’s California Zephyr, the successor to D&RGW’s grand, long-lived (D&RGW kept operating it privately until 1983) flagship train. That’s not a lot of traffic to keep up a 570-mile line (including a 6.2 mile tunnel) in some of the most spectacular–and most brutal, for weather and maintenance purposes–scenery in the country.

System map of the D&RGW in 1965, featuring the Moffat Tunnel line. Source.

The coal traffic that once sustained the Moffat line is probably mostly dead for good. But, as Wrinn suggests in his piece, what if the former D&RGW could become one of the US’ rare passenger-primary routes? An unlikely proposition given the expense of maintaining it, surely, but the line does have a strong passenger heritage, and links two growing cities with extensive, recently built out transit networks that connect well to their intercity train terminals. And it’s just about the right length to trial the one-overnight model that Michael proposes above.

Today’s California Zephyr is essentially a day train, with a mildly useful but slow schedule westbound across the Rockies, and an equally slow but less useful one (3:30 AM departure from SLC!) eastbound.

A 15-hour trip wouldn’t work to run a one-overnight trip with two trainsets, but it wasn’t always that slow. The 1952 Official Guide (indicate Denver & Rio Grande Western on the menu at left) has westbound train 17 at 13:40 from Denver to Salt Lake, leaving at 8:40 AM and arriving at 10:20. Eastbound #18 left SLC at a somewhat more civilized 5:40 AM and arrived in Denver at 7:00 PM sharp, for a time of 13:20. The Zephyr was a true day train in both directions, complemented by sleeper service at night.

And I think it might be time to bring that kind of service pattern back. With much less freight interference than in the line’s glory days and modern equipment (this line might work very nicely for tilting trains), it might be possible to get run times down into the 12-hour range. Even if that’s not possible and some train sets have to lay over, one day trip and one night trip in each direction–plus the Zephyr, whenever Amtrak feels like running it–between Denver and SLC might work nicely. The day trip would appeal to tourists wanting to see the spectacular scenery, while a barebones, no-meals sleeper operation could appeal to budget travelers who don’t want to make the stressful drive over the Rockies or don’t want to travel with a car. There’s also the possibility of restoring Ski Train service to resorts along the route, which current owner Union Pacific has been open to but Amtrak has been its usual obstreperous self about.

I don’t know if three passenger trains per day plus scattered freight service would be enough to justify the massive maintenance expense of keeping the Moffat Line open. I do know that the metro areas at both ends of the route are among the country’s biggest transit success stories, and have been highly creative in getting there. And I suspect that a day/night schedule on trains dedicated to SLC-Denver service could work. Hopefully someone will give it a try.

Small Cities, Big Roads: the Story of American Infrastructure

I haven’t had a lot of time for blogging recently (though I did post my final papers), but the semester’s over now (thank God), so here’s a fun little celebration post.

Chuck Marohn and the crew over at Strong Towns, among others, have been doing a good job documenting the absurd overbuilding of American infrastructure. I spend too much of my time daydreaming by zooming around the country on Google Maps, and in doing so I’ve noticed a trend that I think typifies the kind of obscene overbuilding that has so thoroughly screwed up the American transportation system.  As it turns out, many, many small American cities have ridiculous bypass roads that must have been built at great expense to taxpayers. I’m not talking about freeways, mind you; I approve of not destroying towns with those things. I’m talking about much smaller highways, the kind where driving through a small city isn’t going to cost you too much time or make you slow down from 70 mph. And the impact of diverting those highways to save a couple of minutes can be devastating to smaller towns or cities; the highways are often the economic lifeblood of a smaller town, and pulling cars away from Main Street and to a bypass can kill a town for good. (That being said, I should acknowledge that sometimes communities do ask for bypasses, to get traffic off their roads or because they think it will preserve a small-town way of life.)

Without further ado…multiple examples of the genre of “Small American Cities with Big Bypass Roads!”

Westerly, RI (Population 22,787): RI-78

Burlington, WI (pop. 10, 464): WI-36 (bypass opened in 2010 at the cost of $118 million. Remember, this is Paul “fiscal conservative” Ryan’s congressional district)

Bennington, VT (pop. 15,764): VT (actually extends a little into New York too) 279. This one’s special because it bypasses a good bit of countryside too:

Upper Sandusky, OH (pop. 6,596): US-30

Xenia, OH (pop. 25,719): US-35

Those are just a few examples; I’m sure there are dozens more. I’m also sure that some of the citizens of these towns prize these bypass roads, thinking they divert fast cars and loud, heavy trucks from local streets. And maybe they do. But as the Burlington example demonstrates–and I remember seeing the road under construction on a family roadtrip to Wisconsin when I was in high school, and marveling at the vastness of the earth-moving in a totally rural area–the costs, both fiscal and ecological, are enormous. Aren’t there better ways to calm traffic, keep people moving, and keep the economy pumping than these enormously wasteful exercises?

 

 

New Life for an Old Bridge Line: Norfolk Southern, D&H, and the New England Market

On Monday the long-rumored acquisition of the southern end of the historic Delaware & Hudson Railroad by one of the two titans of railroading in the eastern US, Norfolk Southern, finally came to pass. On the one hand, this is a relatively minor transaction that simply brings ownership of a long-suffering rail line into line with the railroad that is its majority user. On the other, it’s a deal that has the potential for wide-ranging effects in the small world of Northeastern railroading—most prominently, to bring real competition to the rail freight market in New England for the first time since probably the 1960s.

History of the D&H

The D&H, whose main line (for now) extends from Sunbury (traditionally Wilkes-Barre), PA to Montreal, has a checkered and often-unprofitable history. A corporate descendant of an early canal corporation, it was in its early years a coal-hauling route, but has essentially struggled to survive on bridge traffic since the decline of the Pennsylvania coal fields. The story of

Historic map of the D&H, via http://www.american-rails.com/delaware-and-hudson.html

the D&H in the second half of the 20^th century is a story of a railroad struggling to keep its head above water, but never useless enough to be abandoned. At various points, it has been owned or operated by Norfolk Southern predecessor Norfolk & Western, Guilford Industries (owner of what is now known as Pan Am Railways, a key player in this week’s acquisition), the independent regional New York, Susquehanna, and Western, and, for the last 20 years, Canadian Pacific. Very little traffic originates on-line, and as Canadian Pacific has struggled to develop the through traffic to Northeastern US markets it anticipated when it bought D&H, the line’s importance to the Canadian railroad has declined, especially south of Schenectady. Above the Capital District, CP uses the line heavily for oil traffic bound for the Port of Albany—CP has the only single-line haul from the Bakken Shale to an East Coast oil port—but those trains don’t use the line down to Binghamton and Pennsylvania.

The New England Gateways

In more recent years, much of the D&H’s traffic has been shaped by a business alliance external to the railroad itself—one that has more to do with the New England market than with the D&H’s historic Pennsylvania-Canada axis. There have, historically, been essentially three routes carrying large amounts of rail freight into New England. The southernmost was the New Haven Railroad’s Maybrook Line, which used the majestic Poughkeepsie Bridge until its suspicious damaging fire in 1974. The second was the New York Central controlled Boston & Albany, an early example of masterful American engineering that connected its two namesake cities across the Berkshires and is still the dominant rail freight corridor into New England. The northernmost of the major New England access routes was the Hoosac Tunnel route, controlled for most of its history by the Boston & Maine and its successor, Guilford/Pan Am. Finished later than the B&A, and cursed with eternal tight curves, single track (though it does have the advantage of less severe grades), and different-line connections to the west, the Hoosac line was always the weaker competitor in the Albany-Boston corridor. Since the reorganization of the railroad industry in the 1960s and 1970s, the Hoosac line has become increasingly marginal, since it fell under the control of a weak regional railroad, while the B&A was controlled by much larger railroads: NYC, Penn Central, Conrail, and now CSX.

Pan Am Southern Enters the Scene

In 2009, the fortunes of the Hoosac route began to look up. Norfolk Southern, seeking to break into the lucrative New England market over which CSX held a virtual monopoly, entered into a business partnership with Pan Am for joint control of the Hoosac Line from the connection with D&H at Mechanicville, NY to the intermodal terminal at Ayer, MA, and associated branch lines.  Known as Pan Am Southern, the partnership brought NS capital investment to the ever-strapped

Pan Am Southern. Original: http://www.nscorp.com/nscorphtml/pdf/pan-am-southern.pdf

Hoosac line, with the promise of additional traffic to come. The Hoosac line still stands at a clear disadvantage to the B&A—it is still single-tracked, is not cleared for double-stack container traffic, and needs a lot of capital investment before it will be ready for fast-moving intermodal traffic. And let there be no confusion—the intermodal market is what NS is after. In days of yore, the railroads moved finished manufactured goods out of New England; now, they’re looking for a slice of the market for moving consumer goods to the region, especially since Boston’s port is not cleared for post-Panamax container ships and has never developed as a major container port.

The closest NS-owned tracks come to the Hoosac Line, though, is Binghamton. And that’s where the D&H comes in, neatly connecting NS’ Southern Tier line at Binghamton to the Hoosac line at Mechanicville. NS has had trackage rights over that segment since the Conrail breakup in the late ‘90s, and the frequency with which it took advantage of them increased markedly after the Pan Am Southern kickoff. In recent years, D&H has reduced local service to 3 days/week, and 80% of traffic on the line has been NS traffic-rights trains (a lot of my information on this comes from the STB filing for the proposed acquisition). It makes sense, then, for NS to try to gain control of the line from a railroad that uses it little and has little incentive to invest in the infrastructure. And that’s how we landed where we are today.

Policy Implications

From the STB filing

NS’ purchase of the D&H’s southern end may remove one major carrier from a small slice of the US, but it carries with it the potential to bring true rail freight competitiveness back to New England for the first time since at least the Penn Central merger. Though the Hoosac Line is not cleared for double-stack intermodal carriage, Pan Am Southern has initiated an efficient “fillet/toupee” operation in Mechanicville, and NS has stressed the D&H purchase’s potential to bring longer, more efficient trains to and from Mechanicville Yard (apparently D&H currently limits train lengths to 8,000 feet, relatively short by today’s standards). NS does not project train volumes to rise much from current levels, but with longer trains running at faster speeds, the volume of freight flowing to New England will surely rise. With NS in full or partial control of Pan Am Southern and, for the first time, a friendly western connection as well, the Hoosac Line stands to be in a position to compete with the B&A in short order.

And the entrance of a strong second competitor into the New England market could have a major impact on the picture for both freight and passenger rail. Currently, CSX essentially has both the New York and Massachusetts state governments over a barrel when it comes to expansion of passenger service. The railroad has refused to allow the use of an unused half of the historic Water Level Route right-of-way for passenger service in New York, and bled Massachusetts for improvements to the B&A that would be necessary for increased passenger service. As I have written in the past, the strong entrance of NS into the New England market, which has now become manifest, allows both state governments (and especially Massachusetts), should they so desire, to put the screws to CSX somewhat. The Hoosac Tunnel route will never be suitable for modern passenger service, and the B&A is barely so, but Massachusetts should be using the threat of employing the public treasury to help NS lower the floor of the Hoosac Tunnel to cow CSX into allowing restoration of a second track for passenger service on the B&A, among other things.

What to Expect

I see little chance the STB will have any problem with this transaction, given its essentially pro-competitive nature. Over the next couple of years, the (former) D&H south end should see a surge of investment in track, signals, and the like, and I’d expect NS to pour more cash into Pan Am Southern as well. Many New England-area railfans would love to see NS take over Pan Am as a whole as well; since the Guilford era, the railroad has had a reputation for neglecting infrastructure and driving away customers that seems to be fairly well-deserved. I doubt that that is going to happen on any quick timetable; NS seems perfectly happy to proceed slowly with its Upstate and New England investments, and it already has significant sway over the most lucrative part of the Pan Am system. But it could happen down the line, especially if NS decides the Portland, ME market (and its port) are a worthy target.

Also predicted: I will finally get my ass over to Mechanicville to watch some trains. I’ve lived half an hour away for over a year and haven’t been yet.  If it’s time for real freight rail competition in New England, it’s time for me to get there.