Did you know that over the past decade the amount of rail freight has declined even if you don't include the plummet in the number of coal trains? It's true:
Why is rail freight down down even though the economy has expanded by a third over the same period? It's not because freight charges have gone up:
Freight charges declined steadily after railroads were deregulated in 1980, turned upward in 2004 for some reason, but have been flat over the past decade.
In fact, the decline of rail freight is a long-term phenomenon. Overall rail networks peaked in the early 1900s and then declined thanks to passenger losses caused by the growth of cars, planes, and intercity buses—and the Great Depression. Both freight and passenger traffic declined when the interstate highway system was built, and the freight network fell off a cliff during the financial troubles of the early '70s. After deregulation freight operators were allowed to close unprofitable routes, and they did so with a vengeance until total track mileage was down to about 90,000 miles, where it's stayed ever since.
These figures are for the six big Class I rail freight carriers. Some of their decline has been made up by smaller regional carriers that sprung up after deregulation, but not all of it. Whether you measure by carloads, tonnage, or track mileage, rail freight is down.
Some of this is due to PSR—Precision Scheduled Railroading—which was pioneered in the '90s but only truly caught on about ten years ago. The idea behind PSR is to reduce operating costs by (a) running trains on fixed schedules, (b) running longer trains, (c) concentrating on only the most profitable long-haul routes, and (d) routing trains more efficiently so they pass through fewer transfer points where cars have to be moved around. Here are the results of PSR over the past decade:
The result of all this has been less rail freight and fewer cities served, but higher profits. This in turn has fueled a huge binge in dividends and stock buybacks.
And that's the story of freight trains.
Shrinking domestic manufacturing combined with a change in distribution systems means logistics has changed from freight rail to cargo flights and ground cargo, implied by the downward trend of freight rail juxtaposed with an upward trend in the LoDI Index: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1xtbm
The story of trains should include the deliberate decision of the federal government to subsidize interstate highways instead of rail, for defense purposes in the 50's. Rail centers of cities were considered vulnerable to nuclear attack, and the interstate beltways were built so that military traffic could continue if the cities were wiped out.
Precision Scheduled Railroading is exactly what airlines started doing after Jimmy Carter deregulated them. The industry wasn't as concentrated as railways are now (there used to be literally dozens of carriers), so they spent the profits on mergers. But reducing the number and frequency of routes, using bigger jets when feasible, fewer transfers, all of it.
I live in a city on the rail line to Canada, coal export, and near two large refineries. They run day and night and the open coal cars are 200 in length. Plays absolute havoc with city traffic!
If you like to watch freight trains (and who doesn't?), there is a smartTV (or Roku) app for RailStream which has free 24/7 views from ~16 cameras. There's a 2 minute commercial at the beginning but no more after that.
You can say for better views (like a railroad yard with lots of stuff going on) but the free views are okay. Up to 80 trains, each with about 100 cars. Many are well cars*, with a lot of Amazon containers on them. Also oil and (sigh) coal.
The Fullerton CA cam is the busiest with Surfliner passenger trains and many, many containers going to/from the port of Los Angeles / Long Beach throughout the night and day.
* A well car, also known as a double-stack car is a type of railroad car specially designed to carry intermodal containers (shipping containers).
Given how much more efficient trains are per ton mile than trucks, reduction in freight traffic is not good environmental news.
While this is broadly accurate, the background and details get fairly complicated. On the one hand, as skeptonomist points out, competing modes are operationally subsidized, even the bulk ones (river barge systems, airports and FAA flight control, etc, as well as highways); rails got their massive subsidies in the 19C when they started up and since then have been unusually capital-intensive and have had high running costs on top of that. Being common carriers has also imposed some burdens on them, but not unique ones.
On the other hand they've been relentless, since their last consolidation wave down to the surviving 6, about taking only the traffic that will fit their operational models and elevating their own needs far above those of shippers. PSR is just the latest and most relentless version of that trend, aimed to eliminate where possible, minimize where it isn't, any intermediate handling between endpoints, and run the most cars they can between endpoints with the fewest engines and crews possible, and to do this on predictable and maintainable schedules. And the longer the distance between endpoints, the better. They don't want carload business that has to be assembled or cut in, or to allow passenger traffic across their lines, or anything else that might disrupt the schedule or slow things down.
If you're only looking at it from a company-centric angle, it can make sense, on the model of coal, which used to be the reliable revenue base that underwrote the stable Eastern roads. In the old days and in most parts of the country rails were the only mode available and they were often competing against other ones, so there was a need and demand beyond the coal base for what railroads did that individual ones went after. Passenger service was the big exception, a money-loser in almost all markets but could have prestige value.
Now with PSR it seems that the roads have decided they can be plenty profitable carrying only the kind of traffic they want-- basically low-speed time-insensitive bulk cargoes and high-speed higher-value container traffic-- and optimizing their infrastructure for efficiency with those kinds of traffic. Considering they're mostly limited to legacy rights-of-way and their capital costs can be pretty insane, that isn't completely crazy.
OTOH, from an ecological point of view, it would make sense to try getting more freight onto the inherently more efficient rails. But that's something that our development pattern since WWII makes very difficult to do. Bottom line, we may be at a relatively stable point in the number of carloads our railroads carry that may not change significantly until there's some major change in conditions. It seems to be what the railroads want.
They're basically behaving like you'd expect businesses with little profitable opportunity for reinvestment in the business to operate, favoring profitability and then shoveling the profits out as dividends and buybacks.
They'll probably take another major hit when automation and electrification hits long-distance trucking, since it's much harder to automate the trains due to regulatory and labor opposition.
And besides, if you automate a train, you replace at most two people for two hundred truckloads. There's not really all that much "fat" in labor costs now.
Also, please do understand that automating freight trains means that there are no eyes on the train that can take action when a hotbox is reported by a wayside detector. EVERY turnout on the railroad would have to be automated, even those for the "setout" spurs hanging off every fifth or so passing siding that get used once or twice a year. If there's nobody on the train to throw the switch, you can't set out the hot car.
Unless the switch to the setout spur is powered and under the control of the DS. And even then, with nobody in the cab, you'd have to have "remotely operated" couplers on ALL the cars in the fleet. Who's going to "pull the pin" on the car to be setout. Given that "remotely operated" makes them vulnerable to hackers, well, let's just say the Conductor sitting left side looks more and more useful in a pinch.
You did say that "automating trains is harder", but I don't know if you know about this very particular problem.
Class I management has been pushing hard lately for one-person cab crews with roving conductors in pickup trucks to swoop in and handle those kinds of situations. Of course there are plenty of routes that roads don't go near so this may not be such a great idea?
It could make some sense to pack dirt bikes or ATVs on the locos so crews don't have to walk the whole length of modern mega-trains to find those hotboxes or flip those switch handles. Wonder if anyone's working on that . . .
Not 100% sure it's as easy to automate trucks as you think. Kevin promised us driverless cars by next year. That's looking dubious. Electrification seems more likely.
But your second paragraph is -- let's say correct but inaccurate. You ignore the prospect of electrifying trains. And in your haste to blame labor and regulation, you ignore both that trains don't take much labor now, and that Kevin's numbers already show a significant increase in accidents. Maybe a little regulation is actually called for: How many more East Palestine style wrecks do you want?
The next thing may well be an augmentation of these long trains with very short trains. The idea is to add a battery+electric motor to a rail car and have it operate as an autonomous unit on the tracks. This is somewhat like (conceptually) a self-driving 18-wheeler, except with an easier task, given that rails are a much more predicable environment.
https://www.fastcompany.com/90965414/this-startup-electrifies-individual-train-cars-so-they-can-drive-themselves
As for the various comments in this thread, uh, do people not know that we have driverless cars TODAY???
Waymo is operating successfully in SF and Phoenix, and I have seen empty Waymo cars driving around LA (they are not yet operating in LA, but are coming soon. I think the cars I see are scouts, driving every road two or three times to get a feel for problem areas).
Yeah, driverless cars are "here", just like Kevin said in 2021. And in 2022. And in 2023. Any day now we'll be able to buy a fully autonomous driverless car. Certainly by 2025. Or...maybe 2026. Or...maybe a little later. But any day now!
https://jabberwocking.com/driverless-cars-are-here/
https://jabberwocking.com/driverless-cars-a-rorschach-test/
https://jabberwocking.com/will-2025-finally-be-the-breakout-year-for-driverless-cars/
They don't have onboard drivers, but they can only go 1-1.5 miles without human intervention.