(The following article by Patrick May was posted on the San Jose Mercury News website on February 25.)
SAN JOSE, Calif. — Asia’s manufacturing boom is flooding the state’s shipping ports, and freight trains are being tapped more to help clean up the clutter. And although the lion’s share of freight still is moved on highways, the railroads’ surge is helping to relieve a trucking system grappling with driver shortages, highway congestion and pollution woes.
The locomotives have their work cut out for them — the number of trailers and containers on rail cars nationwide grew by more than 60 percent between 1990 and 2003, while the total number of rail carloads grew by 35 percent.
Union Pacific, which along with Burlington Northern Santa Fe moves most of the cargo coming into California from Asia, has set volume records year after year since 2002, and last year pulled a record of nearly 10 million loaded rail cars.
Yet for a muscle-bound transport mode defined by double-decker trains and locomotives pulling 10,000 tons without breaking a sweat, the rail network has become surprisingly fragile.
“With everything so interdependent,” said Jennifer Bronson of shipping giant APL, “any little wrinkle can screw up the entire chain.”
An assortment of wrinkles — labor shortage, faulty projections by the railroads — is what led to the so-called “summer 2004 meltdown” in freight traffic at the twin ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles, the nation’s main spigot for cargo from Asian manufacturers. The estimated price tag for those 11 days of idling ships and trucks, cargo back-ups and empty railroad tracks was $70 billion. And experts worry if the ports or railroads or shippers fumble again, the next meltdown could be even messier.
“We’re not far from a crisis of some kind,” said Bob Wolf of the Southern California Leadership Council. “The challenge is not only to move all these goods east, but to do it without paralyzing the communities they’re moving through.”
Freight history
Moving freight efficiently along railroad tracks is a huge challenge, especially in a densely urbanized area such as Southern California’s Inland Empire. With the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles staggering beneath the weight of Asian cargo, everyone along the shipping chain knew something dramatic had to be done — and in April 2002 they had their solution.
It’s called the Alameda Corridor, a $2.4-billion 20-mile-long rail expressway linking the ports to the big train yards near downtown Los Angeles. From there, trains continue their long journey deep into America’s heartland, while trucks pick up much of the short-haul cargo. With half of the corridor set into a 35-foot-deep trench, its three tracks now shoot 50 trains a day eastward, and in the process remove 8,500 containers that otherwise would have been trucked from the ports along already congested highways.
Like the Capitol Corridor that offers passenger service, the Alameda is another train tale that underscores the promises and perils of an overworked transportation grid, in this case the ports, railroads and communities in Southern California that shoulder 40 percent of the nation’s cargo traveling by ship.
While America once relied on rail to move its goods, mostly from eastern ports out west, trains from the 1930s on began losing market share to trucks, thanks to bigger rigs and better highways. The 1980 deregulation of the trucking industry was a further blow. But by the mid-1980s, as the railroad industry got legislative breaks of its own and carriers figured out a system to move two containers on one flatcar, Port of Long Beach spokesman Art Wong said, “almost overnight the railroads came back to life.”
Booming business
The Alameda Corridor is the postcard of that renaissance. The streamlined marvel replaces the tangle of street-surface tracks that once took freight trains over four different branch lines and 200 railroad crossings at 20 mph, half the speed trains now move through the trench.
John Doherty, the Alameda Corridor’s chief executive, said trains today “can’t compete with trucks on trips under 800 miles. It takes $200 to truck a container 20 miles, but it’s $450 on a train. So Las Vegas and the Southern California market are better served by trucks.”
For long hauls, though, trains are becoming more crucial than ever, as volume explodes. In 2000, railroads nationwide moved 9.2 million containers; last year, that number climbed to 12.3 million. And California’s getting a hefty piece of that action: Between 2000 and 2005, the number of containers reaching the United States from China doubled, with the majority of them arriving at Southern California ports.
Last year, the Alameda Corridor handled 25 percent of the nearly 9 million containers that passed through the twin ports, a number of boxes expected to more than double by 2020, assuming the ports and railroads can handle it.
They’re getting ready. Experts say the next generation of cargo ships will carry more than 10,000 containers. That’s the equivalent of 21 trains, each a mile-and-a-half long, bobbing and weaving through the increasingly congested Inland Empire.
To keep that cargo moving out of the ports, the Alameda will be a lifeline. Fortunately for shippers, it’s now using only a third of its total capacity of 160 trains a day, since most cargo still is loaded directly onto trucks at the ports.
Skyrocketing demand
Union Pacific spokesman James Barnes points to “the voracious appetite of the American consumer,” the insatiable hunger for inexpensive goods that nations like China are happy to oblige.
The Asian manufacturing boom benefits from an increasingly fluid and “just-in-time” supply chain — larger and larger ships off-loading containers directly onto longer and longer trains.
But if American consumerism is an insatiable hunger, the digestive tract starts on the docks of Long Beach, where Rudy Rael stood on a recent morning, staring up at a canyon of in-bound containers awaiting their journey through the Corridor to points east.
“We’re bursting at the seams,” said Rael, assistant operations director for ITS, one of the port’s oldest container terminal operators. “We’ve doubled our terminal in the past three years, and it’s already filled up. And this mountain of boxes keeps growing.”
So do the trains moving them east.
“Our average train is less than 7,000 feet long, but we’re preparing for 10,000-foot trains,” says Steve Branscum with Burlington Northern Santa Fe, the state’s other major rail carrier. “We’re investing more on our transcontinental line to Chicago and hope to have that double-tracked by early 2008.”
Railroads are adding track as fast as they can, but there’s a limit to their capital-improvement budgets. And the unexpected demand for much-needed rail cars has caused a manufacturing backlog, requiring railroad companies to wait several months to have orders filled.
Shifting gridlock
The Alameda shows that the transportation system defies easy fixes. Some have criticized it for not getting even more trucks off Southern California’s congested freeways, while others say it only shifted the crowding problem 20 miles inland. As one train after another is shot from the Corridor’s cannon, communities in its eastern path have had to scramble to deal with the fallout — noise and shaking, smoke and dust, and worst of all, blocked city streets.
The gridlock is something Sharon Neely and her colleagues at the Alameda Corridor East project are trying to address. By organizing cities along the rails through Los Angeles County and working with lawmakers in Sacramento and Washington for funding, Neely’s group is lobbying for the construction of underpasses or road separations at 20 of San Gabriel Valley’s 54 railroad crossings.
But Victor Sandoval, owner of the 2nd St. Bistro in downtown Pomona, says even with the new underpasses, sharing a business district with more and more trains poses problems for an entrepreneur. There are the blaring horns that can ruin a romantic candlelit dinner. “It’s hard to create a nice atmosphere with mile-long trains rumbling by outside,” he says. And there are the deliveries that show up late because trucks got caught at a crossing.
“Each morning,” Sandoval says, “we come in and sweep up the mortar that fell from the bricks in this building because it gets shaken all night long by the trains.”
Seeking solutions
But Neely says the railroads, which historically have tended to wield power with arrogance, remain an obstacle. By law, she says, carriers only are required to chip in 5 percent if a city wants to construct a grade separation to ease traffic, leaving the communities to foot the rest of the bill. Neely points out that while highways get dedicated funding from gas taxes, railroad-crossing projects don’t.
The railroads make no apologies. Why should they pay for something benefiting motorists and not trains, says Union Pacific’s Davis. “I hate that idea of ‘railroads were here first,’ but the rail industry did help develop this country, it helps bring the goods that support our day-to-day lives, and it continues to help with the construction of America. Is it right that people continue to build right up against the railroad tracks?”
Neely disagrees.
“Yes, the railroads were here for 100 years and cities developed around them, but they weren’t carrying 90 trains a day and blocking intersections for 20 minutes. We want to be a partner with the railroads, because a lot of the clothes we’re wearing and food we eat is brought to us by trains. We’re trying to find a happy medium.”
Fred Arm, who suffers many sleepless nights in Richmond because of the nearby rattling and screaming of passing trains, has spent years fighting the railroads for the establishment of no-horn “quiet zones” at some of the busier track crossings.
Arm sees himself as an innocent bystander in what he calls the “global-vs.-local” clash that crosses over in his city, which has seen a sharp increase in passenger and freight traffic.
“We all benefit from this cargo,” he says. “But, especially in California, we’re also paying a price for a global economy and this Wal-Mart way of life.”