(The following article by Cynthia Kyle was posted on the the Business Direct Weekly section of the Mlive.com website on December 16.)
DETROIT — Traffic is up for passenger and freight trains running through mid-Michigan, and operators hope business will stay on track for another upbeat year.
“We’re on a steady growth pattern,” says Robert Chaprnka, president of the Michigan Railroads Association, representing 13 of the state’s long- and short-haul freight carriers.
Amtrak ridership rose 16.6 percent in fiscal 2004, officials reported. Photo courtesy of Westrain.
The freight rail news is especially good given Michigan’s peninsular geography, lying as it does off the tracks running through the nation’s transit midcenter.
“There has to be a reason to come into Michigan,” Chaprnka says.
Passengers find more reasons for rail travel too, according to Amtrak, the national passenger train operator running three routes across the state’s southern lower midsection.
For the fiscal year ended Oct. 30, 16.6 percent more people boarded at Amtrak’s Michigan stops than the year before.
Lansing’s ridership was up 35.8 percent. Kalamazoo riders rose 13.6 percent. Jackson’s was up 5.4 percent and traffic through Battle Creek climbed 3.7 percent.
“Ridership has really been growing in Michigan,” says Tim Hoeffner, passenger rail services manager for the Michigan Department of Transportation.
October numbers continued the upward trend.
Ridership for the Wolverine Detroit-Chicago line was up 12.4 percent. Bluewater Limited transit departing Port Huron, with a stop in East Lansing and ending in Chicago, increased 10.3 percent. Travel on the Pere Marquette, running from Grand Rapids to Chicago, was up 14.9 percent.
“There’s a lot more being shipped and railroads are getting a significant portion of that,” says Tom Drake, lobbyist for CSX Corp., with Michigan offices in Livonia and national headquarters in Jacksonville, Fla.
Rail freight was up more than 3 percent nationally this year thanks to a 10-percent increase in grain shipments and a 3-percent rise in coal hauling.
A bumper grain harvest, due to 80-degree weather in September, promised more of the same, the Railroads Association said.
New technologies encouraging pinpoint tracking and so-called intermodal shipping – containers that can be moved from ships directly to railroads and onto truck beds – are also behind the increase. Container traffic was up from 3 million units in 1980 to 9.9 million last year, according to the association.
Some 23 freight railroads operate over nearly 3,700 miles of track in the state, by the MRA’s current count.
The lines employ more than 5,000 people living in Michigan and carried 116 million tons of freight, including coal, farm products, chemicals, cars, lumber and automotive parts.
Three of the nation’s six largest rail freight companies operate in Michigan. CSX [NYSE:CSX], Grand Trunk Corp., a Detroit-based subsidiary of Canadian National Railway Co. [NYSE:CNI] and Norfolk Southern Corp. of Norfolk, Va. [NYSE:NSC] rank as Class I operators, with operating revenues of at least $272 million in 2002.
Utilities and Michigan’s automotive manufacturers are among their largest customers.
“Automakers are everyone’s biggest customer,” Drake says. “We’re also moving more and more commercial products.”
Consumer goods such as clothing, kitchen appliances and even computers made overseas are picked up at coastal ports for the ride to Michigan distribution centers, he notes.
At the same time, Amtrak and the state are bolstering passenger service with increased marketing and a key change in schedule.
In April, Amtrak ended passenger service from Chicago across mid-Michigan into Canada to Toronto. The train, called the International since inception in 1982, ran into post-9/11 border crossing delays and often caused riders to miss long-distance connections.
Peak ridership fell from 120,000 in 1990 to 24,000 in the 2003 fiscal year, Amtrak spokesman Marc Magliari says.
The Bluewater Limited replaced the International’s run, with the addition of an early morning ride to the Windy City and evening return.
“You can go over and back in a single day or stay a single night,” Magliari says. In the past, riders had to stay two nights to make enough time for shopping or business, he says.
“It’s working out quite well for business and leisure,” notes Rick Anderson of Anderson International Travel in East Lansing, an agency that books rail travel.
But challenges loom for freight and passenger trains.
Short-line rail traffic in the Gratiot-Montcalm area, where mid-size manufacturers are closing or moving out of the area, has been hurt. Michigan must improve its business climate to prevent economic erosion, Chaprnka says.
Where business is good, crews can be hard to find quickly, he adds.
Diesel fuel costs are up at least 50 cents a gallon over the past year. Diesel fuel powers the generators for engines’ electric motors.
“It would cut into your profit margin,” Chaprnka says.
Passenger train travel growth is putting more pressure on freight owners to end delays on shared tracks. The Michigan Association of Railroad Passengers, a not-for-profit advocate for rail improvements, appealed to Amtrak and MDOT in October to make on-time passenger service an “immediate priority.”
At the same time, federal lawmakers annually threaten to end Amtrak subsidies, which would force the state to increase support for passenger rail. In a contract that expires next Sept. 30, Michigan agreed to pay Amtrak $7.1 million, up from $1 million in 1994.