(The following story by Rebecca Boyle appeared on the Fort Collins Now website on March 5, 2009.)
FORT COLLINS, Colo. — Ferroequinologists may have noticed an increase in empty rail cars parked throughout the Front Range lately.
(They’re train enthusiasts, for those of us who don’t speak Latin. Ferrous = made of iron, equine = horse; ferrous equine = iron horse. Got it?)
Eighteen months ago, it was as good a time as ever to be in the railroad business. But like most segments of the economy, the good times are no longer rolling.
Railroad volume was down 15 percent through the first seven weeks of the year, according to the Association of American Railroads. Rail freight is down in every category from lumber to TV sets — the only exception is coal.
That means an increase in parked rail cars throughout the United States, including Colorado.
But as any Fort Collins resident knows, the trains themselves aren’t going anywhere.
Fort Collins is a busy enough train town that most cars parked in the city are eventually picked up, according to city and railroad officials.
The city is luckier than other train towns, which are playing host to the more than 206,000 boxcars parked by the nation’s five largest railroads.
The number represents 30 percent of the nation’s boxcars. An average boxcar is about 65 feet long; end-to-end, they would stretch from New York to Salt Lake City.
In December, Union Pacific Corp. parked a three-mile-long train of cars in Thornton south of 168th Avenue to just north of 136th Avenue. But residents revolted, and UP agreed to move the cars to an area north of Colo. 7 to just south of Weld County Road 6. They couldn’t be moved until the city of Thornton removed asphalt that had been paved over the tracks near Weld 6, however.
The snaking line of boxcars can be seen from Interstate 25.
Fort Collins’ train issues stem from an abundance of moving trains, however, not parked ones.
Mike Herzig, special projects engineer with the city engineering department, is the city’s the unofficial train guy, and takes calls from frustrated residents about train blockades.
He said he’s not aware of any spurs or sidings being used to store cars indefinitely, however.
Steve Forsberg, a spokesman for BSNF Railway, formerly Burlington Northern Santa Fe, said the railroad doesn’t have enough space to park cars in Fort Collins. BNSF operates the train that runs down Mason Street.
“You need to have track capacity in the form of siding or some more lightly used tracks in a yard or something where you can tuck those cars,” he said.
In fact, trains along the BNSF line might be longer than usual, because the company is trying to be as efficient as possible.
The company has parked 35,000 cars throughout the U.S. during the past few months. In a good economy, about 200,000 to 220,000 cars would move along BNSF’s system on any given day.
“It’s a significant portion of the number of the cars that would normally be moving on our network,” Forsberg said. “It’s a sad and unfortunate sign of the state of the economy.”
BNSF itself owns less than half of those cars; others are owned by the company whose freight they haul. Others are designed for multi-modal transport, so a semitrailer can pick up a boxcar at a rail yard and drive it up I-25. Demand for those services has also dropped significantly, Forsberg said.
For the first seven weeks of 2009, U.S. railroads reported a 16 percent drop in cumulative carloads, a 15 percent drop in containers and a drop in total volume of about 14.7 percent, compared with the same period in 2008, according to the Association of American Railroads.
Forsberg said longer trains are likely to be a common sight, because they’re more efficient than running additional locomotives.
“It’s just like when in a flush time, you may make several trips to the grocery store during the week if you forgot to get something on the weekend, (but) during tough times, you probably tend to make fewer trips and you make those trips count,” Forsberg said. “We do similar things by working very hard to make sure that we’re running as large a train as we can, to save fuel and cost.”
Most people wouldn’t notice much difference, because the average train is a mile long or longer to begin with, Forsberg said.
Fort Collins sees about half a dozen trains along the BNSF line each day, which is considered light use, Forsberg said.
Three railroads bisect Fort Collins and all are active freight lines. Union Pacific and Great Western Railway share the track that parallels Riverside Avenue, where parked cars and 30-minute delays at some intersections are common.
The line has some sections of siding, which is a second, parallel track, used for switching cars or passing. Occasionally, rail cars will remain parked on the siding for several hours, but often not much longer than that.
Zoe Whyman, community relations manager for the Fort Collins Natural Areas Program, works in a converted farmhouse that sits a few hundred yards from the train tracks. She said she hasn’t noticed an excess of parked cars, but she certainly notices the switching yard.
“I think the biggest inconvenience is having to wait for it on that Lemay (Avenue) crossing. Occasionally we’ll have people be late for meetings because they got ‘trained,’” she said.
Another UP line near Vine Drive has some sidings were cars can be delivered; a steel business nearby receives cars occasionally, Herzig said. There used to be a wye, used to turn trains around, near Lee Martinez Park, but it was abandoned several years ago, he said. There aren’t many other places to park cars at all.
Forsberg said it makes sense that the railroad industry has dropped significantly in the recession; demand for freight haulers is dependent on demand for the freight, and that demand has all but evaporated — with the exception of coal.
“Coal has held up better, but railroads have moved everything from automobiles to computers and TV sets, and from grain to virtually every material that’s used to build a home,” Forsberg said. “Read the headlines in the average newspaper, and I think any of us would be hard-pressed to think of any segment of the economy that has not been impacted by the downturn.”
Unfortunately for ferroequinologists, that includes the trusty iron horse.