Back on Track for the Future

Midnight’s come and gone, and through the black night Norfolk Southern’s Train 215 out of Chicago highballs on toward Florida, a mile-long queue of double-stacked containers and piggybacked trailers. Bell clanging, whistle wailing, it glides on and on past sleeping towns and darkened factories and empty highways.

Outside Gary, engineer Les Blauvelt had dimmed his interior lights. “Don’t want to be a target,” he had said. “They’ve shot at my engine here. Stoned it too.” He had focused down the line, on the lookout for old refrigerators and abandoned cars that bandits in Gary sometimes pile on tracks in an attempt to derail a freight. But tonight, nothing.

Blauvelt eases the throttle forward a notch. Train 215 gathers speed.

And now Blauvelt is rumbling southward again, the power of the world at his fingertips: 7,000 horses in back-to-back engines hauling a train so long that, from a dead standstill, the locomotive covers 60 feet before the rear car moves an inch.

Blauvelt, 35, whose grandfather ran iron horses in the days of steam, pours a cup of coffee from his thermos. Times, he says, are good: Yesterday he received a performance bonus; work is plentiful; there’s labor peace; his wife has a new car. “The rail business is so good now it’s unbelievable,” he says. “People who knew the mess freight was in 20 years ago wouldn’t even recognize what’s happening.”

On any given day, 20,000 trains like Norfolk Southern’s daily 215 roll through America, carrying the goods the nation produces and consumes. Their journey over 180,000 miles of track represents one of the great comebacks in U.S. industry. The battered, endangered train companies of a generation ago have remade themselves--streamlining operations, reinvesting in rails and cars, and engaging in some huge mergers-- to form the world’s most efficient and profitable freight rail system.

Between 1983 and 1993, productivity in the industry jumped 157%. At the same time, revenue increased 32% and rates fell 40%. Today, with microchips and lasers replacing oil lanterns and telegraph wires, trains are carrying 40% of the nation’s freight tonnage, and virtually all of the 500-plus surviving U.S. railroads are making money.

“In terms of heavy freight movement, we set the standard for the world these days,” said William Withuhn, the Smithsonian Institution’s curator of transportation. “But in the dark days, in the early ‘70s, the railroads were slated for some kind of national takeover without changes in the way they could do business. There was even talk of letting everyone go bankrupt and selling everything at a fire sale.”

Back in 1919, a convoy of trucks had set off from San Francisco to Washington, D.C. Although the journey took three months, at an average speed of 6 mph, the message was clear: With better roads, trucks could compete with trains, which then moved everything and everybody everywhere. Within half a century, the prophecy had come true.

Trucks swept up the most expensive cargo, leaving trains with a firm grip on only bulk loads like coal and grain, and reducing their share of total freight hauling revenue to 13%, where it remains. The nation’s trains, losing passengers due to bad service and freight due to high rates, indifference and inefficiency, entered an era of steep decline.

Truck Competition Runs Over Industry

More than one-fifth of the train companies were in bankruptcy in 1970. The government poured billions of dollars into the moribund Penn Central and five other lines to replace antiquated track and rolling stock. The term “standing derailment” entered the trainman’s vocabulary, a benign way of describing what happened when dilapidated track beds gave way and stationary trains fell over.

“This is Mintone, the egg capital of the world. That’s a little trivia for you,” Blauvelt says. Train No. 215, devouring eight gallons of diesel fuel a mile, is closing in on Fort Wayne, Ind. It lumbers up an ascent, over a track bed as smooth as ice, hissing and groaning, the million-dollar General Motors locomotive leading a parade of 97 cars that stretch for 6,000 feet. Tonight a crew of two--Blauvelt and his conductor, Larry Trigg--is doing the work of nearly a hundred truck drivers.

Ahead, flashing barricades swing down at road crossings, and color-coded signals--both computer-controlled from Norfolk Southern’s Fort Wayne dispatch center--give the engineer instructions on entering the next “block.” Scanners along the track check the wheels of each passing car, and an automated voice crackles over Blauvelt’s radio, “No defects.” A box the size of a briefcase attached to the last car beams a signal to the console in his cab, giving him readings on air pressure in the brake system.

Each year, about 500 motorists are killed and 2,000 injured in accidents at the nation’s 280,000 highway-rail crossings. The majority of the accidents occur when the train is traveling at less than 30 mph. And last year a rash of collisions and derailments involving only trains raised questions about rail safety. Some critics began to wonder whether all the staff reductions and reliance on new technology might be at fault.

But all types of collisions involving trains, measured in number of rail miles traveled, have dropped nearly 300% since 1978 in the wake of improved safety technology. The most common cause of accidents is human error, sometimes the result of fatigue as some shifts last 12 hours.

What enabled trains to become streamlined, high-tech, market-driven competitors was the Staggers Rail Act of 1980, an example of government policy gone right. It deregulated the industry, allowing companies to make quick adjustments to service, cut special deals for top customers and shed unprofitable lines. Freed to compete, the rails began investing.

They blasted out mountain tunnels to handle 20-foot-high, double-stacked containers. They lowered roadbeds beneath city streets, bought new equipment, upgraded beds to their best condition in history, laid new track at $1 million a mile.

They went on a merger binge, combining such famous names as the Burlington Northern with the Santa Fe, and the Union Pacific with the Southern Pacific. They also cut rail mileage by a third, shed 268,000 workers (60% of the work force) and began arriving at destinations within the appointed hour instead of the promised week. Only an echo remained of railroad magnate William Henry Vanderbilt’s 19th century business philosophy: “The public be damned.”

America has had a romance with the rails ever since the nation’s first chartered line, the Baltimore & Ohio, started making the 14-mile run between Baltimore and Ellicott’s Mills in 1830. A ticket cost 12 cents. By 1887, the United States was adding 13,000 miles of new track a year, and the railroads--which had united East and West, helped open the frontier and turned towns into cities--had come to be viewed as being as much of a national symbol as the bald eagle. Their work force swelled to 2 million.

It was a tough, dangerous job in which accidents took the lives of as many as 2,500 workers a year. But those John Henry days are gone, along with cabooses, brakemen and flagmen.

Computers Boost Speed and Accuracy

Nowadays, a rail yard is a beehive of computer-driven loading and unloading. Each trailer or container brought in by truck becomes an icon on the load planner’s screen. Dragging the icons across his computer screen, the planner drops them onto specific cars to make up a train. His design travels by computer to the yards, where crane operators, studying their own computer screens, swing giant containers overhead like bales of hay, setting each gently onto the rolling stock.

“This is the 21st century,” said Dan Schneider, Norfolk Southern’s load planner in Chicago. The phone by his computer rings. There’s a delay loading 215: One trailer bound for Atlanta seems to be lost. Schneider calls up his tracking system and says: “It’s in Knoxville, right where it’s supposed to be. Let’s finish up 215 and get it out of here on time.”

Ten hours later, at Norfolk Southern’s dispatch center in Fort Wayne, controller Scott Gavin is at his console as Train 215 nears Cincinnati just before sunrise, a new crew now aboard. He is talking to engineer Tim Melcher over the radio, putting trains on sidings, setting computerized switches and signals, clearing passage for high-priority freights, thinking, like a chess player, five or six moves ahead to consider how safety and schedules could be affected by this decision or that.

On the semicircular reverse projector screen that wraps around the wall in front of Gavin and four other controllers is a maze of lines and flashing symbols, representing the traffic on 1,800 miles of track between Chicago and Buffalo, N.Y. The room is dim, like that of an airport control tower, and in these nighttime hours when the rails are busiest and trains are backed up trying to get in and out of various yards, dispatchers are apt to work straight through their shift without even a coffee break.

“It wasn’t too long ago all this was done with pencils on big sheets of paper,” said Charlie Wise, who runs the dispatch center. “But we tell the computers what to do, not the other way around. It’s impossible to put together a signaled crash. The system is fail-proof.”

The terrain north of Cincinnati rolls and dips, and as 215’s locomotive loses speed climbing a gradual ascent, the rear cars a mile back are accelerating coming down a hill. To keep the train flowing smoothly--sudden jerks and bangs can damage goods and even cause derailments--engineer Melcher works the throttle and brakes in concert, controlling the slack between cars. He knows every crossing and twist that’s ahead over 500 miles of track because, like a riverboat captain hauling barges on the Mississippi, anticipation is critical: At 60 mph, the top speed Norfolk Southern allows, his train can take several miles to come to a controlled stop.

“It’s just something you slowly learn, and after a while, it’s like driving a car,” says Melcher, 22, who once wanted to be an airline pilot. “You plan ahead and know what you’re going to have to do five miles down the track. If you can do that, you don’t have to be smart to run a train. You just need common sense.”

More Improvements Are Around the Bend

Senior trainmen can earn $90,000 a year with overtime, and Melcher figures he’s got a future with Norfolk Southern. He’s probably right.

Trucks and trains--once mortal enemies--have formed a profitable alliance to move the nation’s freight. New locomotives twice as powerful as existing ones are coming on line. Better brakes, controlled by electronic signal and satellite tracking systems in each engine, are around the corner.

It all portends longer trains, faster schedules, more profitability and a degree of rail sophistication that would have dazzled Casey Jones.

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Rails on the Rise

Railroads have staged a comeback after decades of decline.

Percent of nation’s freight carried by rail

Average trip length (in miles)

Leading commodities:

Coal

Chemicals

Farm products

Motor vehicles

Nonmetal minerals

Lumber

*

Cars per train

1929: 48

1955: 66

1980: 68

1994: 65