for Life Enjoy a rich journey across the American railroading landscape through the lens of Hal Carstens!
Railfan HAL CARSTENS
schedules for the wheat, corn, soybeans and grain shipments. Commissioner Julie Fedorchak says
farmers in her state are “captive shippers with a perishable product and no other rail options,” and who “are being harmed by de- lays on the BNSF network.” Bad for freight: So what do you do about
a region on BNSF’s line (operating through Minnesota, Montana and North Dakota) where the railroad has struck pure black gold in the Bakken shale “fracking” busi- ness, but now has some very unhappy farm- ers in a pursuit that also contributes a no small amount of stability to the economy? That’s a tough trade-off. The railroad is owned by Berkshire Hath-
In this all-new collection, you’ll enjoy more than 100 pages of color photos selected by our editors spanning Hal’s trackside adventures from the last sixty years. From coast to coast, from steam to diesel (and trolleys, too), from main lines to short lines and everything in between!
away, whose CEO/owner is Warren Buffett, arguably America’s most famous investor. In a letter to his company shareholders, Buf- fett boasted of Berkshire’s foresight and profits, including $5 billion this year for such capital improvements as 500 locomo- tives. Appearing at the Fargo STB hearing, North Dakota’s U.S. Senator Heidi Heitkamp (D), applauded that purchase, but then added, “I fear that in a couple of years, it will be inadequate for what we need to move.” Bad for passenger: The other half of “inadequate for what we need to move” in the jam-up on BNSF’s northwest property is the decline in passengers on Amtrak’s Em- pire Builder, a train named for James Hill, the founder of the Great Northern Railway that created and operated that famous run in the early 20th century until
passenger
trains ultimately were handed off to Am- trak in 1971. So what we have here is a case of the
falling (or unsteady) metaphoric dominoes. In order to accommodate the obscenely late freight movements, Amtrak has found it necessary to lengthen its schedule on the Builder (as it is known) to give the train more time to progress from station to station. However, in an effort to solve one problem, the result is (of course) creating a new one. How would you like it if you had to get off
the train at 4:26 a.m. with a load of luggage in a dark city? That’s a problem for Dylan Boyle of the Whitefish, Mont., Convention and Visitors Bureau. But the eastbound trains must do that if they are to enable their cross-country passengers to meet their Chicago connections to trains heading for the east coast. Too bad for Boyle and his efforts to main-
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tain standards for the usually booming tourist business in Whitefish. He complains that while 65,000 passengers patronized the station in 2013, as of May 2014, the num- bers were on course to come in way below that. One would hate to tote up the amount of money lost to the Big Sky state’s tourist and tourist-related businesses. And Montana’s famous Glacier Park, with
its rafting, hiking and fly-fishing in the sum- mer, skiing in the winter and some of the world’s most beautiful scenery whatever the season, including the super gorgeous color changes in the fall, is taking a substantial customer loss. The train stops there, but the onrush of passengers de-training and making a beeline for the check-in cue in the lobby has considerably thinned out. By one count, the Builder had lost 19 per cent of its ridership. On his way out the door, Ross Capon, re-
tiring longtime official of the National Asso- ciation of Railroad Passengers (NARP), ac- cused BNSF of favoring “oil over people.”
That accusation may or may add to the al- ready strained relationship between freight and passenger railroading despite efforts in both camps to untangle the differences. This could be a rough time for the “One Rail” coalition. It might be people vs. people — i.e. the
people who consume energy and grain-relat- ed foods vs. the people who depend on pas- senger trains. But then many use both.
The “Cold Train” (Frozen Out?)
On top of the above, we note the Cold Train, a refrigerated service from the west (Port- land, Ore., and Quincy, Wash.) to the mid- west (Chicago, Ill.) has now shut down after four years in operation. The blame, according to Capital Press, is (again) “rail congestion.” And once again, that in turn gets us right
back to an “unavoidable” slowdown by BNSF and a surge of oil and coal business on the railroad’s northern line late last fall. Re- sult? An abrupt nose-dive from 90 per cent on-time to a measly five per cent. P.S... Note the “surge” this time refers not
just to oil but coal. That would indicate that after all the herculean efforts to shut down the industry for environmental reasons, coal nonetheless remains respectably competi- tive, albeit short of its former status (and not so long ago) as the railroad industry’s biggest customer. Does the recent coal surge portend a fat-
ter bottom line for railroads? Not necessari- ly, says shipper spokesman Terry White- side. “What the coal companies started doing was simply looking for other markets, and they found them in North Korea and China,” he points out. So more coal mined in the U.S. is now headed by rail to the coast for trans-Pacific ships to Asia. Foreign mar- kets replace much of our domestic consumption
Northeast Corridor Work Ahead
There are difficulties on the rails that are more indirectly related to the capacity is- sues. Take the Northeast Corridor, for ex- ample. Amtrak President Joe Boardman has warned that the millions of passengers rid- ing the nearly 100 trains on Amtrak and MARC (Maryland’s commuter service) plus the dozen or so freight runs on Norfolk Southern that depend on the NEC’s Susque- hanna Bridge are in for a squeeze. That 108-year facility requires an up-
grade estimated somewhere in the millions. That is just one example of what Boardman is talking about when he warns that coast- ing along and taking the Northeast Corridor for granted is basically a can-kicking (down the road) exercise. A significant portion of that region’s commerce heavily depends on the bustling rail infrastructure on the NEC
Are Regulatory Improvements the Cure?
All these railroad problems (which acceler- ated late last year) are about to get more scrutiny on Capitol Hill. A bipartisan bill, authored by Senators Jay Rockefeller (D-
W.Va.) and John Thune (R-S.D.) is aimed at making the Surface Transportation Board (STB) more powerful. That agency regulates railroad rates and service issues. As the top lawmakers on the Senate Commerce Com- mittee, Rockefeller and Thune have focused on the Upper Midwest where shipments of grain, automobiles, and coal have disrupted some of Amtrak’s passenger trains. In announcing the planned legislation, Senator Rockefeller noted, “Industries, busi-
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