US Rail System: Rail Companies and GE Locomotives

choi

Zack O’Malley Greenburg, Joann Muller and Christopher Helman, America’s Second Rail Boom. The relic of the 19th century will become the most important logistics system of the 21st century–making billions for Warren Buffett and others. All aboard!  Forbes, Feb 10, 2014.
www.forbes.com/sites/joannmuller ... s-second-rail-boom/

Quote:

“more and more freight traffic has moved from roads to rails, where trains can move one ton of goods about 500 miles on a single gallon of fuel. * * * The [rail] industry, so recently an aging also-ran in the age of superhighways, is now a fountain of superlative figures * * * The most impressive fact of all is that the boom has been underwritten by industry, with no cost to taxpayers. That’s annual infrastructure spending of $20 billion [] Contrast that to America’s highways, which receive $40 billion a year in federal subsidies.

"America’s second great rail boom started with tragedy [in September 2008 a commuter train blew through a red light and rammed head-on into a Union Pacific freight train]. The following month Congress passed the Rail Safety Improvement Act of 2008, requiring the country’s major railroads to fund, build and implement a new, safer ‘Positive Train Control’ system by the end of 2015 [GPS and so on] * * * UP [Union Pacific] alone consumed 1.2 billion gallons of fuel that year–second only to the US Navy * * * the beefed-up train control system–more likely to be completed, Congress willing, in 2020–has been revolutionizing freight hauling in America, allowing the railroads to pinpoint a locomotive’s location within one yard (and remotely stop it if an engineer ignores a signal). Safer, yes, but also more [fuel] efficient

“Diesel is once again edging toward $4 a gallon * * * and manufacturers are turning to rail for shorter and shorter shipping jobs [because rail is more efficient than trucks in diesel consumption]. Less than a decade ago diesel prices were so low that manufacturers rarely considered rail for shipments of less than 1,000 miles. Now they’re ditching trucks in favor of trains for jobs as short as 500 miles.

“Ironically, the biggest growth area for the rail industry is oil itself. The Great American Energy Boom has been a boon for the railroads, especially when the gushers are found in spots uncrossed by pipelines, like the Bakken formation of North Dakota. EOG Resources contracted the first crude oil train out of the Bakken in 2009. Now BNSF, for one, is moving 600,000 barrels of oil per day (enough oil, once refined, to fill up the gas tanks of 1.35 million cars), up from 54,000 barrels in 2010. * * * BNSF now has 10,000 tanker cars dedicated to moving oil. ‘We’re on the path to 1 million barrels per day on our railroad,’ says BNSF Chairman Matt Rose. The growth ‘is like nothing I’ve seen in my career.’  It’s not just crude the railroads are shipping. For every new oil or gas well that gets drilled and fracked, the oil companies haul in 40 railcars of materials [for logistics].

“"National Transportation Safety Board investigated the safety of moving Bakken crude by rail. It determined that many railcars now moving Bakken oil are too old and need to be replaced or retrofitted to meet new safety standards. * * * Who will benefit from that replacement cycle? Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, for one. Even before acquiring BNSF, Berkshire in 2007 bought Union Tank Cars.

“Today’s diesel locomotives are a lot cleaner than those 19th-century coal-fired steam engines, but they’re still not clean enough. * * * Now GE is focused on fuel, rolling out a new line of locomotives that can operate on liquefied natural gas and reap up to 50% savings over diesel * * * That’s critical, since rival over-the-road heavy truck fleets are shifting to cheaper natural gas, too.

“In recent years railroads have been using this process to build longer and longer trains, [Union Pacific’s chief information officer Lynden] Tennison says, pushing lengths from 10,000 feet to as much as 15,000 feet in some cases, thereby boosting fuel efficiency and cutting crew costs. In 2010 Union Pacific even tested a double-stacked 18,000-foot train


Note:
(1) The legend to photo 1 (“Union Pacific’s Bailey Yard: Rail is on a roll.”) does not appear in print, which is odd.
(2) In print but not online, there is a map of American continent, displaying rail owned by each rail company and headlined “Running the Rails.”
(a) “BNSF (SUBSIDIARY OF BRK.A)”

BRK.A is the ticker symbol
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ticker_symbol(section 2.3 United States)
for Berkshire Hathaway Inc.

(b) Canadian National Railway
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_National_Railway
(headquartered in Montreal, Quebec; CN is the largest railway in Canada, in terms of both revenue and the physical size of its rail network; "incorporated [in] 1919, comprising several railways that had become bankrupt and fallen into federal government hands, along with some railways already owned by the government. [In] 1995, the [Canada] federal government privatized CN"/ Now primarily a freight railway)
(c) Canadian Pacific
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Pacific_Railway
(Headquarters Calgary, Alberta; The railway was originally built between Eastern Canada and British Columbia between 1881 and 1885), fulfilling a promise extended to British Columbia when it entered Confederation in 1871)

From the beginning, CP was private yet subsidized heavily by Canada.
(d) Kansas City Southern Railway
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kansas_City_Southern_Railway
(is the smallest and second-oldest [since 1887; after Union Pacific] Class I railroad company still in operation); Headquarters Kansas City, Missouri)
(e) Norfolk Southern Railway
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norfolk_Southern_Railway
(Headquarters Norfolk, Virginia; formed in 1982 through mergers)
(f) Union Pacific Railroad
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_Pacific_Railroad (1862- ; headquartered in Omaha, Nebraska)

(3) “in dusty North Platte [air distance 250 miles west of Omaha], Nebr, Tony Orr stands at the center of the world’s largest freight rail yard * * * He’s the general superintendent of Union Pacific’s Bailey Yard–at 2,850 acres, it’s three times the size of New York’s Central Park and handles 10,000 train cars per day on 315 miles of track [in the Yard].

Bailey Yard
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bailey_Yard
(The yard is named after former Union Pacific president Edd H Bailey)

(4) “the bottom fell out of the economy” in the Great Recession

bottom drops out, the:
"Also, the bottom falls out .  A collapse occurs, as in <The bottom dropped out of the steel market>, or <When they lost the game, the bottom fell out of their hopes to make the playoffs>. This term alludes to collapsing deeper than the very lowest point, or bottom. [First half of 1600s]"
Christine Ammer, The American Heritage® Dictionary of Idioms. Houghton Mifflin, 1997.
dictionary.reference.com/browse/bottom+drops+out,+the

(5) EOG Resources
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EOG_Resources
(Enron Oil and Gas became independent from Enron [bankrupt in 2001] in 1999, and changed its named to EOG Resources, Inc [also in 1999])
(6) tank car
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tank_car

(7) “The 12-cylinder engines are brought in from GE’s [Fort Worth, Texas] plant in Grove City, Pa; the alternators come from the Erie factory; the traction-motor combos from a GE facility in Mexico. These 220-ton rolling power plants [ie, locomotives] are majestic.”
(a) For “12-cylinder engines,” see multi-cylinder engine
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-cylinder_engine
(section 1.8 Twelve-cylinder engines)
(b) Grove City, Pennsylvania
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grove_City,_Pennsylvania
(approximately 50 miles (80 km) north of Pittsburgh)
(c) alternator
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternator

(8) “The data come from GPS signals, track-topography maps and sensors embedded in the locomotive. All of which gets fed into complex train-handling algorithms. The [latest freight] train is not fully automated like some passenger rail systems (parts of the Paris Metro, for example); the conductor remains in control.”

Paris Métro
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Métro
has two fully automated lines Line 14 (built in 1998, automated from the beginning), and Line 1 (as indicated by its name, was the first one to open in 1900; converted from a manually driven operation to a fully automated operation (completed in 2011)).