In recent decades, North American railways
have become increasingly reliable and economical providers of freight
transportation service. They’ve expanded beyond their traditional dominance in
hauling bulk goods like coal and grain over long distances and have made major
gains in hauling manufactured goods since the invention of the intermodal
container. Canada’s own CN is often considered the gold standard of freight
railways worldwide. Meanwhile, in Europe, most bulk traffic uses the
continent’s extensive inland waterway network, while lighter goods tend to move
by truck.
Operating a successful freight railway
presents very different challenges from passenger rail. The most important
criteria of success for freight rail are cost, followed distantly by
reliability. As long as their goods arrive within a few hours of promised and the
bill is lower than if they had gone by truck, most shippers are quite pleased.
Low cost is achieved by packing as much as possible into each freight car, and
as many cars onto each train. Over the past several decades, North American
freight railways have invested billions into improving their infrastructure to
increase their competitiveness. Tracks have been upgraded to accommodate
heavier freight cars, new technologies like locomotives distributed throughout
the train have permitted longer trains, and bridges and tunnels have been
raised to permit the stacking of two shipping containers on each car. European
freight cars look like toys compared to their North American counterparts and
double-stacked containers are unheard-of. The average European train is less
than thirty cars long, while more than a hundred cars per train is the rule in
North America.
North American passenger rail operators are
often quite reasonably accused of trying to operate as if they were freight
railways, using freight locomotives, freight track maintenance standards and
freight signalling systems. Europeans make the same mistake in reverse, trying
to emulate their success in passenger rail by emphasizing the importance of
speed and punctuality, even going so far as to propose running freight trains
on high-speed lines. This does nothing to aid in the critical factor of cost
per ton-mile. The limited amount of existing freight rail traffic makes large
investment seem excessive, just as the low ridership of North America’s weak
passenger rail service is used to claim that passenger rail investment is uneconomic.
Of course demand is low when the service is poor; demand won’t get any higher
until the service is improved.
The poor state of European freight rail is
a clear demonstration of the difficulty of operating both a successful
passenger and freight railway. The needs of the two types of trains are simply too
different. In fact, much of what makes European passenger rail so successful
causes serious problems for freight. Heavy North American freight trains wreak
havoc on high-quality track built for high-speed passenger service. Europe’s
extensive track electrification offers enormous benefits, but it also limits
overhead clearance for double-stack containers. High platforms at stations
permit passengers to board without needing to climb stairs, speeding loading
and providing wheelchair accessibility. Unfortunately, they can also restrict
the width of passing freight trains. Some of the problems are simply the result
of history, particularly in Britain where railways were built in the Victorian
age to a very narrow loading gauge. New European lines are built to minimize
curves, a big problem for high-speed passenger trains, but which comes at the cost
of steeper grades that are a nightmare for heavy freight trains. European
railways have been built over decades for passenger rail, not freight, so it
isn’t surprising that European freight railways have struggled.
The needs of passenger and freight railways
are so different that separation is likely the only solution. Of course,
passenger trains and freight trains can still share tracks in many places, especially
on low-density long distance passenger routes, but major passenger corridors
should be separated from major freight routes so that they can be optimized for
their respective users. Fortunately, the advent of intermodal shipping means
that only a core of freight network is required; instead of picking up a few
cars at each shipper, much freight traffic is now delivered by trucks to a
relative handful of intermodal terminals. North America benefits from its
legacy of competing private railways, which produced multiple parallel
corridors that can now be divided between passengers and freight. The Amtrak-owned
Northeast Corridor has almost no freight traffic, as there is a parallel corridor
owned by the freight railways and dedicated to their trains. Europe needs to
embark on the arduous project of clearing a core network for heavy freight cars
and double-stacked intermodal containers, likely after shifting most passenger
trains to new high-speed lines.
Running a decent regional rail system in a
North American city will require the exclusion of most freight trains from
regional rail tracks. Local customers can have freight cars picked up and
dropped off at night, when regional trains are not operating, but through freight
traffic should use dedicated tracks. Especially for high-speed lines, the
problems posed by North American heavy freight on track superelevation, track wear,
platform height, and collision safety are too problematic for extensive track sharing.
(More in future posts on sharing between freight and CityRail) Fortunately, many cities including Toronto have already shifted most of their
freight rail traffic to bypass routes in the suburbs. Toronto’s main intermodal
terminals are in Brampton and Vaughan and there are relatively few directly
served industrial customers in the city centre. The Barrie and Stouffville lines,
and most of the Richmond Hill, Lakeshore and Kitchener lines, have very little
through freight traffic. The Milton line and segments of other routes would
simply require separate tracks for freight traffic, either in the same corridor
or on a new parallel route. Most freight traffic in the GTA would not interact
with CityRail at all, while separating the two track users where they do
interact would not be an insurmountable task.
