Hugh Sidey's America

By Hugh Sidey

Out of Newark, New Jersey, and up the west side of the Hudson River, three locomotives lug 63 flatbed freight cars -- almost a mile of Conrail train for United Parcel and the U.S. Postal Service, due in California in 72 hours. Engineer Jim Metzger, 42, flicks his eyes like beacons from digital screens inside his cab to the roadbed and back -- right hand on the throttle controlling 11,400 horses, left hand on the three-tone whistle, two longs, a short and a long at every crossing. Past suburban backyards and friendly waves, through the West Point tunnel, rolling from 35 m.p.h. to 50 m.p.h. beneath the hulking mansions of the great rail barons, visionaries and crooks. This is power, this is excitement, this is the guts of America.

In any given 24 hours, there are 20,000 freight trains moving somewhere in this nation, growling over the plains, clanging through urban switches and laboring up mountain passes, carrying 37% of the stuff the country produces and consumes. Their long tails, sometimes stretching two miles behind, are mostly hidden in the swells and crevices of the land. Their mournful calls are filtered to whispers inside the hermetic minivans and campers off on the highways -- out of sight, out of sound and largely out of the national mind.

Yet the 12 great freight routes, which bear 90% of the business of the 535 surviving railroads, are all profitable these days. They make up a $27.5 billion industry that nets $1.95 billion and can easily absorb the $200 million damage from the Midwest flood that inundated 500 miles of track and caused 1,000 trains to be rerouted. Emerging from a century and a half of wild venture, corruption and the suffocating hand of government, they are a gathering economic force, destined to get stronger in a transport picture dotted with troubled ships, planes and trucks.

The freights make up all but a percent of railroading today, both in dollars and distance. Commodities such as grain, forest products and coal are still the underpinning of the rails, but railways are nibbling more into consumer products such as Nikes and Chevrolets. Rails transport two-thirds of the new cars from factories to dealers and piggyback 6.5 million truck trailers a year.

At the beginning of the century, the rails hauled everything -- people and products. Trucks and cars changed that, and by 1970 the rails had shrunk and were stalled, often indifferent to customers and shifting markets. About 22% of the lines were in bankruptcy, and the whole industry was under threat of nationalization. Trucks grabbed all the new business and, as any motorist knows, a great deal of the highway space.

Canny West Virginia Congressman Harley Staggers pushed the rails into the modern world in 1980 with a deregulation bill that allowed the lines to make quick market adjustments of fees and practices. The rails shrank their lines a third (to 196,081 miles), sweated employment from more than half a million to 280,000, doubled freight-car capacity by stacking containers, curbed damage to products. They hauled 40% more freight with 40% fewer cars, bored out mountain tunnels to take the 20-ft.-high stacks, lowered roadbeds beneath highways and city streets, upgraded beds and bridges and steel rails to the best condition in history, and in the end delivered goods in better shape and for as much as 30% less.

Railroad baron William Henry Vanderbilt's scornful dismissal of rail patrons ("The public be damned"), which has shadowed the industry for more than a century, at last seems laid to rest. "We are customer driven; we tailor-make our service for our customers," says James Hagen, chairman of Conrail, a firm that was fabricated out of the bankrupt remains of dozens of lines, including the legendary New York Central and the Pennsylvania. Conrail lost $412 million in 1977, the first full year after it was birthed. Last year it made $282 million. Hagen and his cohorts in the rail business are tough businessmen, not the plungers and exploiters who made so much of early rail history.

It is not only the rail behemoths that do well. There are 410 short lines, fragments of old roads that have been reconstituted by adventuresome rail buffs and entrepreneurs to hook customers up with the main lines. The Maryland Midland is one. Nestled in the hills below Camp David, the presidential retreat, it serves 34 customers who need coal and raw materials to turn out cement and lumber products. Paul Denton, 51, a refugee from the Baltimore & Ohio in Baltimore, Maryland, is president, commanding a fleet of 200 cars over 67 miles of track. From a tiny office in the quaint 1902 depot in Union Bridge, he listens to the comforting purr of his six locomotives prowling in the valley at 25 m.p.h. Small potatoes in the big picture. But last year the line grossed $2.3 million and made a gratifying $302,000. And Denton echoes the new call of railmen from top to bottom. "I have three concerns," he says. "The customer, the customer, the customer."

The railroads have computerized terminals and yards so that every engine and car is shown on a screen somewhere. Union Pacific dispatcher John Cazahous in Omaha, Nebraska, once spotted 14 runaway freight cars from another line 1,500 miles away in Los Angeles. Within 11 minutes he had alerted California crews, who placed three locomotives in the path to take the crunch. No lives were lost. Locomotives that used to sit for days waiting for loaded cars are now turned around in hours. Empty cars are shuttled like airplanes. Huge "hump" operations like Conrail's Selkirk Yard, near Albany, New York, can sort 3,200 freight cars a day and send out trains to 70 destinations.

In the Chicago offices of the Santa Fe, they will tell you that "the engine of our growth for the next several years" is going to be intermodal traffic, which means the use of truck trailers and special containers that can be easily exchanged between rail and truck chassis. Santa Fe and the giant trucking concern of J.B. Hunt Transport, in Lowell, Arkansas, pioneered the modern strategic alliances between trains and trucks, which used to be mortal enemies in the marketplace. Increased rail efficiency, rising truck costs and as much as 100% driver turnover a year in trucking drove the two industries together. Santa Fe carries nearly 3,000 trailers and containers a week for Hunt, which, with 7,000 truck tractors, is trying to cut long trips in order to regionalize service areas for less wear and tear on drivers. The advantages trucks have over rails are flexibility and time in shorter distances. Hunt spends $200 million a year on alliances with eight rail companies and plans to integrate further by putting 1,000 newly designed containers a month into service to replace its 17,000 older trailers.

Few people these days dispute that rails are better for the environment. They give off only one-tenth to one-third the pollutants emitted by trucks. And the freight-rail's accident-fatality rate (per ton mile) is a third that of the trucking industry's. Virtually all the rail rights-of-way are owned and maintained by the railroads. The battered public highways used by trucks are constantly behind the maintenance curve.

The healthy freights are pumping their good fortune back into the economy. Toward the end of the year, the first eight of 350 new alternating-current (AC) traction locomotives will be delivered to the Burlington Northern. The order, worth $675 million to General Motors and Siemens AG, is the largest for rail equipment in history. Though changing from DC to AC (engine wheels are driven by electric motors that take current generated by the locomotives' diesels) is not sexy science, the improved power and pull mean three of these 4,000-h.p. monsters can do the work of five older ones.

All that is new in the great freights is rooted in what is old. The romance of railroading is intact. Richard Davidson, U.P.'s chairman, sits in his 12th- floor office above Omaha's Dodge Street, named for engineer Grenville Dodge, who drove the original line west. Davidson, once an 18-year-old brakeman on the Missouri Pacific, views the Missouri River bluffs where Abraham Lincoln stood and pointed to the spot where the Union Pacific would begin in 1862. Through Davidson's window come the faint calls of trains hustling along the valley. "I still get emotional when I get on a locomotive and listen to those turbochargers kick in," he says.

Back east, out of the hills of West Virginia and Virginia, endless strings of coal hoppers of the Norfolk Southern and CSX roll toward the gargantuan coastal terminals where the cars are grabbed and rolled upside down, spilling their cargoes onto belts that pour the coal into ship holds. Those trains travel on lines first plotted and built to rush the troops of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson into Civil War battles. Confederate General William Mahone, an engineering genius, felled trees so skillfully in Virginia's Great Dismal Swamp before the war that today's trains still rush over the enduring logs.

Railroad talk is Brobdingnagian by nature. The lines bind every corner of America and are pushing increasingly into Mexico and Canada as trade builds. Those 12 top freight lines alone own 1,189,660 cars and 18,964 locomotives, which together could make a train that would stretch halfway around the globe.

All railroad people, from corporate towers to the yards, seem to have sniffed the new promise. Deloyt Young, manager of the world's largest freight yard, U.P.'s Bailey Yard in North Platte, Nebraska, knows every inch of his eight-mile domain, a moving mosaic of thousands of cars and engines. It is hard by the old ranch where Buffalo Bill Cody assembled his Wild West show (complete with conquered Sioux Chief Sitting Bull) and sent it out on tour aboard U.P. trains. "I don't need an economist to tell me when things are good or bad," Young says as he watches for the flash of headlights over the windswept horizons, signaling long freights coming from east and west. If Young records more than 100 trains a day, as he has lately, he knows commerce is getting better someplace. The American freight rails have the capacity to carry three or four times the freight they carry today. That is an invitation to great adventure in this capitalistic society.