High-Speed Rail Buzz Overpowers Daily Chug Of Freight Trains
From the steam engine to visions of a national high-speed rail system, railroads have made their mark on American culture.
In his first term, President Obama promised to create a national system of high-speed rail, though he was scarcely the first politician to have done so. The January 2010 stimulus bill allocated $8 billion for high-speed rail projects, but Congress rejected federal funding for the project.
In his State of the Union address on Tuesday, the president reiterated the goal of having passenger rail rise again.
But these new projects could conflict with the freight systems that go largely undetected for many Americans.
As it stands now, Amtrak pays private companies in the center of the country to run its low-speed passenger trains on freight-rail tracks. But high-speed trains would need their own tracks, depriving the freight-rail system of some of that revenue.
How to build a high-speed system without hurting the freight industry is a problem that has not yet been solved, says professor Christopher Barkan, director of the RailTEC center at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
"The freight railroad network is a great asset to our economy and environment," he says, "and we need to be careful that expansion of passenger service does not harm the viability of that efficient freight-rail transit system we've developed."
Mark Sprague's Illinois farm covers about 3,000 acres near the Mississippi River. He grows mainly corn and soybeans, a bit of winter wheat, and he relies heavily on freight rail to get it around.
"For the past several years, I'd say close to 70 percent of my corn has actually left this area by rail," he says.
Cheap rail is hugely important to Sprague's harvest.
"You can move a ton of freight about 125 miles with a gallon of diesel fuel [by truck]. But by rail, it's more like 500 miles you can move a ton of freight with a gallon of diesel fuel," he says.
“ We have the world's best freight-rail system, but no one sees that. And when they do see it, they're waiting for a mile-long train to go by so they can get to their child's soccer game.