Latest / Thinking Transportation: Engaging Conversations about Transportation Innovations / Long Trains Runnin': How Freight Trains Impact U.S. Communities According to a Recently Released Study Requested by Congress

Transcript

Long Trains Runnin': How Freight Trains Impact U.S. Communities According to a Recently Released Study Requested by Congress · Thinking Transportation: Engaging Conversations about Transportation Innovations

• 0:15
  Allan Rutter: Howdy, everyone. Welcome to Thinking Transportation, conversations about how we get ourselves and the stuff we need from one place to another. I'm Allan Rutter with the Texas A&M Transportation Institute. Now, it's hard for our younger listeners to conceive of this, but when I was coming of age in Austin in the early 70s, the only way for me and my friends to listen to popular music was either by buying a record--which of course are now coming back in vogue--or by listening to AM radio. One of the prominent groups I heard on KTSA out of San Antonio was The Doobie Brothers, a group formed in 1970 in San Jose, California. Two big singles came out of their 1973 album, The Captain and Me: the songs "China Grove" and "Long Train Runnin'." Today, long trains are running much more frequently and with greater effects. We are joined today by David Willhauer, senior program officer with the Transportation Research Board, who is the project manager for a congressionally requested study from the National Academies on the impacts of trains longer than 7,500 feet. I was one of the 12 members of the consensus study panel that worked on the report. So, it's a double pleasure to talk about this report after two years of work. Dave, welcome to Thinking Transportation.
• 1:36
  David Willhauer: Thanks, Al, for having me on.
• 1:39
  Allan Rutter: So, David, we're recording this episode just days after the release of the report titled "Long Freight Trains: Ensuring Safe Operations, Mitigating Adverse Impacts." Now, we'll talk about this report, but first tell our listeners a short version of your journey that brought you to the Transportation Research Board to manage this and other reports.
• 2:02
  David Willhauer: I just got hired by the Transportation Research Board, and this study was being proposed and I have a freight and rail background. So, it was a logical fit to have me work on this study. Congress wanted them to stand up a committee through the National Academies on the impacts of trains longer than 7,500 feet. And our charge was to put that committee together and to develop a report and make recommendations back to Congress. That's essentially what consensus and advisory studies are. And, so, Congress asked the Federal Railroad Administration to contract with our agency, and that's how it got started.
• 2:41
  Allan Rutter: So now you mentioned "consensus study." What does that term mean to the National Academies?
• 2:48
  David Willhauer: So, a consensus study is a study that's organized in order to have a diverse group of experts work together and evaluate recommendations to reach consensus on a particular topic. Committee members are briefed by experts of all kinds to learn about the topic and deliberate with these professionals in the early stages of the study. And then they start to meet in closed sessions to then deliberate with each other and understand the statement of task and have discussions about how to respond to the statement of task and develop recommendations in the report. And naturally, a diverse group of experts don't always agree on everything. So, there's a healthy debate that occurs along the way, and we circle back with experts when we have questions about certain aspects of the study. The reason these are conducted in closed session is because, if we revealed any preliminary findings along the way, it wouldn't be fair to the process because committee members need to be free to change their minds and also deliberate with their colleagues. The goal is to reach consensus on recommendations and present those to the sponsor and to Congress.
• 4:03
  Allan Rutter: So "consensus" is consensus of the committee members, not consensus of an industry as a whole?
• 4:08
  David Willhauer: Yes.
• 4:09
  Allan Rutter: So, you've spoken about a committee. Who's on that committee, other than me, and how is it created?
• 4:17
  David Willhauer: So, the way we create these committees is to ensure that we have a diverse background of representation from railroad experts. The statement of task also had some pretty technical information about train operations work . So, we reached out to former railroad professionals. We're not able to enlist members who are currently employed by our railroad or the railroad industry, and, therefore, we have to usually seek out railroad professionals who may be retired or no longer working for a railroad. And then, because highway rail -grade crossings were a part of the statement of task , we wanted to reach out to state municipal officials who have experience with highway rail -grade crossings. And we wanted perspectives from federal, state agencies. The federal agency that sponsored the study was the Federal Railroad Administration. So, because they were the sponsor, they couldn't be on the committee, but we have state representation, and we also want diverse representation from different parts of the United States and individuals with diverse backgrounds.
• 5:27
  Allan Rutter: And my initial reaction was a little bit like Groucho Marx, who once resigned from a Hollywood club by telegram saying, "I don't wanna belong to any club who would accept me as a member." But how did you and the committee go about doing their work? Talk a little bit about who the committee consulted.
• 5:45
  David Willhauer: Our first audience that we felt would be the most important to understand long-train operation was, of course, the Class I railroads that operate long trains. And so, we invited all six Class I railroads to present to the committee, and we asked them specifically to talk about their long-train operations, to talk about how they handle grade crossings, blocked crossings, and occupied crossings, and how they handle interactions with passenger rail service. And so we gave them an agenda, if you will, to present to us--so it would be a consistent message from all the railroads. And, in addition to the railroad operations, we heard from the Association of American Railroads and from labor union representative national groups representing locomotives, engineer dispatchers, and train car men to understand how rail workers work with long trains and some of the challenges they encounter operating long trains and dispatching long trains and, in particular, inspecting long trains, particularly in the field. And we heard from shipping organizations to understand how shippers relate to long trains. We assembled a grade-crossing panel of representatives from the Federal Railroad Administration, the Federal Highway Administration, from a state development commission, and local elected officials to understand how grade crossings impact their communities. And then in particular, we thought it would be helpful to go to Chicago, the epicenter of long-train operations within the United States and be up close and personal what the belt railway looks like operating manifest trains in and out of Chicago every day. And while we visited Chicago, we heard from local officials, we heard from representatives from the Metropolitan Planning Organization in Chicago and learned quite a bit about that operation.
• 7:40
  Allan Rutter: So, about how long did that information development process start before the report actually starts taking shape ?
• 7:48
  David Willhauer: So, we spent the fall pulling the committee together in 2022, and then the first half of 2023 was really dedicated to what we call the discovery process--information gathering, factfinding. We asked for some data from the railroads. We collected data from publicly available sources, we conducted a literature review and we studied all that we could about long-train operations. And because long trains require connecting cars with multiple locomotives in the trade , there's a lot of technology that's used to operate long trains. And that technology has gotten quite sophisticated over the years with the development of communication systems, engineering assist systems to allow the engineers to control the train, electronics that control dynamic braking as well as throttle controls. So, we dedicated a whole meeting to technology and invited representatives from the major brake companies that work with the railroads and with technology experts to understand how those systems work and to ask questions about what happens when an engineer has to drive the trains themselves. One of the things I learned from this study is that the engineering assist systems are quite sophisticated, and they operate the train remotely, and engineers are standing by in case the system has to turn the operation back over to the engineer. So, that's quite a dynamic process of operating these trains .
• 9:19
  Allan Rutter: About how long did the report preparation take place and how were committee members involved?
• 9:25
  David Willhauer: We prepared the report along the way, if you will. We did a lot of writing in the discovery process to understand some of these concepts, and we learned that we needed to basically develop a chapter dedicated to technology, a chapter dedicated to railroad operations and safety, and a chapter dedicated to some of the public impacts of long trains, like the highway rail-grade crossing issue conflict with passenger rail operations. And then, finally, there was a charge for us to also understand the impacts of greenhouse gas emission. So we had an environmental chapter as well. So these chapters started to be developed over the summer and fall of 2023. And it wasn't until the end of 2023 that we really had the makings of the draft report assembled.
• 10:13
  Allan Rutter: So now, describe for our listeners the independent review process that the National Academies does for this kind of study.
• 10:22
  David Willhauer: Once the report is put together in draft form, we assemble another panel of independent reviewers. We have a little bit more flexibility in who we select to review the report because an independent committee can include representatives who are either working with a railroad or from a railroad organization. And since we have both US and Canadian railroads, we wanted to make sure we had both US and Canadian committee members and, similarly, US and Canadian reviewers. So, we reached out and asked people to review the report over about a three-week timeframe. And so, these reviewers look critically at the report and make comments about the veracity of the data, about the accuracy of the report, about how well it's written, about whether our concepts were thought through. And some of our analysis required a methodology that, when we looked at long-train operations, we looked at some publicly available data and did some analysis that required review. And, in the end, they provide their comments, and we review all those comments very carefully and respond to all of them. So it's a very rigorous process.
• 11:39
  Allan Rutter: Yeah, it surprised me being on the inside of this, just how rigorous that was and the extent to which the committee members themselves were engaged in report production. I think what it results in is--in the terms of a document--one, it's a little fuller. There's a lot more to it. Two, it's distinct from sponsored research, particularly if it's done by a consulting firm on behalf of a company. There's a lot more internal review process to it. So once the product is out there, there's a lot more background to it.
• 12:15
  David Willhauer: Well , that's why Congress established the National Academies to do these consensus studies in the first place. Congress was looking for a non-political independent entity that could assemble a group of experts to look at a particular problem and come up with a solution. There were a series of long-train derailments that occurred during the course of the study, most notably the derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, brought a lot of attention to the topic of long-train operations, and there were several other incidents that we reviewed that were the same makeup of long-train operations and particularly "manifest trains"--the trains that have different size cars and different length cars that are operating from yard to yard across the country--picking up and dropping off cars along the way. Those trains in particular have unique challenges in operating over undulating terrain with multiple locomotives spread throughout the [length] to control the train . And we looked in particular at those types of operations.
• 13:17
  Allan Rutter: Well, that's a good segue to talk about the report itself, and we'll talk a little more about the distinctions between the kinds of trains. First, is there a definition of what a long train is?
• 13:29
  David Willhauer: Well, that's a good question because that's in our charge, right? Our charge was to look at trains that were impacted --trains that were 7,500 feet--and we reviewed a study that was done by the Federal Railroad Administration on the stakeholder perception of long trains. And in that study, they could find no uniform definition of what constitutes a "long train." So the 7,500 feet comes from the Association of American Railroads' ( AAR) standard of a 150-car test rack with 50 feet per car that they use to test brakes in Rebo , Colorado. And we also discovered that trains were actually being operated that were much longer than that. And we tried to get some sense of how many of these types of trains were in operation around the US and Canada. But we learned the more we got into it that, trains can be controlled over that number if you have the right number of distributed power locomotives and you use proper train handling and trend makeup techniques. And so we didn't choose in the end to recommend limiting train length in our study.
• 14:41
  Allan Rutter: Which brings up a question that's come up when I've discussed the report. Are long trains safe or unsafe, or do we know anything about that?
• 14:52
  David Willhauer: Well, long trains are operated with more and more cars and more and more locomotives. And if they're assembled correctly and they're operated correctly, and when they pick up and drop off cars, they continue to maintain the same rules of making up their trains, they can be operated safely. But when we looked into the derailment data, that there was a preponderance of derailments that were associated with longer trains when it came to train makeup and handling and how engineers are operating those trains.
• 15:26
  Allan Rutter: That gets me into a sort of distinct question. One of the things the report came to a conclusion on, particularly about long-train operations, is there's a distinction between what's called a "unit train" and a "manifest train." Would you describe for our listeners what the differences are?
• 15:44
  David Willhauer: Well, a "unit train" operates from an origin to a destination without stopping, with a set number of cars that are the same size and the same weight. So, a coal train or a lumber train or a crude oil train would be considered a unit train because it operates from one part of the country to another without stopping and dropping off or picking up any additional cars. Whereas, a "manifest train" differs in that it's made up of a variety of cars, a variety of weights and sizes, and they stop from yard to yard along their journey and pick up and drop off cars. So the train makeup changes each time they pick up and set out more cars. And then an "intermodal train" has intermodal containers on cars that are also different weights and different sizes, but they're primarily intermodal containers as opposed to "general frame ." So, those are the three types of long train .
• 16:46
  Allan Rutter: So, in a statement reacting to the report, the Association of American Railroads stated that "any effort to impose a prescriptive train-length limit would be both irresponsible and unfounded." I'm not hearing the study had actually recommended any length limits.
• 17:04
  David Willhauer: That's correct. We didn't recommend any train length, nor did we say that trains should be limited in their length; but they need to be part of the railroad's risk reduction program because they inherently have operating challenges because of their length that require proper placement of cars, proper train handling, and training the locomotive engineers to operate long trains. And those are the things we focused on because those are the things that inherently create an additional risk of operations. And so rather than focusing on the length, we focused on ensuring that safe operations were still maintained regardless of train length; that they would train engineers to be able to control these multiple locomotives using the engineer assist programs; and the conductors to be able to keep track of their cargoes and respond to train emergency as they occur underway . If a train breaks apart underway , for example, and they have to replace a knuckle or stop the train and make some repairs, that they can do so safely and be able to reassemble the train and get to their destination safely.
• 18:19
  Allan Rutter: I think one of the interesting things about having Canadian representation on our report was that their safety board and the people who keep an eye on what's going on in railroads in Canada, they had an awful lot of background on this sort of safety management-system risk reduction, which is a lot of the recommendations that the committee made about manifest train operations need to be considered within this framework. Talk a little bit about how the committee made its recommendations around risk production and safety management systems.
• 18:56
  David Willhauer: Well, you're right in that the Canadian railroads were the first to begin operating longer trains back in 2018, 2019 timeframe. And as they were operating longer trains, they recognized that they needed to build longer sidings. They needed to enhance their braking systems, particularly in colder temperatures because as you increase the length of the train, it makes it more challenging to make sure that the air that controls the air brakes , the air is propagated through the length of the train. The longer the train, the longer distance that the air has to propagate through the train, and in cold temperatures that can be even harder to operate air brakes . And so Canadian railroads came up with the ability to sometimes put dedicated brake cars together that had compressors in those cars to operate trains if they got longer. And as they got longer, they recognized that they needed to embrace the safety management system in responding to their Rail Safety Act. And what they ended up doing is developing what I would call a robust safety management system that recognized the need to study the risks of additional train length on operations in the US. The FRA also responded by developing a safety management system in the form of a risk-reduction program, but it was a more streamlined version and didn't initially recognize the same requirements for quantitative risk analysis until much later. And we believe that railroads like other high-risk industries--such as offshore oil and gas operation, pipeline operations, airline operations--should really embrace a full-fledged safety management system that takes into consideration risk factors and develops quantitative risk assessments to make sure that these operations are done safely. And so that was an important part of our recommendation, and we made some suggestions about what elements should go into such a risk-reduction plan for controlling long trains with proper makeup , proper train handling, and recognizing that these would be important considerations in their claims .
• 21:18
  Allan Rutter: What else did the committee have to say about factors like communication systems?
• 21:23
  David Willhauer: So, all trains require communication between crew members, the locomotive engineer has to communicate to the conductor when they're pushing back into a yard and picking up cars. And, initially these were done with hand signals and over the years they've been switching to radio operations with handheld radios. And as the train length increases, the reception of those radios became more and more difficult. And we believe that's something that needs to be addressed as well. It's important that they are able to communicate with each other.
• 21:56
  Allan Rutter: One of the things our listeners can probably appreciate is, if you've got a train that's a mile and a half long and it's coming in and out of a siding or going into a switch and the engineer is in the cab controlling the train and the conductor is at the back of the train, making sure that the switching is done right... If you're a mile and a half away, you gotta make sure that your radios work.
• 22:20
  David Willhauer: Exactly. The distributed power locomotives in the train are a way to serve as repeaters to get the signal through the train operations. But radio communication is important too. And some railroads are also working to ensure that repeaters are used as they're trying to make sure that radio communication is being done correctly. And we , we think there's some opportunity for improvement there as well.
• 22:47
  Allan Rutter: I think one of the things I remember hearing is that United States is a pretty large place, and long trains that are operating--say in Arizona and Nevada, relatively flat territory straight, not a whole lot of geographic differences. That's different than a long train operating in Ohio or Pennsylvania over the Appalachians, which is lots of hills. I mean, it's not the Rockies, but you've got some undulating grades there that you could have a train where the engineer is on one hill, and his train is going up and down at least another two hills.
• 23:25
  David Willhauer: That's right. And the locomotives have to be able to communicate with each other as well. And they're designed to be able to operate either in synchronization or asynchronization so that there's ways to control the train. And then, when those trains have to be inspected, it's clear that the longer the train, the more distance that crew members have to travel to inspect those trains. And so that means they sometimes have to walk the length of the train. And that has increased the time it takes to inspect trains.
• 23:55
  Allan Rutter: Well, it also seems to have some impacts on length of the trains and how they come through crossings, which would be my next subject, the blocking of crossings. Was the committee able to reach any conclusions about the connection between train length and frequency and duration of crossing blockage?
• 24:13
  David Willhauer: No. The data is really not available to do so, and we learned very quickly that even though there's some parts of the country where there are really chronic examples of block crossings such as Houston and Chicago and areas near large rail yards, it can be any length train that blocks a crossing. It can be a short train or a long train. We found examples all around the country where it was really a function of the geography of the town and how the railroads operated in their yards in those towns that block certain crossings. And it's development occurring across the United States. More and more development comes around rail yards, and we find the subdivisions of communities being built adjacent to rail operations, and it has an increasing impact on how these crossings get blocked. And when it comes to responding to emergencies , some towns can be bifurcated, completely by a stopped train that would prevent first responders from getting from one side of the town to the other. Some towns have invested in technologies to actually provide a monitoring system so that they can alert both motorists and first responders to a potential blocked crossing and give them an opportunity to take an alternative route or perhaps change their plans for that particular trip. And then other communities are taking more long-term approaches to either eliminate the crossings or look at crossing-grade separation projects, which tend to be quite expensive and very difficult to do over multiple years. It was a challenging topic because it's something that's happening around the US but we didn't really have good sense of just where and how much it was occurring based on the inability to get the data for that.
• 25:58
  Allan Rutter: Yeah, grade-crossing safety and related issues are subjects that TTI has studied extensively for decades. One of the things that was clarified when we conducted the study is a legal determination that regulating block crossings is a matter of federal jurisdiction, not state laws or local ordinances. Early in 2024, the Supreme Court let stand an appellate court ruling that blocked crossing statutes were preempted by federal laws on rail safety and rail economic regulation. Now, neither Congress nor the Federal Railroad Administration has entered that regulatory space just yet, but the courts have determined that the feds own that space. The effect of that for me is a bit like a family that owns a big lake house owned by their grandparents until the house is inherited by one of the family members who chooses to keep the house boarded up so that it can't be used by the family anymore. The heir may not use the house, but no one can.
• 26:58
  David Willhauer: Well , you're absolutely right. The states and local jurisdiction used to be able to work out solutions with railroads and even fine railroads for blocked crossings. But recent court cases have resulted in that no longer being possible. So it really does need to be a federal solution. And while the Surface Transportation Board is currently reviewing different railroad cases, we believe that the Federal Railroad Administration should really be in a position to require the railroads to supply the data that would illustrate which crossings are being blocked the most, and to shine the light, if you will, on those communities where the problems are the worst, and allow those communities to work closely with the railroads and come up with a solution. And, informed by that data, they can make decisions on what can be done. And the railroads can in turn consider how they may change operations to reduce those crossing delays because we've learned that they're able to change operations when needed to to reduce blocked crossing occurrences. And we believe that the Federal Railroad Administration is gonna need to get involved because there will likely be necessary to have some penalty for not providing that information in order to provide incentives for the railroads to provide that data. And because the Surface Transportation Board also is involved in railroad dispute and so forth, whatever the Federal Railroad Administration does needs to be allied with what the Surface Transportation Board is doing as well.
• 28:33
  Allan Rutter: So, more data, a little more coordination, not that it gets any simpler. The final subject of the report is the effects of long trains on Amtrak's inner-city passenger trains that operate on freight rail lines. What kinds of issues did the committee discover and what does the committee recommend be done about those conflicts?
• 28:55
  David Willhauer: The representatives from Amtrak presented to the committee in a very comprehensive summary of situations that have occurred over the years with delays to passenger trains due to freight rail operations such as long trains operating in areas where the sidings are not long enough to allow passenger trains to pass. And Amtrak has had statutory preference to operate passenger-rail service since its inception, but it hasn't always been enforced. And with regard to long trains, the only real enforcement that we felt we could justify was a freight railroad operates a long train in a subdivision where their sidings are not long enough to be able to accommodate a passenger train such as an Amtrak train to pass that freight train. And so when it comes to meets and passes, we felt like that was a logical place to focus. There were other examples that Amtrak provided about how there was an increase in broken knuckles over the period of time since long trains have been operating and, incidents where crews have to be recrewed and they run out of hours of service because they've spent the whole day operating a longer train that takes longer to get where it needs to go. All freight trains experience troubles with recrewing and broken knuckles. So, we focused primarily on the areas where rail sidings were not sufficient to allow passing passenger trains.
• 30:29
  Allan Rutter: And just for our listeners who are not foamers, broken knuckles refers to the couplers that connect one car to another, where they sort of wrap around each other. And it's that connection, which looks like hands connecting to each other that we describe as the broken knuckle, right?
• 30:47
  David Willhauer: Yeah, that's right.
• 30:49
  Allan Rutter: Now, you and some of the committee members have been able to brief this study's sponsors that the Federal Railroad Administration, and visit with some congressional staff in advance of the release of the report. What's been their overall reaction to the report?
• 31:05
  David Willhauer: Overall, it's been mixed because if you can imagine, the congressional representatives have different opinions about long-train operations and whether or not there should be regulatory action for or against train operations. So we had a lively discussion with our congressional representatives about the results of our report and our recommendations, as some of the members were in agreement with some of the recommendations and others were not. Our sponsor was pleased with the report. There was also the report where an opportunity for them to review these risk-reduction programs, and this has been very much a work in progress since the railroads are not required to complete their risk-reduction plans in their entirety until 2025. So, our recommendations were really focused on what they should look like when they're completed. And it was important to recognize that the Federal Railroad Administration is working closely with the railroads to audit those risk reduction plans. That was a part of our conversation with our sponsor. We also were able to recognize that alongside this study, the Federal Railroad Administration was conducting some of their own studies on air brakes with trains with 100 cars in length and 200 cars in length . And they did both stationary and moving tests of air brakes in a comprehensive study that was going alongside our study. So, we were able to incorporate the results of their study in ours. They also completed a study on the stakeholder perceptions of longer trains and our recommendations regarding crew training, and some of the challenges of crews operating long trains were echoing some of the findings that they discovered in their studies on the same topic. And so it was an opportunity to recognize some of the challenges of long-train operations and propose, we believe, some solutions that will have an impact on ensuring their safe operations in the future.
• 33:17
  Allan Rutter: Well, thanks again, David, for taking time to visit with us about this important report. Long-train issues certainly affect Texas communities given the number of rail miles in our state and the frequency of reports of blocked crossing issues in Texas. Let me ask you the question we pose to all of our podcast guests. What is it that motivates you to show up to work every day ?
• 33:40
  David Willhauer: Well , thank you, Al. I'm challenged every day by the complexities of transportation puzzles, if you will. We have a diverse transportation network, and I've been studying transportation from maritime to rail and transit and freight operations my whole career. And it's a challenging topic, and it requires understanding the systems, but also being able to explain it in developing policies. And I'm continually impressed with how my colleagues work to solve these problems together. And at the National Academies, we're constantly facing studies of this kind where we have to figure out how to solve problems with some very talented individuals and committee members. And I enjoy working with people on solving problems and working through solutions and trying to make an improvement every day.
• 34:35
  Allan Rutter: Well, it was a whole lot of fun working with you on this report, and I really appreciate you spending some time with us on the podcast, helping our listeners understand what the report is all about. Thanks again.
• 34:47
  David Willhauer: Thank you, Al . Thanks for serving on the committee.
• 34:52
  Allan Rutter: Our nation's freight railroads are privately owned and operated. Sometimes their private-sector activities can affect communities adjacent to rail lines. Economists call these effects "externalities," costs or benefits that affect a third party not directly involved in private-sector transactions. Members of Congress were concerned about the externalities of long-train operations--safety risks, blocked crossings. And delayed passenger trains, and they asked for this consensus study to consider what the externalities are and how they might be mitigated. It's a complicated set of issues, and the recently released report offers a thorough discussion about what is known and what more needs to be known about the operations of long trains. We hope today's discussion offers insights into the study and that it may encourage our listeners to read the report for themselves. Thanks for listening. Please take just a minute to give us a review, subscribe, and share this episode. And please join us next time for another conversation about getting ourselves and the stuff we need from point A to point B. Thinking Transportation is a production of the Texas A&M Transportation Institute, a member of The Texas A&M University System. The show is edited and produced by Chris Porteau. I'm your host, Allan Rutter. Thanks again for listening. We'll see you next time .