Waste by Rail--A Better Solution

Railroads in North America have been active in the industrial belt for over tens years, hauling scrap to container ports for shipment to disposal sites and buyers abroad.

Now, as freight traffic remains relatively slow throughout the country, railroads have sought new business in waste management, helping communities with their disposals at sites hundreds of miles away. Many cities have filled their current sites to capacity and are disposing waste at remote sites, using the latest green technology.

Waste by Rail offers a next generation solution for cities that have surpassed their current landfill facilities.

Read More:
http://www.wastebyrail.com/successstories.asp#TransferBuildAnchor

Norfolk Southern Unveils Experimental Electric Locomotive

Naysayers to Green Railroading have been heard to say that freight by rail is "only marginally better than the alternative". Now they'll now have to readjust their thinking. Electric locomotives, like Norfolk's NS 999 constitute the future of freight transportation.

A national transportation policy that promotes railroads will be good for the environment.

Read the press release:
http://sev.prnewswire.com/null/20090928/PH8276428092009-1.html

Latest Trend: Rail Traffic Up

Average weekly carloads on U.S. railroads in August 2009 (279,046) were more than 15,000 carloads higher than in July 2009 and higher than any previous month in 2009, though seasonal factors account for some of that increase — note the increase in August each year in the chart at right (Coal mines, for example, often undergo maintenance during July and ramp back up in August.) The last two weeks of August saw higher U.S. carload traffic than any previous two-week period in 2009.

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An Investment Opportunity for Railroads?

With the current dismal economic conditions of today--freightcars parked at every available storage space, it would seem like an unlikely time to suggest railroad investment...but maybe not. When listening to various prognostications, there seems to be two separate schools of thought. Some analysts peer into their crystal ball and see business slowly working its way back to normal. The other camp thinks that the world has been fundamentally changed since the economic meltdown. In this view, consumer spending and business in general, will never be the same. This latter school bases its thinking on consumer behavior. Evidence shows that the average Joe's savings rate has increased at the expense of his spending rate. Will he return to his earlier habits?

Here's the test: If average Joe starts doing well financially will he think about all those forgone purchases (his pent-up demand, as economists call it) and start a trend (as we see so often at the end of business cycles) to spend America out of recession?

Personally, my money is on Joe spending again. Maybe he'll ramp up slowly to his old ways, but old habits, especially ones related to consumption, die hard. With that in mind, the overall investment environment in general, and the railroad environment, in particular, will improve slowly over the next few months. There will be ups and downs, but the overall trend will be up.

Freight Trains are Three or More Times More Fuel-Efficient than Trucks

Here are just a few thought-provoking energy-efficiency facts from the Association of American Railroads website:

1. A freight train can move a ton of freight an average of 436 miles on a single gallon of fuel. That’s close to four times as far as it could move by truck.

2. A train can take the load of 280 trucks off the road. That’s like removing 1,100 cars from the road.

3. Each ton-mile of freight moved by rail rather than highway reduces greenhouse gas emissions by two-thirds or more.

You can also visit the association's "Carbon Calculator" page to calculate exactly what a trainload of freight hauled by rail might save the environment. I calculated a 100 car train, moving fresh and frozen food across the U.S. (from Los Angeles to Charleston) and the tool calculated that "968 Tons of Carbon Dioxide were saved by moving this freight by rail instead of by truck." This savings would amount to 22,523 seedlings working 10 years to remove the same amount of waste.

View the Carbon Calculator at:
http://www.aar.org/Environment/EconomicCalculator.aspx

Portland Western Freight Train Roberts, Oregon