The amount of trucking loads on the roads has become an issue; many roads are getting relatively clogged with truck traffic. In one New York story, truck-related accidents on the Long Island Expressway have doubled from 2002 to 2008, prompting local congressman Jerrold Nadler to propose moving some of those loads onto rail and opening up a New Jersey-to-Brooklyn rail tunnel (bypassing Staten Island and Manhattan) to expedite such traffic.
That is not just a big-city issue, as trucks are carrying an increasing amount of freight traffic. Rail companies are working better ways to ship freight across country, using more intermodal container transport, allowing trucks to take items the last few miles and using rail for most of the journey.
Big container ships can compound issues with railroads, as a Panamax-class freighter can hold 5000 20-foot containers. It takes about twelve miles of double-stacked trains to get those out of the port. To meet the demand of offloading ships coming into the west coast ports from Asia, the major railroads have routinely started running trains up to two miles long between LA/Long Beach and eastern intermodal points; a three-mile long “monster train” was tried between Texas and California last month. That long of a train, if going at 30 MPH, will block a rail crossing for six minutes, much to the chagrin of drivers caught at the crossing.
The trade-offs of those long trains will continue to have officials perplexed. If we move more traffic onto railroads, we’ll have more long blockages at crossings, but fewer trucks on the road. Also, the railroads have more pricing power than trucking firms, as there are a few big railroads and countless thousands of owner-operator trucking firms.
Sources: http://www.joc.com/node/416349
http://www.thetrucker.com/News/Stories/201...slandroads.aspx
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