US Railroads Research Articles

Development of track component health indices using image-based railway track inspection data

The primary role of the US Department of Transportation (USDOT) Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) is ensuring the safe operation of railway rolling stock and infrastructure by way of regulatory oversight. FRA regulations require US railroads to conduct visual track inspections as often as twice per week depending on a specific track segment’s FRA track class, which also governs maximum train operating speed. Such inspections are often subjective due to the inherent limitations of human visual inspection and cognition. Additionally, human visual inspections require some level of risk given the need for inspectors to be on track while also consuming valuable network capacity. As a result, and the desire to collect objective data to improve both safety and maintenance planning, railroads are pursuing new means and methods to assess track condition and evaluate track component health. This paper presents a numerical method to define track component health using field data collected on the High Tonnage Loop (HTL) at the Transportation Technology Center (TTC) in Pueblo, Colorado, USA. Line scan laser and image data of the track were captured using a 3D Laser Triangulation system and were subsequently processed using Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNNs). The track heath quantification method proposed establishes benchmarks that were developed based on the understanding of railway track mechanics, high axle load (HAL) railroad engineering instructions, and FRA regulations. The novel metrics presented are referred to as Track Component Heath Indices (TCHIs) and are quantitative values that objectively assess track condition and provide a means to monitor condition change with time and tonnage. These data can be used in conjunction with traditional track geometry and other forms of track heath data (e.g. GPR and rail profile) to more holistically assess the condition of the track structure and its components and ultimately predict its future state.

The evolution of activist investors in the U.S. railroad industry

The railroad industry has faced a series of prominent activist campaigns since the late 1990s, including those at CSX (2006, 2016), BNSF (2007), Norfolk Southern (2015), Canadian National (2011), and Canadian Pacific (2021). These investors, who have taken ownership interests in a variety of ways, have sought major changes in railroad operations, financial policy, and overall strategy. Rather than using traditional means of proxy contests or acquisition proposals, these high-profile activists have developed new means and tactics seeking to influence company financial policies and strategic direction. This paper begins by summarizing the rise of activist investors in general, and the changing nature of their objectives and their tactics. Some industry analysts have claimed that the recent railroad activist campaigns are novel and unprecedented. In contrast, this paper argues that the railroad industry has long been shaped by activist investors, whose objectives and tactics have changed as the industry has evolved. We define and then chronicle the evolution of activist investors in US railroads since inception and develop a taxonomy of major activist investor events and objectives. For most of its history, activist investors in railroads have been motivated by three main objectives: network growth and extension; consolidation; and bankruptcy and restructuring. But as the effects of deregulation settled out by 2000, railroads have experienced new types of investors who have sought changes that are less industry-specific and more like those in the broader economy, focusing on governance, operating strategy, and capital distributions.

Forecasting Risk of Service Failures Between Successive Rail Inspections: A Data-Driven Approach

Service failure is an incident when a defect of size over threshold value is noticed and the track is taken out of service. They are a major concern for the railroads due to their impact on economic and safety aspects of the rail company. Despite the effective inspection strategies developed by the railroad, service failure may still occur in their network because of the growth of an undetected defect or the defect that is initiated after an inspection. Various factors influence the growth rate of a defect, causing service failure. Identifying and understanding these factors will assist in accurately predicting the risk of a service failure. This paper develops a data-driven approach based on accelerated failure time model using the data collected from one of the Class-I US railroads during the period from 2011 to 2016. Different distributions of the hazard function are evaluated, and the log-normal distribution is found to be the best fit. This study identifies the following factors: past rail defects, past geometry defects, days from the last grinding, product of rail age and degrees of curvature and infrastructural data such as the number of turnouts, grade of rail and rail segment length to have an influence on failure time of the rail. Temporal transferability model validation and comparison with other machine learning approaches are performed using the data collected in the year 2016. The results of this study are useful for railroads to develop effective strategies for rail inspections and preventive maintenance.

Prediction of arrival times of freight traffic on US railroads using support vector regression

Variability of travel times on the United States freight rail network is high due to large network demands relative to infrastructure capacity, especially when traffic is heterogeneous. Variable runtimes pose significant operational challenges if the nature of runtime variability is not predictable. To address this issue, this article proposes a data-driven approach to predict estimated times of arrival (ETAs) of individual freight trains, based on the properties of the train, the properties of the network, and the properties of potentially conflicting traffic on the network. The ETA prediction problem from an origin to a destination is posed as a machine learning regression problem and solved using support vector regression trained and cross validated on over two years of detailed historical data for a 140 mile section of track located primarily in Tennessee, USA. The article presents the data used in this problem and details on feature engineering and construction for predictions made across the full route. It also highlights findings on the dominant sources of runtime variability and the most predictive factors for ETA. Improvement results for ETA exceed 21% over a baseline prediction method at some locations and average 14% across the study area.

Working on the Railroad: Public Accounting Talent in the United States-The Case of Haskins & Sells (Now Deloitte)

Nineteenth century US railroads were the first ‘big businesses’ and had profound influence on society. This paper addresses one source of talent for the early US public accounting profession—railroads. Following the end of the US Civil War (1861–65), industrial expansion was a revolutionary experience, with large trusts appearing in the wake of the railroad's maturing influence on the development of a vast continental economy. Accounting practice also was impacted by railroads. For example, the development of annual reports, income measurement, the standardization of reporting by regulators, developing fixed and variable cost, and throughput concepts for capital intensive business—all were related to the railroads. This paper focuses on a significant link between the emerging public accounting profession and the railroads by examining how an early major US public accounting firm relied upon accounting skill developed within railroads as an important source of talent. Arguably, talent is the most important resource of a professional firm. While it is a commonly held view that the immigration of UK accountants in the late nineteenth century was the source of public accounting talent, this paper provides evidence of a competing explanation—the sourcing of talent from a firm (Haskins & Sells) that continues to the present day as Deloitte. Key leadership and personnel of that time gained their experience while working on the domestic railroads.

From Rail to Road and Back Again? A Century of Transport Competition and Interdependency

From Rail to Road and Back Again? A Century of Transport Competition and Interdependency

A path-based capacitated network flow model for empty railcar distribution

In this paper we develop a novel formulation for the empty railcar distribution problem that considers realistic technical and business requirements while assigning empty cars to customer demands. The proposed model takes block and train capacities into account, while satisfying the supply and demand constraints, and allows car substitutability among pools of the same car type as well as customer preferences towards different pools. Following the practice in US railroads, the proposed model does not combine car routing and car distribution decisions. Those two decisions are separated from each other and they are usually made by different departments in US railroads. The model is implemented in CPLEX Concert Technology using Java and is illustrated in a numerical example. Results show that the proposed model can improve several performance measures over the noncapacitated model which is currently used by industry.

Changes in the Role of US Railroads as Haulers of Coal and Crude: Causes and Consequences

The role of the class I railroads in the USA in hauling both coal and crude oil has changed a good deal in recent years. Though coal remains the single most important commodity for US railroads, the volume carried has been declining since 2008. On the other hand, though oil and other petroleum products continue to account for a fairly small share of the freight hauled by US railroads, that share has been growing continuously since early 2010. As a result of this rapid increase and the accidents that have accompanied it, regulators have imposed new and costly restrictions on the railways. This paper discusses the factors behind these two trends—largely the decline in coal’s share in electricity generation and the increased application of new technologies in oil and gas regions far from pipelines—and discusses some of the regulatory and policy implications, in addition to the impacts on the railroads themselves.

A comparison of North American and European railway systems – a critique and riposte

The objective of current paper is to offer constructive criticism and expose some serious shortcomings in the paper published Clausen and Voll (Transp Res Rev 5:129–133, 2013) in the ETRR. A literature review method is applied for the current research paper. A technical and scientific discussion, including organizational and policy issues in relation to rail freight transport systems in Europe and U.S., is performed. Clausen and Voll [4] ostensibly set out to draw comparisons between North American and European railway systems. It claims to be focused on the management and operation of carload freight and how this is organized, planned and moved but does not develop this in adequate detail. The paper fails to address many generic contextual differences and influences that govern the management and operation of carload freight in both domains. It does not present a balanced or complete set of arguments as to why one scenario is to be preferred to the other. The analysis in the paper is largely generic, limited and yet arrives at robust and trenchant conclusions preferring the North American production model without any real substantiation or justification for this position being presented. The European position is inadequately described in terms of governance, ownership and operational models and is criticised for its constraints and limitations without any real explanation as to how these could be overcome. The relatively slow evolution of the response of the US railroads to the legislation that endowed them with greater commercial and operational freedoms is not adequately covered. The position in Europe in relation to a rapid sequence of interventions and directives is also not adequately reviewed. The paper does not demonstrate the impact of recent technologies in terms of intermodal activities despite these being significant components of rail freight volume and revenue in both domains. The paper also has very limited details on the commercial and competitive realities faced by railways in both domains including rail-on-rail, waterway and road based competition and how this is managed by the train operators. The paper makes superficial reference to the “Blocking Problem” but fail to develop what this implies and how the rail freight operators develop strategies to mitigate this.

Diesel locomotive fueling problem (LFP) in railroad operations

About 75 % of the world’s railroads operate with diesel fuel. Even though European railroads rely on electric traction to a large extent, US railroads rely mostly on diesel fuel (100 % of US freight is hauled by diesel locomotives). Like in other industries there is intense competition to keep costs low; and in railroad operations based on diesel locomotives, the cost of fuel and its delivery is the major component of the overall cost. Since the cost of fuel is highly location dependent (due to local taxes and transportation costs between supply and demand points), locomotive fueling problem discussed in this paper is a critical problem in railroad operations. Given: the set of yards, the set of trains to operate, the locomotive assignments to trains, and the fuel cost and capacity data; this problem deals with finding the fueling plan for the various trains to minimize the total cost of fueling the locomotives. We describe three different algorithms, two based on greedy method and one using MIP model, that we used to solve this problem and highlight the summary of solutions obtained by each of them for comparisons of these algorithms.

Economics vs. harmonious civilization

Economics presents capitalism as a harmonious society made coherent by a network of mutually advantageous transactions. This article challenges that view, showing how economists structured their abstract theory in terms of transactions in order to eliminate any consideration of the conflicts and contradictions within capitalism. To make this point, the article includes examples, such as the United States Federal Reserve's efforts to strangle economic growth to keep wages in check, the performance of development states, and the repeated bankruptcies of US railroads during the nineteenth century.

Spinning Welfare: The Gains from Process Innovation in Cotton and Car Production

Economists and economic historians want to know how much better life is today than in the past. Fifty years ago economic historians found surprisingly small gains from 19th century US railroads, while more recently economists have found relatively large gains from electricity, computers and cell phones. In each case the implicit or explicit assumption is that researchers were measuring the value of a new good to society. In this paper we use the same techniques to find the value to society of making existing goods cheaper. Henry Ford did not invent the car, and the inventors of mechanized cotton spinning in the industrial revolution invented no new product. But both made existing products dramatically cheaper, bringing them into the reach of many more consumers. That in turn has potentially large welfare effects. We find that the consumer surplus of Henry Ford’s production line was around 2% by 1923, 15 years after Ford began to implement the moving assembly line, while the mechanization of cotton spinning was worth around 6% by 1820, 34 years after its initial invention. Both are large: of the same order of magnitude as consumer expenditure on these items, and as large or larger than the value of the internet to consumers. On the social savings measure traditionally used by economic historians, these process innovations were worth 15% and 18% respectively, making them more important than railroads. Our results remind us that process innovations can be at least as important for welfare and productivity as the invention of new products.

The Contribution of the Diesel Locomotive to Trainmen's Safety on US Railroads, 1927–1954

The widespread diffusion of diesel locomotives in the United States after the Second World War reshaped nearly every aspect of American railroading. This article explores the contribution of the diesel locomotive to trainmen's safety on U.S. railroads between 1927 and 1954. The author begins by outlining the various dangers associated with steam engines, including locomotive boiler or cylinder explosions and broken rods. Bad maintenance often caused accidents. The author discusses how both methods and materials improved over time as a results of a group of modifications in design, construction, operation, and maintenance. Other topics covered include the Interstate Commerce Commission, the dangers of steam, the unions, and the risks and benefits of the diesel engine. The author concludes that while steam locomotives had once been dangerous, steady progress in technology and work practices, along with federal regulation after 1911, had greatly reduced the risks. Although the evidence suggests that when diesels arrived they reduced accidents per locomotive by as much as 60 percent, yet because the risks from steam were already low, the improvement in safety from the change to diesels was quite modest.

Accounting, economic development and financial reporting: the case of three pre-Civil War US railroads

This study examines three leading US railroads during the years before the Civil War. Although these were private corporations, various governments assisted the railroads. Governmental involvement in the construction of railroads can be justified from the importance that railroads played in economic development in the areas the tracks bisected, as well asjustified due to the importance of railroads in linking together a region and for the provision of basic transportation that was otherwise lacking. It was seen that the government investment would have a direct financial payoff, hence, justifiable as a good investment. This examination focuses on the support provided by the public sector and the railroads' actions that acknowledged this public support. Public assistance in financing fledgling railroads had direct impacts upon financial reporting and public disclosure. One of these impacts was that annual reporting, a model used by governments, was introduced to nineteenth century businesses by means of railroads, a quasi-public enterprise.

The Routledge Historical Atlas of the American Railroads

With 50 full-color original maps, and a keen and perceptive text, the preeminent historian of US railways has created an illustrated atlas that will delight general history readers and railroad fans alike. From the construction of the first US railroads in the 1830s to the advent of Amtrak, this outstanding work explores the revolutionary geographical expansion and rapid acceleration of American life made possible by the people who built, operated and rode the US railway systems. The Routledge Historical Atlas of American Railroads traverses some of the most exciting thoroughfares in our history and culture, and offers a unique view of young America. Anyone interested in the people and events that shaped the US, general readers, students and all railroad fans will make this a new standard work. Also inlcludes 50 color maps.

Estimating Radial Measures of Productivity Growth: Frontier vs Non-Frontier Approaches

In this paper, we propose an alternative econometric framework for estimating and decomposing productivity change that does not require a distribution for inefficiency or the uncorrelatedness between inefficiency and the regressors. We develop our methodology for the input-oriented radial measure of productivity change and establish that this equals the negative of the time change in the log cost function. Our econometric framework is based on a fixed-effects, multiple-output cost frontier, where we decompose productivity change into discrete shifts in the frontier and changes in firm efficiency levels relative to the frontier. We also show that the standard non-frontier specification is nested within our frontier model and thus can produce different estimates of productivity change. Using a panel of twelve US railroads from 1951 to 1975, our estimated cost frontier suggests average annual productivity growth of roughly 0.3 percent, with efficiency change rising then falling over the period. Specification tests reject the non-frontier model, which yields smaller gains in productivity.

Slow Train to Paradise: How Dutch Investment Helped Build American Railroads

Railroad historians have long been aware of Dutch investment in the building of American railroads, but how extensive was that investment? This book reveals for the first time that, because of the frequent failure of railroad companies to meet their debt obligations, several railroads were for a time completely in Dutch control. Though Dutch capitalists initially believed they had discovered a shortcut to El Dorado by buying American railroad securities, it turned out that only long-term investment brought financial paradise within their reach. This book is a complete history of Dutch investment in American railroads up to World War I, telling in detail not only why the Dutch invested in US railroads, but also in which companies and how much they invested. Introductory chapters survey the Dutch capital market from the late eighteenth century until World War I and extensive appendices provide detailed information on individual Dutch brokers and their financial activities.

Railroad Deregulation, Innovation, and Competition: Effects of the Staggers Act on Grain Transportation

Railroad Deregulation, Innovation, and Competition: Effects of the Staggers Act on Grain Transportation

Economics of scale and scope in multiproduct firms: evidence from US railroads

Recently, there has been a surge of interest in analysing scale economies in US railroad firms. The analysis of scale economies in existing studies is, however, limited in view of recent advances in the theory of the multiproduct firm. In this paper, the previous work is extended to address the issue of scale and scope economies in multiproduct firms. The findings show that US railroads experience mild overall economies of scale, but rather marked product-specific economies of scale with respect to both freight and passenger services. However, there appear to be diseconomies of scope associated with the joint production of the two services. Based on these results, this study indicates that US railroad firms would have no tendency to behave as a natural monopoly in the absence of regulation.

Measuring Industrial Stagnation: The Case of the US Railroads

This paper first applies to railroads the tools of modern fiscal risk analysis, using the long-term series of holding period rates of return on railroad shares to derive a measure of industrial stagnation. This analysis is then used to gain added insights into the industry's transition from growth to stagnation. While fundamental disequilibrium produces a continuing low rate of return, railroads have succeeded in raising substantial capital on a continuing basis despite frequent bankruptcies and financial crises by resorting to financial innovations. The equipment trust certificate is cited as an example, an investment instrument which effectively shields the investor from the riskiness of enterprise. This has enabled railroads to raise debt capital at a relatively low-risk premium.