Intermodal traffic, that is, truck trailers or ocean containers handled on special rail equipment, is the fastest-growing segment of rail traffic. Between 1990 and 2000, rail intermodal grew at an annual rate of 4.6%—much faster than rail carload freight, which grew at an annual rate of only 1.4%. However, during the same period, truck tonnage grew at an annual rate of 6.9%, and air cargo at a rate of 17.9%. The growing rail intermodal is expected to overtake coal as the single largest source of revenue for freight railroads in the year 2004. But railroad intermodal tonnage is not growing as fast as truck traffic, and market share is consequently falling. This is a problem: with total freight traffic projected to grow 57% by the year 2020, all the increased traffic will have to be accommodated on the highway network. The introduction of double-stack rail cars in the 1980s dramatically reduced rail haul costs, and it made intermodal traffic competitive at distances of 500 mi or so, whereas previously rail could compete with trucks only at distances of about 750 mi or more. Still, most rail intermodal traffic remains long haul. Three-quarters of all truck tonnage moves distances of less than 500 mi, and rail does not compete in this market. Rail haul costs are developed for a number of short corridors, and it is demonstrated that although double-stack usage has lowered line haul costs, terminal and drayage costs remain high. If these costs can be reduced, rail intermodal can be competitive even in short-distance corridors. Several ways to lower these costs, both by industry initiatives and by public investment, are proposed. Without some action by the public sector, short-haul rail intermodal will continue to be noncompetitive, and highway truck traffic will continue to grow.

For the first few years of this century, Brazil was the major supplier of rubber to the world. However, the Amazonian wild rubber industry was unable to compete, in either price or quality, with the Asian plantation rubber that began to appear on world markets after 1906. Development of a successful plantation culture in the Amazon seemed imperative, but even with public subsidy, plantations remained an economic impossibility. By 1945 the Brazilian rubber industry, overwhelmed by Asian production, had virtually disappeared.

The purpose of this analysis was to quantify the business benefits of Positive Train Control (PTC) for the Class I freight railroad industry. This report does not address the safety benefits of PTC. These were previously quantified by the Rail Safety Advisory Committee (RSAC), which identified nearly a thousand "PPAs" (PTC-preventable accidents) on U.S. railroads over a 12-year period, and determined the savings to be realized from each avoided accident. The RSAC finding was that avoidance of these PPAs was not, by itself, sufficient (from a strictly economic point of view) to justify an investment in PTC. Examples of potential business benefits include: * Line capacity enhancement * Improved service reliability * Faster over-the-road running times * More efficient use of cars and locomotives (made possible by real-time location information) * Reduction in locomotive failures (due to availability of real-time diagnostics) * Larger "windows" (periods during which no trains operate and maintenance workers can safely occupy the track) for track maintenance (made possible by real-time location information) * Fuel savings This paper presents the results of the analysis. It is important to recognize, however, that the state of the art in making these estimates is not sufficiently mature to make exact answers feasible. Presented here are the best estimates now possible, with observations as to how better information may be developed. Benefits were estimated in the above areas and the cost of deploying PTC on the Class I network (99,000 route miles and 20,000 locomotives) were calculated. The conclusions of the analysis were as follows: * Deployment of PTC on the Class I railroad network (99,000 route miles, 20,000 locomotives) would cost between $2.3 billion and $4.4 billion over five years * Annual benefits, once the system was fully implemented, were estimated at $2.2 billion to $3.8 billion * Internal rate of return was estimated (depending on timing and cost) to be between 44% and 160%

Railroads were originally conceived as public highways on which anyone might operate. This idea rapidly demonstrated its impracticality, and for many years railroads in most of the world have controlled both infrastructure and operations. However, the European Union is moving toward an open access model for railroads in which track ownership (and related functions, such as train dispatching) is required to be separate from train operations. Separate ownership and operations will require some method for establishing access charges. The fundamental issue is how costs are to be shared among multiple users of a single rail line. At the simplest level, costs can be assigned based on the volume of traffic. But what measure should be used—gross tonnage, train hours, or number of trains? TrackShare is a cost-allocation model that has been developed to meet this need. The process of applying TrackShare to the National Railroad Passenger Corporation’s (Amtrak’s) Northeast Corridor to determine the cost of operating rail freight traffic is described.

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