Out of Newark, New Jersey, and up the west side of the Hudson River, three locomotives lug 63 flatbed freight cars -- almost a mile of Conrail train for United Parcel and the U.S. Postal Service, due in California in 72 hours. Engineer Jim Metzger, 42, flicks his eyes like beacons from digital screens inside his cab to the roadbed and back -- right hand on the throttle controlling 11,400 horses, left hand on the three-tone whistle, two longs, a short and a long at every crossing. Past suburban backyards and friendly waves, through the West Point tunnel, rolling from 35 m.p.h. to 50 m.p.h. beneath the hulking mansions of the great rail barons, visionaries and crooks. This is power, this is excitement, this is the guts of America.
In any given 24 hours, there are 20,000 freight trains moving somewhere in this nation, growling over the plains, clanging through urban switches and laboring up mountain passes, carrying 37% of the stuff the country produces and consumes. Their long tails, sometimes stretching two miles behind, are mostly hidden in the swells and crevices of the land. Their mournful calls are filtered to whispers inside the hermetic minivans and campers off on the highways -- out of sight, out of sound and largely out of the national mind.
Yet the 12 great freight routes, which bear 90% of the business of the 535 surviving railroads, are all profitable these days. They make up a $27.5 billion industry that nets $1.95 billion and can easily absorb the $200 million damage from the Midwest flood that inundated 500 miles of track and caused 1,000 trains to be rerouted. Emerging from a century and a half of wild venture, corruption and the suffocating hand of government, they are a gathering economic force, destined to get stronger in a transport picture dotted with troubled ships, planes and trucks.
The freights make up all but a percent of railroading today, both in dollars and distance. Commodities such as grain, forest products and coal are still the underpinning of the rails, but railways are nibbling more into consumer products such as Nikes and Chevrolets. Rails transport two-thirds of the new cars from factories to dealers and piggyback 6.5 million truck trailers a year.
At the beginning of the century, the rails hauled everything -- people and products. Trucks and cars changed that, and by 1970 the rails had shrunk and were stalled, often indifferent to customers and shifting markets. About 22% of the lines were in bankruptcy, and the whole industry was under threat of nationalization. Trucks grabbed all the new business and, as any motorist knows, a great deal of the highway space.
Canny West Virginia Congressman Harley Staggers pushed the rails into the modern world in 1980 with a deregulation bill that allowed the lines to make quick market adjustments of fees and practices. The rails shrank their lines a third (to 196,081 miles), sweated employment from more than half a million to 280,000, doubled freight-car capacity by stacking containers, curbed damage to products. They hauled 40% more freight with 40% fewer cars, bored out mountain tunnels to take the 20-ft.-high stacks, lowered roadbeds beneath highways and city streets, upgraded beds and bridges and steel rails to the best condition in history, and in the end delivered goods in better shape and for as much as 30% less.