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Few people these days dispute that rails are better for the environment. They give off only one-tenth to one-third the pollutants emitted by trucks. And the freight-rail's accident-fatality rate (per ton mile) is a third that of the trucking industry's. Virtually all the rail rights-of-way are owned and maintained by the railroads. The battered public highways used by trucks are constantly behind the maintenance curve.
The healthy freights are pumping their good fortune back into the economy. Toward the end of the year, the first eight of 350 new alternating-current (AC) traction locomotives will be delivered to the Burlington Northern. The order, worth $675 million to General Motors and Siemens AG, is the largest for rail equipment in history. Though changing from DC to AC (engine wheels are driven by electric motors that take current generated by the locomotives' diesels) is not sexy science, the improved power and pull mean three of these 4,000-h.p. monsters can do the work of five older ones.
All that is new in the great freights is rooted in what is old. The romance of railroading is intact. Richard Davidson, U.P.'s chairman, sits in his 12th- floor office above Omaha's Dodge Street, named for engineer Grenville Dodge, who drove the original line west. Davidson, once an 18-year-old brakeman on the Missouri Pacific, views the Missouri River bluffs where Abraham Lincoln stood and pointed to the spot where the Union Pacific would begin in 1862. Through Davidson's window come the faint calls of trains hustling along the valley. "I still get emotional when I get on a locomotive and listen to those turbochargers kick in," he says.
Back east, out of the hills of West Virginia and Virginia, endless strings of coal hoppers of the Norfolk Southern and CSX roll toward the gargantuan coastal terminals where the cars are grabbed and rolled upside down, spilling their cargoes onto belts that pour the coal into ship holds. Those trains travel on lines first plotted and built to rush the troops of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson into Civil War battles. Confederate General William Mahone, an engineering genius, felled trees so skillfully in Virginia's Great Dismal Swamp before the war that today's trains still rush over the enduring logs.
Railroad talk is Brobdingnagian by nature. The lines bind every corner of America and are pushing increasingly into Mexico and Canada as trade builds. Those 12 top freight lines alone own 1,189,660 cars and 18,964 locomotives, which together could make a train that would stretch halfway around the globe.