It’s about time that Long Beach is able to provide on-dock container rail handling. Drayage trucks have been a massive source of pollution in the area since the 1990s. Even the Clean Trucks initiative, helpful though it was, can’t keep the particulates and other noxious elements of diesel exhaust down. The proper solution is on-dock rail.
Though this won’t touch the total cost of the project, it’s enough to get it going. It can certainly fund studies and preliminary work.
The time frame isn’t till 2025 for the first trains, though.
The Chinese government and several states have been subsidizing rail service from China to Europe. A phase-out is planned for 2023 now. Subsidies were supposed to end in 2022 but an extension was made for COVID.
There are various claims of inflating the amount of traffic.
Rates from Europe to China, the return trip, have been low, so that empty containers get returned to China. In fact, they are set at less than cost; around $100 per container, while the real cost is around $3000 to move an empty container.
But with container rates sky-high now and so many blank sailings from Asia by container liners, the rail service rates have been very high to Europe. Perhaps a subsidy is no longer needed. We’ll see.
Quality of service will be the main determinant of the success of this route in the long run. And we will see if the various countries on the route can figure out how to cooperate over the long run to get total rail shipment times down.
This interactive page shows key information about Class I railroads in the US. It displays the average speed of trains while moving, average dwell time in a yard waiting to be switched or unloaded, and the number of cars in service. You can select the figures for each Class I rail, and the time shown on the graphs, start and end.
The data comes from the Surface Transportation Board compilation of data provided by the railroads themselves, and is probably a bit late due to the deadlines for submitting figures.
The graph of speed for BNSF is especially interesting. It shows a recent spectacular jump, from under 25 mph to over 26 mph. Clearly the message is getting through to rails that they’d better move cargo.
Dwell time, spent sitting in yards waiting to be switched on, has for BNSF been rising recently, pointing to a new bottleneck. It had better start working on these problems.
We also don’t see which particular sites or segments of the rail line are contributing to the changes in the figures. That’s for each rail to figure out and make corrections. But seeing an overview of what’s going on will provide motivation for rails to do their part to keep congestion down. And a rail does not want to be perceived as slow-moving, for sure.
I hope we can count on the authors to keep updating this page, so the visibility will provide an incentive for rails to improve.
Supply Chain and Logistics 