Lots of folks think (and indeed, I used to think) that we’re under-utilizing the rails, and that we could ship more cargo via rails and take trucks off the road.
I’ve been selling a bunch of hay to an extended family of guys who all work for the UPRR out of Elko. They’ve filled me in on so much stuff about the rail system this summer.
The rails are pretty much operating at capacity, which allows them to get choosey about their loads. The rails prefer to haul bulk commodities: coal, grains, oils, chemicals in tank cars, etc. After that, they’ll haul cargo in inter-modal containers.
The rails don’t like dealing with freight outside of containers. If it isn’t in a container, they charge you such a high rate that you go to trucks. What they really want to haul is bulk commodities.
Since we have an increasing amount of “just in time” inventorying, and an increasingly decentralized economy, it is very difficult to use rails to transport anything but bulk loads.
I did some computer systems work for a plastics company that got their raw materials - tons of HDPE pellets - via rail. They had a big vacuum system to shuffle the pellets around to the various blow-molding equipment bins.