Free Republic

SALT LAKE CITY — A new manufacturing facility in the city's northwest quadrant is projected to bring 1,000 new jobs to the area over the next decade. Swiss-based railroad vehicle maker Stadler broke ground Friday on a state-of-the-art manufacturing facility at 150 S. 5600 West, where the company will build and assemble trains for transit properties throughout the United States and North America. Stadler currently leases space from the Utah Transit Authority at its Warm Springs facility at 900 N. 500 West that employs 115 workers. The expansion project is scheduled for development over 10 years or less, depending on...

ROCKY MOUNT — An intermodal CSX rail hub proposed for Rocky Mount will bring 1,500 jobs to North Carolina. The facility, called the Carolina Connector Hub, is expected to be operational by December 2019. “Good transportation is essential to economic growth. You can take it to the bank,” said Rep. G.K. Butterfield, D-Wilson, sponsor of the “Jobs First: Building for Our Future” forum held Friday. More than 100 people attended the event at the historic Helen Gay Train Station in Rocky Mount. Built in 1903, the station was acquired by the city of Rocky Mount in 1995 and restored in...

The Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) has published a final rule for a new pilot program that would seek competitive bids from "eligible petitioners" to replace Amtrak as the operator of up to three long-distance routes. The rules fall under a provision of the Fixing America's Surface Transportation (FAST) Act that requires the FRA to implement the pilot program. Published in the Federal Register last month, the final rule takes effect Sept. 5 and establishes a petition, notification and bid process by which the FRA will evaluate and select bids to provide passenger-rail service over particular long-distance routes. The rule also...

I’d almost expect something like this in a Third World country, but not here. A recent string of robberies on BART trains took a frightening turn when dozens of juveniles swarmed an Oakland station over the weekend and commandeered a train car, forcing passengers to hand over bags and cell phones and leaving at least two with head injuries, witnesses told the transit agency. The incident — the first of its kind in recent memory — occurred around 9:30 p.m. Saturday at Coliseum Station. According to a police summary, witnesses said 50 to 60 juveniles flooded the station, jumped the...

A maker of railcar equipment is coming to Henrietta and is expected to create 44 jobs. Rolen-Jinxin is a joint venture of companies from Spain and China. They have chosen a site in West Henrietta to locate their first U.S.-based operation. The company makes interior parts and other equipment for railcars. Rolen-Jinxin will create production, engineering and management jobs at the West Henrietta location. Empire State Development has offered tax credits worth up to $600,000. Monroe County is also offering incentives. The total project cost is close to $1 million. A company official, managing director David Parr, says that Rolen-Jinxin...

A dispute that threatens decade-old plans to build a western access road to O'Hare International Airport is headed to a federal agency, as the Illinois Toll Highway Authority sues the Canadian Pacific Railway. In a petition filed today, the tollway asked the U.S. Surface Transportation Board to allow it to force CP to sell or grant easements to the tollway for portions of railroad property immediately to the north of the railway's huge Bensenville Yards. The tollway indicated it also may eventually need access to the yard itself. The Surface Transportation Board is the federal agency that regulates railroads, and...

BELEN, N.M. (KRQE) – It was an incredible scene, and even more incredible the driver is still alive. Workers at the rail yard couldn’t believe their eyes when a car came flying out of nowhere — over three different trains. The car came flying down Baca which is a dead-end at 1st Street in Belen. Police said the driver hit this small embankment and landed on the other aside of those trains. They said the driver was doing almost 100 miles per hour down Baca Thursday morning. Police said there were no skid marks or indication of braking or slowing...

For about $700 you can travel more than 6,000 miles, from Moscow to Beijing, aboard the Trans-Siberian Railway, the single longest railway line in the world. Built between 1891 and 1916 to connect Asian and European cities across the great span of Russia, the Trans-Siberia Railway celebrates its centennial this year. Crossing a record seven time zones and offering up vast landscapes, the world's longest railway line has always attracted adventurers during its 100 years in service.

The Association of American Railroads (AAR) reported U.S. rail traffic for the week ending May 7, 2016: Total U.S. weekly rail traffic was 492,923 carloads and intermodal units, down 10.6% compared with the same week last year. Total carloads for the week ending May. 7 were 233,047 carloads, down 14.8% compared with the same week in 2015, while U.S. weekly intermodal volume was 259,876 containers and trailers, down 6.4% compared to 2015. Three of the 10 carload commodity groups posted an increase compared with the same week in 2015. They were miscellaneous carloads, up 6.7% to 9,839 carloads; chemicals, up...

We continue to get more evidence that the U.S. economy has entered a major downturn. Just last week, I wrote about how U.S. GDP growth numbers have been declining for three quarters in a row, and previously I wrote about how corporate defaults have surged to their highest level since the last financial crisis. Well, now we are getting some very depressing numbers from the rail industry. As you will see below, U.S. rail traffic was down more than 11 percent from a year ago in April. That is an absolutely catastrophic number, and the U.S. rail industry is feeling...

Vienna to Bratislava in 8 Minutes In 2013, Elon Musk’s SpaceX revealed the concept for a high-speed ground-transport system, dubbed the Hyperloop, which would travel around 700 mph and deliver passengers from Los Angeles to San Francisco in just 35 minutes. The idea: to create a faster, cheaper, safer and more environmentally conscious transit option — one in which pods travel through tubes with near-zero air pressure, and which is eons ahead of the hell that is Interstate 5. Three years later, however, the California Hyperloop is still a far cry from coming to fruition: SpaceX is currently holding an...

CSX Corp. executives said on Wednesday that current pressures on rail cargo volumes are at levels not seen outside a recession. “You have multiple aspects working against you: the low [natural] gas prices, the low commodity prices, the strength of the dollar,” Chief Executive Michael Ward said during an earnings call with analysts. “Except for markets like automotive and housing related, you’re seeing pressure on most of the markets.”

Railroads would be required to have at least two crew members aboard freight trains when they are traversing the state under a bill that won preliminary approval in the Colorado House . ... Minority Leader Brian Del Grosso, R-Loveland, took the Democrats to task over the bill, saying it is a poor way to deal with a problem he said they created. He said over the past several years, Democrats have made policy decisions that have contributed to the slowdown, and even closure of coal mines, citing the recent closure of the Bowie No. 2 mine near Paonia specifically. That...

According to the Association of American Railroads shows that rail traffic continues to slow down, as shipments of a range of commodities are sharply lower from a year ago. New data shows fewer shipped cargoes of coal, grain, metals, and oil across the United States in early November. For example, coal shipments are down 9.7 percent year-to-date compared to the same period in 2014. Cargoes of oil and other petroleum products are also down 7.7 percent over the same timeframe. For coal, the slowdown is due to dramatic fall off in coal production. As more and more coal plants are...

October 20, 2015 Norfolk Southern Railway Company and its rail operating subsidiaries (“NSR”) will no longer accept shipments of Poisonous-Inhalation-Hazard (“PIH”) commodities, effective Dec. 1, 2015. PIH commodities in transit on Dec. 1, 2015 will be delivered to destination by Dec. 31, 2015. Starting on December 1, 2015, NS will not pull PIH loads or residual cars from a facility on NS and will not accept such cars at interchange. As to traffic requiring interchange with a connecting railroad, the effective date of this cessation of service shall be accelerated as necessary to comply with any earlier cessation of service...

The May Amtrak derailment outside of Philadelphia put the sorry state of passenger rail in the United States briefly back on the public agenda, leaving many people wondering not just about the specifics of the crash but about the more general issue — how is it that a rich and powerful country that was a pioneer in railroad adoption in the 19th century has such terrible trains? The United States is a big country, with lots of trains in it. So you can really think of this big generic question as composed of three separate questions with separate answers. One...

Everything you really need to know about the Constitution (and that’s barely an exaggeration) -- why it is structured the way it is, what led to it, its purposes -- is found in pages 2 – 12 of the March 9 concurring opinion by Justice Thomas in the Dept of Transportation v Assn of American Railroads case. Although it received little media attention, Justice Thomas has provided us a masterpiece of constitutional thinking, explaining why “administrative law” -- the practice of delegating to bureaucrats the making and enforcement of rules with the force of law – is so profoundly unconstitutional....

As a young reporter in the 1970s, I covered the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC). Created in 1887, the ICC regulated the nation's railroads and sought to protect the public against abusive freight rates. Congress deregulated the railroads in 1980 and ultimately abolished the ICC. The verdict was that the agency had so weakened the industry that a government takeover might be necessary. Deregulation was a desperate alternative to nationalization. I mention all this because there are obvious parallels between the Internet today and the railroads in the late 19th century. Like the railroads then, the Internet today is the great...

West Coast docks are paralyzed as employers and longshoremen continued to spat about contracts and congestion problems. There are plenty of losers. Exporters, like farmers and ranchers, can't get their perishables to Asian markets during the Lunar New Year when demand for fruit and meat is particularly high. And importers large and small are beginning to report shipment delays and inventory shortages. Are there winners? Kind of … Air Freight. Some importers, like electronics dealers and luxury retailers, can afford to put their cargo on planes, despite at least a ten-fold increase in shipping costs. ... East Coast/Gulf Coast ports....

As fracking accelerates in North American shale fields, oilfield services providers Halliburton Co and Baker Hughes Inc are stockpiling sand to protect themselves against rising costs and are buying more railcars to transport the haul.