States Reinvest in Once Abandoned Freight Lines

It is 6 o’clock on a recent morning and the thrum of Housatonic Railroad freight train NX-13’s twin diesels is deepening. Engineer P.J. Bailly releases the air brakes and eases the early morning train south down the railroad’s main line. It is hauling a variety of materials, from ethanol and lumber, to paper goods, construction and demolition debris. In all, the Housatonic Railroad hauls some 6,000 cars’ worth of freight a year between its southern end in Danbury, Conn., and its northern terminus in Pittsfield, Mass. There, it exchanges cars with the major East Coast railroad, CSX.

While there’s no definitive data on the railroad’s economic impact on the two states in which it operates, the businesses served by the Housatonic employ 3,000 people. The companies served by the railroad, in turn, do millions of dollars’ worth of business in products and services annually, adding to secondary employment numbers.

That the train is on the tracks at all this morning, though, is something of a miracle—a miracle for which the state of Connecticut is directly responsible. Connecticut was one of a group of states with the foresight in the 1970s and 1980s to step in and snap up abandoned rail lines at a time when railroads nationally were jettisoning thousands of miles of right of way in the face of an epidemic of railroad bankruptcies. “Back then,” says John Hanlon, president of the Housatonic Railroad, “railroads were almost viewed as irrelevant.”

Indeed, a growing number of states are beginning to look to rail. Projects being supported in part by government now range from the modest—a $207,000 grant from the New York state Passenger and Freight Rail Assistance Program to rehabilitate a paper company at the Port of Albany in New York—to the hugely ambitious, such as one in the Chicago area. This particular project is a partnership between the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT), the state of Illinois, the city of Chicago, Metra (Chicago’s regional commuter rail line), Amtrak and numerous private freight railroads. Known as CREATE (Chicago Region Environmental and Transportation Efficiency), billions of dollars are being invested in rail and road infrastructure improvements in and around Chicago aimed at opening up what railroaders and transportation officials alike regard as the country’s worst rail bottleneck.

The emphasis is on strategy because Wise has his eye on the newly widened Panama Canal, which has set off a national and international arms race to upgrade the capacity of ports. Florida has invested millions along with private railroads to improve rail access to its ports, including tracks to the Port of Miami. It’s a $500 million investment in rail freight capacity statewide by CSX Transportation, using $432 million from the proceeds of a Central Florida rail corridor purchase by the state for commuter rail service in the Orlando area. Additionally, the Florida DOT partnered with the Florida East Coast Railway, Port of Miami and U.S. DOT in a $49 million project to restore on-dock rail service to the port.