Word: freight
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...pushed the rails into the modern world in 1980 with a deregulation bill that allowed the lines to make quick market adjustments of fees and practices. The rails shrank their lines a third (to 196,081 miles), sweated employment from more than half a million to 280,000, doubled freight-car capacity by stacking containers, curbed damage to products. They hauled 40% more freight with 40% fewer cars, bored out mountain tunnels to take the 20-ft.-high stacks, lowered roadbeds beneath highways and city streets, upgraded beds and bridges and steel rails to the best condition in history...
...railroads have computerized terminals and yards so that every engine and car is shown on a screen somewhere. Union Pacific dispatcher John Cazahous in Omaha, Nebraska, once spotted 14 runaway freight cars from another line 1,500 miles away in Los Angeles. Within 11 minutes he had alerted California crews, who placed three locomotives in the path to take the crunch. No lives were lost. Locomotives that used to sit for days waiting for loaded cars are now turned around in hours. Empty cars are shuttled like airplanes. Huge "hump" operations like Conrail's Selkirk Yard, near Albany, New York...
...railroad people, from corporate towers to the yards, seem to have sniffed the new promise. Deloyt Young, manager of the world's largest freight yard, U.P.'s Bailey Yard in North Platte, Nebraska, knows every inch of his eight-mile domain, a moving mosaic of thousands of cars and engines. It is hard by the old ranch where Buffalo Bill Cody assembled his Wild West show (complete with conquered Sioux Chief Sitting Bull) and sent it out on tour aboard U.P. trains. "I don't need an economist to tell me when things are good or bad," Young says...
...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...
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...