Word: freights
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Newark, New Jersey, and up the west side of the Hudson River, three locomotives lug 63 flatbed freight cars -- almost a mile of Conrail train for United Parcel and the U.S. Postal Service, due in California in 72 hours. Engineer Jim Metzger, 42, flicks his eyes like beacons from digital screens inside his cab to the roadbed and back -- right hand on the throttle controlling 11,400 horses, left hand on the three-tone whistle, two longs, a short and a long at every crossing. Past suburban backyards and friendly waves, through the West Point tunnel, rolling from 35 m.p.h...
...given 24 hours, there are 20,000 freight trains moving somewhere in this nation, growling over the plains, clanging through urban switches and laboring up mountain passes, carrying 37% of the stuff the country produces and consumes. Their long tails, sometimes stretching two miles behind, are mostly hidden in the swells and crevices of the land. Their mournful calls are filtered to whispers inside the hermetic minivans and campers off on the highways -- out of sight, out of sound and largely out of the national mind...
...great freight routes, which bear 90% of the business of the 535 surviving railroads, are all profitable these days. They make up a $27.5 billion industry that nets $1.95 billion and can easily absorb the $200 million damage from the Midwest flood that inundated 500 miles of track and caused 1,000 trains to be rerouted. Emerging from a century and a half of wild venture, corruption and the suffocating hand of government, they are a gathering economic force, destined to get stronger in a transport picture dotted with troubled ships, planes and trucks...
...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...