enroute
BY MARK B. SOLOMON, SENIOR EDITOR
INTERMODAL
show me
the green
Railroads tout intermodal as the environmentally
friendly way to ship. Can the economic case be
made to shippers?
IN THE NEVER-ENDING BATTLE BETWEEN
rails and truckers to win the hearts, minds, and
budgets of shippers, it seemed only a matter of
time before the environment became a competitive
weapon. And that’s precisely what happened.
The Web site of the Association of American Railroads, the
leading rail trade group, states that, on average, a train can carry one freight ton
436 miles on a gallon of fuel—four times farther than a truck can—and that an intermodal train removes 280 trucks, or the equivalent of 1,100 automobiles, from the road.
AAR also notes that each ton-mile of freight moving by rail instead of on the highway cuts
greenhouse gas emissions by more than two-thirds, and that by shifting 10 percent of domestic freight from truck to rail, emissions would be reduced by 12 percent and 1 billion gallons
of fuel would be saved each year.
The AAR site includes a “carbon calculator” that allows users to plug in data on train sizes,
traffic lanes, and commodities hauled to determine the reductions in carbon footprint if the
goods moved by rail rather than truck. For example, a 100-car train moving intermodal or
consumer-goods shipments from Atlanta to Chicago would save 125 tons of CO compared
2
to the same amount of freight moving on the highway, according to the calculator. It would
take 2,909 tree seedlings 10 years to remove that amount of carbon from the environment, the
AAR site says.
While the numbers keep AAR statisticians busy and employed, they do little to endear the
railroads to what is at once their chief rival and their key partner and customer: the trucking
industry. Truck advocates argue that some environmental data spouted by the railroads is misleading, noting that even if virtually all long-haul truck freight (roughly defined as freight
moving more than 550 miles) migrated to intermodal, a truck would still start and finish
every intermodal haul. Thus, the elimination of long-haul truck movements would barely
make a dent in the number of commercial vehicles on the road, truck advocates say.
