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YOU COULD CALL CANADIAN NATIONAL a lopsided railroad. For 15 years it's been the fastest growing of the big six railroads in North America. But most of the growth has [...]

TEXAS, AS ANY TEXAN WILL TELL YOU, is unlike any other state in the union. You could say the same thing about railroading in Texas. Can you name another state [...]

RAFAEL SANTANA BECAME president and CEO of Wabtec July 1, after the historic merger earlier in 2019 with GE Transportation, where he had been CEO. TRAINS spoke with Santana about [...]

TRY TO IMAGINE 16,132 freight trains, each with 75 cars, just simply vanishing. It seems implausible, right? Yet that's precisely the amount of merchandise traffic that CSX Transportation and Norfolk [...]

ANALYST ANTHONY B. HATCH has been covering railroads since 1985. After 14 years on Wall Street, Hatch founded his New York-based consulting firm in 1998. ABH Consulting provides railroad and [...]

Nothing says 'NAFTA Railway' quite like a Kansas City Southern stack train crawling across the International Railway Bridge at Laredo, Texas, with a consist that includes a block of Canadian [...]

Canadian Pacific Railway was the industry's dog back in 2011. Take away its 2007 acquisition of regional Dakota, Minnesota & Eastern, and for five years CP's revenue had been sinking. [...]

EACH DAY, Florida East Coast Railway does the impossible: It loads its own containers on double-stack cars at Jacksonville, Fla., and then launches them to Miami, just 351 miles to [...]

A century ago, New York Harbor was teeming with carfloats that shuttled railcars between New Jersey and New York City. Even as late as 1964 a dozen railroads still floated [...]

An operating ratio is a strange thing. It is the only financial statistic that you can see in action every day. That's particularly been the case over the past decade, [...]

The NJ Transit of the 1990s was a standard-bearer of U.S. commuter rail operations. Growing ridership and strong on-time performance helped earn an American Public Transportation Association award for outstanding [...]

RAILROAD TRENDS COME AND GO. In the 1980s, newly deregulated railroads shed trackage, merged, and figured out how to survive in a competitive marketplace. In the 1990s, railroad CEOs built [...]

AS RAILROADS ADOPTING Precision Scheduled Railroading lay off employees, close yards, and store locomotives and freight cars, executives insist the changes are not a way for the industry to merely [...]

Railroads are sitting on two ticking time bombs: autonomous and semi-autonomous trucks. You can't be sure if or when they will go off. But you cannot ignore the potential of [...]

ROBERT LAUBY, the top career safety officer at the Federal Railroad Administration, retired April 13 as associate administrator for railroad safety. Lauby joined FRA in 2005 as a senior systems [...]

RAILROADS ARE ENJOYING another surge in crude-oil traffic, three years after the previous crude-by-rail boom went bust.The rising tide of oil traffic is focused on Canada this time, and less [...]

A Mexican mining company shocked the railroad world when it emerged victorious in bidding for the Florida East Coast Railway. Grupo Mexico, which also owns Mexico's largest railroad, in March [...]

Stock markets bet on Hunter. After transforming Illinois Central, Canadian National, and Canadian Pacific into ultra-efficient and highly profitable railroads over the past three decades, E. Hunter Harrison in January [...]

Cut through all of the positive industry statistics and trends over the past decade and one stark fact emerges: Traffic peaked in 2006. The ugly reality is that, in terms [...]

With overall rail traffic slumping 5 percent in the U.S. last year, and sliding 3.1 percent in Canada, 2016 will go down as an off year marked by a number [...]

Back in 2005, the U.S. petrochemical industry was saddled with the world's highest production costs. There were dire predictions about the industry's future, including talk about plastic imports coming to [...]

Norfolk Southern has an ambitious goal for its carload business: Make it competitive with trucks. But to make that happen, the railroad has a lot of work to do over [...]

Jim McClellan possessed a rare combination of leadership, vision, knowledge, and a love of railroading. Could the rail industry of today produce another McClellan? Probably not, according to several current [...]

Your guess is as good as ours on what will happen in 2017. Judging from recent comments though, the industry has a lot to look forward to. Here's TRAINS' list [...]

The complex, expensive, and often cumbersome way that federal regulators determine whether railroad rates are reasonable does not need an overhaul. That's the conclusion of an independent analysis of the [...]

THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE GRAND TRUNK PACIFIC and its subsequent collapse in 1919, just five years after opening as a through route to Prince Rupert, ranks among the bigger busts [...]

Hunter Harrison famously closed hump yards while bringing his Precision Scheduled Railroading operating model to Canadian National, Canadian Pacific, and CSX Transportation. Conventional wisdom says this signature move of PSR [...]

CHANGES CONTINUE AT YARDS across Union Pacific as part of the railroad's implementation of its version of Precision Scheduled Railroading. The most recent move saw the hump at Davidson Yard [...]

Is BNSF Railway vs. Canadian National a fair race? You're standing alongside BNSF Railways double-track Southern Transcon in the Texas Panhandle. Bearing down on you at 70 mph: A 12,000-foot [...]

Short lines have become a hot commodity. There's intense competition among potential buyers as individual railroads, shortline holding companies, and Class I routes are put up for sale. And that [...]

CANADIAN PACIFIC will acquire the Central Maine & Quebec Railway, with plans to upgrade the route to handle premium intermodal and automotive traffic. CP announced Nov. 20, 2019, that it [...]

Journalist-turned-author Howard Green conducted more than 14,000 interviews while at Canada's Business News Network, including the CEOs of every major Canadian company and more than a few American firms. But [...]

Wabtec executives are excited about joining two companies with a rich engineering heritage and a combined 250 years of experience in railroading. 'This is truly a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,' Wabtec CEO [...]

You're a railroad CEO. Your headquarters may be in Calgary, Fort Worth, Jacksonville, Kansas City, Montreal, Norfolk, or Omaha. Regardless, the view from your desk is the same: Your railroad, [...]

Railroading's growth engine seems to be running on fumes. Intermodal was down 3 percent through the end of August, with both international and domestic traffic facing a slew of challenges. [...]

Declining rail traffic--down 7.1 percent through the first half of the year throughout North America--means it's an unlucky time to be a train crew member, shop employee, or an aging [...]

Rail traffic, which has been disappointingly weak all year, should begin to pick up in the second half of 2016 across traffic segments, executives from several Class I railroads said [...]

Two railroads have new CEOs as of July. Luc Jobin, Canadian National's CFO, will take over from Claude Mongeau, while Pat Ottensmeyer will take Kansas City Southern's reins from David [...]

Canadian Pacific's plan to acquire Norfolk Southern ultimately succumbed to overwhelming opposition. But it was doomed from the start. CEO E. Hunter Harrison was never able to coax or force [...]

A once pitched public battle for control of Norfolk Southern is now a subdued campaign Canadian Pacific's ongoing pursuit of Norfolk Southern generated more questions than answers as March opened. [...]

Canadian Pacific is set to put all it has into a bid for Norfolk Southern. Here's what to watch Before watching a big game, fans know the basic statistics of [...]

Are you ready for big business to be a spectator sport? After Canadian Pacific CEO E. Hunter Harrison told investors on Dec. 8 that he is prepared to go to [...]

Winning shareholders will be easy compared to what Canadian Pacific and Norfolk Southern would have to do to show the Surface Transportation Board that a combination is good for the [...]

Railroads and shippers were relieved after President Barack Obama signed legislation on Oct. 29, 2015, that gives the industry three more years to implement positive train control, averting an unprecedented [...]

Looking to avoid an unprecedented shutdown of the national rail network--and the gridlock and economic crisis that would follow--Congress in October was working on legislation to extend the deadline for [...]

INVESTIGATORS ARE TRYING to determine why two CSX Transportation trains collided in August on an Ohio line protected by positive train control, the multibillion-dollar safety system designed to prevent collisions. [...]

CANADIAN NATIONAL WILL PURCHASE CSX Transportations line linking the Syracuse, N.Y., area with Montreal. The August deal came just three weeks after the railroads said they would begin joint intermodal [...]

AS RAILROADS ADOPT the Precision Scheduled Railroading operating model, some disgruntled shippers are making it clear they find precisely nothing to like about PSR. In late July, Union Pacific, Norfolk [...]

THE SURFACE TRANSPORTATION BOARD HAS BEEN ASKED to settle a pair of disputes in Chicago--one between Amtrak and commuter railroad Metra at Chicago Union Station, and one between the two [...]

PRECISION SCHEDULED RAILROADING is unfolding in predictable and unpredictable ways on Class I systems this year. Union Pacific will consolidate six Chicago-area intermodal terminals into four in July. And Chief [...]