Quick Facts

Freight

  • Freight traffic is expected to increase 67 percent by 2020.
  • One intermodal train can carry the load of more than 280 trucks, freeing room for approximately 1,100 cars.
  • Each bulk and merchandise train can carry the load of up to 500 trucks.
  • U.S. container traffic nearly doubled over the last decade, and this trend is expected to continue.

In 2005, U.S. freight railroads hauled enough:

  • Coal to supply electricity to every home in America.
  • Wheat to make more than 400 loaves of bread for every man, woman and child in America.
  • Corn to supply the lifetime corn requirements of 28 billion chickens or 287 million hogs, or to feed more than 27 million dairy cows for a year.
  • Newsprint to print 11.4 billion newspapers — more than half of all the papers printed in the U.S. each year.
  • Fertilizer to spread 203 pounds on every acre of corn, wheat and soybeans planted in the United States — an area approximately equal to the combined land area of Illinois, Iowa, Wisconsin, Kansas and Nebraska.
  • Lumber to build approximately 1.1 million average-sized houses.
  • Traffic congestion is at critical levels in many major U.S. cities, causing $78 billion drain on U.S. economy due to lost time and fuel wasted.
  • Railroads are currently the only mode of transportation not significantly funded by the government. If railroads only maintained current share of transportation market, they would need to spend $175 billion to $195 billion in next 20 years just to accommodate freight needs.
  • In order to expand the freight rail network, the industry would need to invest an additional $148 billion over the next 30 years to make sure that there is adequate rail capacity to meet future demand.

Environment

  • Every railcar trip removes approximately three truck trips from congested highways.
  • Railroads can move one ton of freight three times as far as a truck on one gallon of fuel.
  • On a per ton-mile basis, railroads emit one-tenth the hydrocarbons and diesel particulates as trucks, and one-third the oxides of nitrogen and carbon.
  • If just 10 percent of long-haul freight now moving by truck moved by rail instead, annual greenhouse gas emissions would fall by more than 12 million tons.