Railroad

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Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy is under fire for claiming credit for new Amtrak trains, as well as funding and improvements, all of which came from President Joe Biden’s landmark bipartisan infrastructure law — the nation’s largest infrastructure investment in more than half a century.

“Announcing the NextGen Acela!” Secretary Duffy declared on Wednesday. He touted the “brand new beautiful trains” delivered by U.S. DOT and Amtrak that will, he wrote, “increase reliability,” “lower ticket costs,” and “improve Amtrak profitability.”

“This is all part of @POTUS’ vision to Make Travel Great again,” Duffy claimed.

But several critics were quick to point to President Joe Biden’s Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) that was signed into law in November 2021.

IFrame Content

CNN senior reporter Edward-Isaac Dovere wrote: “as detailed on the Amtrak website, the improvements that Secretary Duffy says are all part of Trump’s ‘vision to Make Travel Great again’ are in fact from the Biden-signed bipartisan infrastructure act, and which were underway long before Trump took office again in January.”

The “information about the source of the funding for the ‘new era of rail’ — a priority for famously Amtrak-loving Biden — is up on the Amtrak site here,” he noted, pointing to this Amtrak website, which reads:

“This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity for Amtrak and passenger rail to play a central role in improving how people move and securing our economic future. This historic legislation provides $66 billion for rail, including: $22 billion directly to Amtrak over five years to repair or replace aging assets, modernize our fleet, improve station accessibility, and other capital projects and purposes defined under the law.”

Also, Amtrak noted, “$44 billion for Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) discretionary grants to support various improvements to passenger and freight railroads.”

Others also blasted the DOT chief.

“Sean Duffy, surprising absolutely no one, taking credit for something brought to you in large part by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, signed by President Biden,” charged former chief Pentagon spokesperson Chris Meagher.

Watch the video below or at this link.

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rail industry spent $654 million on federal lobbying over past 20 years: analysis

https://www.alternet.org/environment/railroad/

https://www.desmog.com/2019/05/30/trump-federal-railroad-administration-crew-staffing-self-regulation-rail-industry/

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Donald Trump Junior conjured up a new conspiracy theory over the weekend regarding train derailments. His hypothesis is that hackers working on behalf of the Russian government were responsible for the February 3rd East Palestine, Ohio Norfolk Southern disaster as well as, perhaps, other incidents involving railcars disconnecting from their tracks.

Shortly after the crash that spilled toxic substances like vinyl chloride and forced thousands of residents to evacuate, many began to recall that Junior's father, former President Donald Trump, loosened regulations on braking mechanisms and safety features during his term.

But that is not the narrative that Junior was presenting.

"No MSDS for the chemicals on train. Yeah, I don't know what that, I don't know what the acronym is. I'm sorry. Um, but yeah, there, it's just gonna keep going. And I read about a spill in Houston and another one in Detroit," Junior said. "And again, it feels like a lot. Hey, maybe there's a train derailment every day. I, I don't know, but like, it seems like we're having an awful lot of train derailments that we're finally hearing about, uh, in the last few days."

Statistically, these are common occurrences, with around three per day on average according to the United States Department of Transportation Federal Railroad Administration. Junior also was unaware that MSDS stands for Material Safety Data Sheet, which is used to catalog hazardous materials and the potential harm that they can cause.

Nevertheless, Junior pressed on, positing that Moscow could be retaliating for the destruction of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline last September:

And all of that happens to come, after, you know, an alleged US attack on a Russian pipeline. And, you know, we know they have very sophisticated, uh, hackers working in the systems and like, does anyone even ask the question? I'm not saying it is. I'll say I'm a conspiracy theorist. Like, uh, I, I don't know, seems like a question we'd wanna ask even if it's refuted with actual evidence. That would be nice. Like, I'd love that for it to not be the case, but maybe it's just a whole sh*t ton of coincidence. Uh, but, I don't believe in that much coincidence anymore.

MSDS material safety data sheet. Ah, yeah. I don't, they have 'em, but they have 'em, but they burned them up. Yeah. That wouldn't surprise me. It seems like the evidence always magically disappears, right? It, it always goes away. Or it, it's discovered conveniently after the other side gets what they want. Uh, again, if you still believe in this much coincidence, folks, I got some, uh, oceanfront property in Colorado to sell you.

Watch below or at this link.

Safety Can't Be a 'Pretext' for Regulating Unsafe Oil Trains, Says Trump Admin

https://www.desmogblog.com/2020/05/20/trump-phmsa-safety-washington-vapor-pressure-oil-trains

desmog

https://www.desmogblog.com/2019/11/14/new-paper-reveals-rail-industry-was-leader-climate-denial-efforts

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New Paper Reveals Rail Industry Was Leader in Climate Denial Efforts

By Justin Mikulka • Thursday, November 14, 2019 - 07:58

A recent paper analyzing the major players in the organized efforts to attack climate change science and delay action had a surprising revelation — the biggest contributing industry/sector was not oil and gas but rail/steel/coal with the most active organization in the climate denial movement being the Association of American Railroads (AAR).

In the paper, Networks of Opposition: A Structural Analysis of U.S. Climate Change Countermovement Coalitions 1989-2015, author Robert Brulle, looks at “key political coalitions that worked to oppose climate action. In conjunction with their allied trade associations, these coalitions have served as a central coordination mechanism in efforts opposed to mandatory limits on carbon emissions.”

And the allied trade association that was most active was the AAR. Why would the rail industry care about climate change and be active in promoting denial? Coal.

Coal has historically been the biggest business for U.S. rail, and still generates over 16% of Class 1 rail revenue in 2018, according to the AAR. Without coal the U.S. rail industry has a major revenue problem — which explains the decades of climate denial activity documented in this new paper.

Of course, the U.S. coal industry is in serious decline despite all of the climate denialism funded by the rail and coal industries. Moody’s has estimated that the rail industry is facing a loss of $5 billion in coal revenues (from current levels of approximately $10 billion) by 2030.

That reality hasn’t stopped the AAR from continuing to push coal while not acknowledging climate change. In a May 2019 publication on rail and coal, the AAR fails to mention climate change while also touting debunked ideas like “clean coal” as potential lifelines for the dying coal industry.

AAR and History of Science Denial

In my book, Bomb Trains: How Industry Greed and Regulatory Failure Put the Public at Risk, I document how the AAR has a history of adopting the climate change denial model of attacking known science to delay, deny and repeal safety regulations. This is the model that worked well for the tobacco industry and continues to be an effective method for lobbyists like the AAR to work with members of Congress and regulators to prioritize corporate profits over public safety.

Much like how Exxon knew the science of climate change long before it started spending big money to mislead the public about that reality, the rail industry and the AAR have done the same with safety measures like modern electronically controlled pneumatic (ECP) brakes.

As I have documented for DeSmog, the rail industry and the AAR and regulators at the Federal Railroad Administration all have agreed that, based on the research, ECP brakes are far superior to the current brakes used on oil trains.

Until new regulations were proposed to require those brakes on oil trains in the future. Then the AAR and industry just changed the story and said there was no science supporting the safety benefits of ECP brakes — after years of being on record saying the opposite. In one case lobbyists for the AAR were in Washington, D.C. lobbying against modern brakes while a derailed oil train was still burning in Illinois.

The AAR even ran ads on Google attacking the facts of ECP brakes.

Image: Screen capture of Google ad from American Association of Railroads.]

The industry has taken a similar approach to denying the science of the impacts of sloshing on train derailments and ignoring the risks of trains that are too heavy and too long.

And perhaps the most egregious example is the rail industry working with the American Petroleum Institute to deny the known science of oil that is the reason oil trains are known as bomb trains. The oil industry claims it doesn’t understand the science of oil — one of the great science denial claims of all time — and as with all such claims it is about putting profits over safety. The rail industry learned this lesson well.

Climate Change Will Wreak Havoc With Rail

While the rail industry has worked to protect its financial interests by supporting climate denial efforts, it also is an industry that is facing huge climate related challenges — well beyond just the loss of its coal business.

In March, the journal Transport Policy published the paper Impacts of Climate change on Operation of US Rail Networks that estimated the costs of temperature increases due to climate change could reach $45 to $60 billion by 2100.

Temperatures extremes — both hot and cold — cause big problems for railroads because metal rails don’t react well to extreme temperatures. The industry has known for years about “sun kinks” which is the term for when metal rails buckle in extreme heat which can cause train derailments.

In July, Mashable featured the issue of heat and railroads and the outlook wasn’t good.

“This is not a problem that’s going away,” Paul Chinowsky, a civil engineer at the University of Colorado Boulder and author of the Transport Policy paper, told Mashable. Chinowsky also noted that rail companies are already stopping traffic during the hottest times of the day in places like Virginia and Arizona. And the article notes the many problems for rail caused by the record heat wave in Europe this summer.

Just this week, Alex Hynes, the managing director of Scotland’s railway, admitted the reality of rail and climate change when he stated that, “The railway in this country can no longer cope because of climate change.”

Flooding on the Tracks

Extreme temperatures are not the only climate related problem facing the railroads. Due to the favorable topography, rail lines tend to follow bodies of water and often travel along lakes, rivers and the ocean putting much of the rail infrastructure at risk of extreme weather causing flooding and sea level rise flooding tracks.

One well known risk is the Northeast Corridor of Amtrak — the busiest stretch of track in the country that runs from Boston to Washington, D.C. — which is at risk of chronic flooding due to sea level rise.

Despite the clear evidence of the risks supported by a study that Bloomberg was able to acquire via a Freedom of Information request last year, Stepen Garder, Amtrak executive vice president and chief commercial officer, told Bloomberg that “We don’t see any fundamental risks to the integrity of the corridor.”

The reason given to Bloomberg why Amtrak didn't release the report to the public was that “it could possibly cause public confusion.” If the public is confused about the reality of climate change and sea-level rise the rail industry and AAR are a big part of the reason why.

Despite some attempts to continue to deny reality, the rail industry can't hide from the facts forever.

On the website for rail company Union Pacific it acknowledges that “the Earth's climate is changing” and then lists some of the potential risks including, “extreme weather events, such as blizzards, floods and hurricanes” as well as “the impact of potential sea level rise.”

The rail industry has a big climate problem that is going to cost it huge amounts of money and present some potentially unsolveable problems like, “Where do you relocate the busiest section of track in the country when it floods?” The answer to that question is essentially … you can’t.

The rail industry engaged in short term thinking with its support of climate denial and now coal is dying and the bill is going to come due for the reality of climate change as it wreaks havoc on the rail industry.

Andrew Quinn, a civil engineer at the University of Birmingham and lead author on the paper Rail Adapt: Adapting the railway for the future summed up the new reality of how railways can no longer deny climate change.

“Every decision [rail companies] make should take into account climate change,” said Quinn. “This is an ongoing thing.”

The rail industry should stop wasting money on science denial because it will need every last dollar to deal with the looming climate-related crises it faces.

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Trump administration’s Department of Transportation (DOT) withdrew another rail safety recommendation originally proposed during the Obama administration. In the process, the agency made quite clear that it has no plans to further regulate the rail industry, especially the dangerous and continued transportation of oil and ethanol in unsafe tank cars.

The latest proposed rule to be withdrawn would have required two-person crews on trains. Supporters of this rule argue that two-person crews are safer because the job of operating a train is too demanding for one person, new technologies are making the job more complex, and fatigue becomes a more serious issue with only one crew member. Since 2017, the Trump administration has already repealed a regulation requiring modern brakesfor oil trains and canceled a plan requiring train operators to be tested for sleep apnea.

Germany launches world’s first hydrogen-powered train

http://news.muckety.com/2014/05/05/warren-buffetts-massive-railroad-lobby/46691

The Sightline Institute, a Seattle-based think tank, calls the avuncular billionaire “the man behind the exploding trains.”

Buffett’s company, Berkshire Hathaway, owns Union Tank Car Company, North America’s largest leaser of tank cars. Berkshire also owns BNSF Railway Company, which moves many of those cars.

To understand what a big deal this is, take a look at the chart at right, from the Association of American Railroads.

Rail transport of crude oil has skyrocketed in the last four years. As North American oil production has outstripped pipeline capacity, trains have taken up the slack.

Because towns, villages and cities grew up along rail lines, these cars pass through heavily populated areas en route to refineries. Several communities in the U.S. and Canada have paid a steep price.

In July, a runaway train devastated the Quebec town of Lac-Mégantic, killing 47 people.

In December, a train derailed and exploded in Casselton, ND.

Last month, another oil train derailed in Lynchburg, VA, causing a spill in the James River and forcing evacuation of the community.

As MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow remarked on her show Friday, “There’s a reason people have started calling these things ‘bomb trains.’ And that’s because they keep blowing up.”

The U.S. Department of Transportation last week sent the White House a package of rules designed to increase rail safety, following Canada’s announcement of tighter regulations.

Deborah Hersman, the recently departed chair of the National Transportation Safety Board, called on the Obama administration to act as soon as possible, rather than getting bogged down in the typical cycle of lobbying, counter-legislation and rule rewrites.

“This issue needs to be acted on very quickly,” she told reporters. “There is a very high risk here that hasn’t been addressed.”

Buffett has spoken out in favor of improved rail safety. “We’re going to move a lot of crude in this country, and we have to learn how to do it very safely,” he told Reuters.

However, Berkshire’s rail interests have paid millions to shape the government response.

BNSF spent $5.2 million last year lobbying in Washington.

The Association of American Railroads, of which BNSF is a member, spent more than $6.5 million. Its lobbyists include former U.S. Reps. Max Sandlin and Vin Weber, and former Sens. John Breaux and Trent Lott.

The darker blue boxes in the interactive Muckety map above are lobby shops representing the trade group and BNSF.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/03/26/exploding-oil-train-legislation_n_6951284.html

A group of Democratic senators wants to improve the safety of transporting oil by rail in the United States, following a series of high-profile derailments that led to fires and explosions.

Sens. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), Patty Murray (D-Wash.), Tammy Baldwin (D-Wisc.), and Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) on Wednesday introduced the Crude-By-Rail Safety Act, which would direct the Department of Transportation's Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration to bar the use of older, riskier types of tankers and ask it to set standards for the volatility of gases in tank cars -- meaning they won't explode as easily. The legislation would also set standards for new tankers, requiring thicker shells, thermal protection and pressure relief valves.

In one recent major incident, a train carrying 3 million gallons of crude oil derailed last month in West Virginia, causing a massive fire and requiring an evacuation. Another train derailed and caught fire in Illinois in early March.

Concern about the safety of tankers is on the rise. A recent federal government report predicted an average of 10 oil train derailments a year and $4.5 billion in damage over the next two decades. The DOT hasalso proposed stricter rules for transporting oil by rail, but has delayed issuing final rules.

"Every new derailment i

just want to make sure that we are all singing the same tune that we have a very safe industry and we want to work together on improving that industry.”

Those were the words of Rep. Jeff Denham (R-CA), chairman of the House Subcommittee on Railroads, Pipelines, and Hazardous Materials on February 3rd at a hearing titled “How the Changing Energy Markets Will Affect U.S. Transportation.” He was directing this advice to Greg Saxton, chief engineer for rail tank car manufacturer Greenbrier.

Denham obviously had a bone to pick with Saxton because prior to the hearing the Modesto Bee, a newspaper in Denham’s home district, ran an editorial making a strong case that the existing tank cars used to transport crude oil are unsafe. The editorial, “Delays on safer rail cars are unacceptable,” didn’t mince words. It was clear on what should happen: “The DOT [Department of Transportation] should adopt rules for those cars then set deadlines to replace every single tank car in America. Our elected representatives should insist on it.”

In Modesto, the elected representative who should be insisting on that is Jeff Denham.

Modesto is also home to Greenbrier’s manufacturing facilities and the editorial quoted Saxton for its conclusion noting his position on the lack of new regulations. “We just need a decision. Twenty years is too long.”

This is not the tune that Chairman Denham wants everyone to be singing. In his comments to Saxton at the hearing he explained his intent.

“I’m making sure that the wrong people are not talking to the Ed boards across the country that would give a wrong perception of our current situation.”

Apparently Saxton is one of the “wrong people” to talk to editorial boards because of his insistence on adhering to the facts. Denham went on to explain what he wants the American public to hear, while of course taking a shot at the Obama administration for good measure.

Rep. Denham said:

“I want to make sure as the administration drags their feet or reorganizes or does some shuffling that there is not a misperception out there in the American public that a) that our current tank cars are not safe, that our industry does not have a safe record and, most importantly, that there is not some magic quick fast track to get all of these new tank cars online very, very quickly.”

Where would the American public get the “misperception” that current oil-by-rail tank cars aren’t safe? Perhaps from the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), which has raised concerns repeatedly about the DOT-111 tank cars for the last 20 years.

This year, the NTSB added the issue of rail tank car safety to its Most Wanted List of items to improve transportation safety. Last year, an NTSB board member testified that using the DOT-111 rail cars to transport crude oil posed an “unacceptable public risk.”

The American public may also have noticed that a couple days after Denham’s talk about telling the American public that rail tank cars are safe, a train carrying ethanol derailed, rail cars were punctured, caught fire and spilled ethanol into the Mississippi River.

The main argument Denham and the oil and rail industries are making is that it just isn’t possible to replace all of the DOT-111 cars on the schedule proposed by the Department of Transportation (DOT).

In an earlier Senate hearing on this topic, Sen. John Thune (R-SD), claimed that the DOT’s timeline for replacing the unsafe cars was “unattainable.”

Meanwhile, Saxton, the chief engineer at the largest tank car manufacturer claims the industry can meet the deadlines, a point Greenbrier has made throughout the past year regarding this issue and one that is included in the proposed regulations from July 2014. This isn’t a new idea.

As reported on DeSmog almost a year ago, the reason the industry is fighting against these timelines to replace the cars is that they need the cars to meet the increasing industry demand to move crude by rail. Instead of replacing the old unsafe cars, the industry wants to simply add any new cars to the fleet that is moving crude oil.

In this debate — and the debate on what to do about the explosive nature of the Bakken crude oil moved in the DOT-111’s — the industry and its champions in congress like Rep. Denham, continue to engage in finger-pointing and obfuscation to make it appear like these claims are reasonable.

“I know that you have a PR [public relations] staff that is very busy working with a lot of op-ed boards around the country,” Denham said to Saxton, “So as they continue to have those discussions I want to make sure they are dealing with some factual information.”

Rep. Denham did not go on to provide any factual information to dispute Saxton’s claims. What he did was use an example to try to make his case that ignored the facts.

“125,000 tanks cars in the fleet currently today. You have the capacity to build how many… 8,000 a year?” Denham asked Saxton, who confirmed that this was true. “So if you were building 8,000 a year the backlog would be about a decade.”

Although Denham’s “about a decade math” is shaky based on the numbers he was using (125/8=15.6), the industry wants a decade to replace the dangerous rail cars, so that is the answer they always get when they do their math.

However, the whole premise is completely misleading. The facts are that no one is saying that 125,000 tank cars need to be replaced and the rail tank car industry has a much greater capacity than 8,000 cars per year.

The proposed regulations note that there are currently 22,800 non-jacketed DOT-111 tank cars in use for crude oil, and an additional 5,500 jacketed DOT-111’s.

The current industry capacity for new rail tank car production is 35,000 per year.

So when Rep. Denham says “I want to see some numbers” — he is bluffing because he knows that the numbers tell a far different story than the tune he is singing.

At the Feb. 3 hearing, Denham’s behavior illustrated again how these public hearings are merely public relations spectacles designed to send an industry-approved message to the American public.

Meanwhile, the real discussions about the new regulations are happening in private meetings between industry and its regulators. In these private meetings the industry lobbies against new tank cars, new braking systems, making the oil safer, and any speed limits for the trains.

Rep. Denham wants the American public to believe there isn’t “some magic quick fast track” way to replace the unsafe tank cars and that it is going to take a decade.

The reality is that the industry has the capacity to replace the tank cars on the timeline in the proposed regulations and there is no need to wait a decade to address this “unacceptable public risk.”

But since doing that would cut into industry profits, the industry and its representatives in congress maintain this is “unattainable.”

They’re singing from the same songbook, and that should scare every American living near the bomb train blast zone.

http://desmogblog.cmail2.com/t/t-l-yuuixl-yuirlyty-e/

Exclusive: E-mails Reveal Feds and Rail Companies Pressured States to Keep Oil-by-Rail Information Secret

Documents released to DeSmogBlog by the Washington State Military Department reveal that both the Department of Transportation (DOT) and rail companies attempted to pressure states including Washington to keep information about Bakken crude oil trains from the public.

CLICK TO READ MORE

http://www.globalpossibilities.org/map-25-million-americans-live-within-the-blast-zone-of-an-oil-train-explosion/

greenpeace 2011

Another misleading claim from Koch Industries’ chemical security policy statement is that, “during this time not one incident of terrorism has occurred.” The danger of this argument is that it directs attention away from the real issue: terrorists are actively seeking opportunities to attack our chemical infrastructure, and a single successful attack could be catastrophic for millions of Americans. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, for example, it was discovered that the hijackers’ ringleader, Mohammed Atta, may have been interested in staging an attack on a chemical facility that stockpiled 250 tons of Sulfur Dioxide, a chemical of interest regulated under CFATS. More recently, the Lashkar-i-Taiba terrorist network, the group responsible for the 2008 Mumbai attacks, had terrorists conduct surveillance operations on a high-risk chemical facility in Maryland. Information from the journal of Osama Bin Laden has revealedAl Qaeda’s interest in attacking the American rail system, the most common method used to transport hazardous chemicals throughout the country.The Department of Homeland security has also issued a warning to utilities, including water treatment facilities that use chlorine gas, that their facilities may be victims of an insider attack. The assumption that because terrorists have not yet attacked a U.S. chemical facility, they will not do so is simply wishful thinking. To truly end the catastrophic threat that chemical facilities pose to communities we must eliminate any possibility of a chemical disaster, terrorist induced or accidental.

http://www.alternet.org/print/environment/white-house-meeting-logs-big-rail-lobbying-against-bomb-train-regulations-it-publicly

DeSmogBlog [1] / By Justin Mikulka and Steve Horn [2]

White House Meeting Logs: Big Rail Lobbying Against "Bomb Train" Regulations It Publicly Touts

June 23, 2014 |

The Obama White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) [3] has held the majority of its meetings on the proposed federal oil-by-rail safety regulations [4] with oil and gas industry lobbyists and representatives.

But OIRA meeting logs reviewed by DeSmogBlog reveal that on June 10, theAmerican Association of Railroads (AAR) [5] and many of its dues-paying members [6] also had a chance to convene with OIRA [7].

Big Rail has talked a big game to the public about [8] its desire for increased safety measures [9] for its trains carrying oil obtained via hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) [10] in theBakken Shale [11]. What happens behind closed doors, the meeting logs show, tells another story.

At the June 12-13 Railway Age Oil-by-Rail Conference [12], just two days after rail industry representatives met with OIRA, American Association of Railroads President Edward Hamberg [13], former assistant secretary for governmental affairs at the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) [14], made the case for safety.

“Railroads believe that federal tank car standards should be raised to ensure crude oil and other flammable liquids are moving in the safest car possible based on the product they are moving,” said Hamberg [15].

“The industry also wants the existing crude oil fleet upgraded through retrofits or older cars to be phased out as quickly as possible.”

Yet despite public declarations along these lines, proactive safety measures were off the table for all four of Big Rail's presentations to OIRA.

Though private discussions, the documents made public from the meeting show one consistent message from the rail industry: safety costs big bucks. And these are bucks industry is going to fight against having to spend.

Massive War Room

Those present at the June 10 OIRA meeting [7] included representatives from AAR, the American Short Line & Regional Railroad Association, Union Pacific [16], Burlington Northern Santa Fe [17] (BNSF [18]), CSX Corporation[19], Norfolk Southern [20] and the DOT.

Akin to the gargantuan war room in the film “Dr. Strangelove,” 26 people took part in the session.

Invitees included Meredith Kelsch [21], senior attorney for DOT; Orest Dachniwsky [22], associate general counsel for BNSF; Robert Schmidt [23], senior manager of operations and casualty analysis for Union Pacific; and Richard Theroux [24], who has worked at the Office of Management and Budget [25] — parent of OIRA — for nearly three decades.

“19th Century Technology”

The heading on the first slide of CSX’s presentation for OIRA [26] stated, “ECP brakes are expensive and do not offer material safety advantages.”....

http://priceofoil.org/

Runaway Train: The Reckless Expansion of Crude By Rail in North America is the first in a series, exposing North America’s booming crude-by-rail industry. It is published in conjunction with the launch of a unique interactive online map of crude-by-rail terminals and potential routes in North America.

The report and map can be found at http://www.priceofoil.org/rail.

http://priceofoil.org/content/uploads/2014/05/OCI_Runaway_Train_Single_reduce.pdf

This report tracks the rise of crude-by-rail in North America,

detailing where crude trains are being loaded and unloaded, how

many trains carrying crude oil are crossing the North American

continent, and who is involved in this burgeoning trade.

This report is the first in a series covering North America’s

booming crude-by-rail industry and is being published in

conjunction with a unique interactive online map of crude-by-rail

terminals and potential routes.

Future reports in this series will look at the economics of

crude-by-rail, safety, and climate change issues. Please see

www.priceofoil.org/rail for the map and links to reports and data.

The growth of crude-by-rail in North America has been primarily

driven by the relentless growth in fracked oil (known as light tight

oil), which is at the heart of America’s ongoing oil boom.

Key findings of this report are:

f Today there are 188 terminals in Canada and the United States

actively loading and unloading crude oil onto and off of trains.

At least 33 of these terminals are expanding their capacity to

handle more crude. An additional 51 new terminals are under

construction or planned.

f Over 800,000 barrels per day (bpd) of crude oil were shipped

on U.S. railroads in 2013, a 70-fold increase from 2005. Including

Canada, total North American crude-by-rail shipments are

currently around one million bpd.

f However, crude-by-rail loading capacity is already at 3.5 million

bpd, which is 3.5 times the current traffic level. By 2016 capacity

could grow to over 5.1 million bpd.

f We calculate that if one million bpd is being loaded and

unloaded then roughly 135 crude oil trains of 100 cars each are

moving each day through North America. This means that at

any given time, there are around 9 million barrels of oil moving

on trains through North America.

f If all the operating, expanding, under construction, and planned

terminals were utilized to full capacity, it would entail some 675

trains with 100 cars each, carrying a total of around 45 million

barrels of oil through North American communities every day.

f BNSF, owned by Warren Buffet, carries up to 70 percent of all

the crude-by-rail traffic in North America today. This railroad

alone expects to load one million barrels per day onto its

network by the end of 2014.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornelius_Vanderbilt

Buffet buys burlington

The financial powers behind the Republican Party in 1860 were the Northern railroad barons, Northern manufacturers who wanted protectionist tariffs to protect them from competition, and Northern bankers and investors like Jay Cooke who wanted to use their political connections to make a killing financing a transcontinental railroad (among other schemes, such as central banking). They decided at the Chicago Republican National Convention of 1860 that Abraham Lincoln was the perfect political front man for their corrupt, mercantilist agenda.

The Great Railroad Lobbyist

From the time he entered politics in 1832, Abraham Lincoln aspired to such a position. That is why he became a Whig, the party of the moneyed elite. Lincoln was one of the most money- and power-hungry politicians in American history. (Indeed, this would seem to be a prerequisite for anyone who is capable of being elected president).

As soon as he entered the Illinois legislature he led his local delegation in a successful Whig Party effort to appropriate some $12 million in taxpayer subsidies for railroad and canal-building corporations. In his landmark book, Lincoln and the Railroads, first published in 1927 and reprinted in 1981 by Arno Press, John W. Starr, Jr. noted how one of Lincoln's colleagues in the legislature said "He seemed to be a born politician. We followed his lead . . . " And they followed Lincoln down a road that would nearly bankrupt the state of Illinois. The $12 million was squandered: Almost no projects were completed with it; much of the money was stolen; and the taxpayers of Illinois were put deep into debt for years to come.

Lincoln's "internal improvements" fiasco in Illinois promised to build "a railroad from Galena in the extreme northwestern part of the state." Above St. Louis, in Alton, "three [rail]roads were to radiate"; "There was also a road to run from Quincy . . . through Springfield"; another one "from Warsaw . . . to Peoria"; and yet another "from Pekin . . . to Bloomington" (Starr,pp. 25—26). The first road mentioned was to become the Illinois Central, which would later employ Lincoln for more than a decade as one its top lawyers.

Lincoln and the Whigs saw to it that "the Assembly also voted wildly and injudiciously in the matter of banking legislation," urging the legislature to print paper money to help finance what his personal secretaries, Nicolay and Hay, would later say was "a disaster to the state." Lincoln's law partner, William Herndon, described the whole debacle as "that sanguine epidemic of financial and industrial quackery which devastated the entire community" (p. 28). The whole scheme was eventually abandoned, and taxes were raised sharply on the hapless Illinois taxpayers to pay off the debt.

The 1837 internal improvements debacle in Illinois may have been a disaster for the public, but it helped catapult a young Abraham Lincoln into position as one of the top — if not the top — lawyer/lobbyists in the country for the railroad corporations.

By 1860 the Illinois Central Railroad was one of the largest corporations in the world. In a company history, J. G. Drennan noted that "Mr. Lincoln was continuously one of the attorneys for the Illinois Central Railroad Company from its organization [in 1849] until he was elected President" (Starr, p. 58). He was called on by the company's general counsel to litigate dozens of cases. He was such a railroad industry "insider" that he often rode in private cars and carried a free railroad pass, courtesy of the Illinois Central.

Lincoln successfully defended the Illinois Central against McLean County, Illinois, which wanted to tax the corporation, for which he was paid $5,000, an incredible sum for a single tax case in the 1850s. The man who paid him the fee was George B. McClellan, the vice president of the Illinois Central who in 1862 would become the commanding general of the Army of the Potomac and, later, Lincoln's opponent in the 1864 election. Starr explains the dishonest ruse that was apparently used by Lincoln and McClellan to trick the Illinois Central's New York City-based board of directors to go along with such an unprecedented fee to a "country lawyer" from Illinois.

McClellan would formally refuse to pay such a large fee, making his directors happy. Then Lincoln would sue the Illinois Central for the fee. But when Lincoln went to court over the fee (armed with depositions from other Illinois lawyers that such astronomical fees were perfectly appropriate!) no lawyers for the company showed up and he won by default. Proof that this was all a ruse lies in the fact that "Lincoln . . . continued to handle [the Illinois Central's] litigation afterwards, the same as he had done before" (p. 79).

By the late 1850s, writes Starr, it was widely known that "Lincoln's close relations with powerful industrial interests" are "always potent and present in political counsels" (p. 67). In today's language, he was the equivalent of a powerful, rich and politically influential "K Street lobbyist." He often traveled "with a party of officials of the Illinois Central company. He rode in a private car, on his own pass furnished him in his capacity as attorney for the company." This "greatly impressed some of the young Republican leaders . . ." This was the real Lincoln, and it is diametrically opposed to the image of the modest, backwoods "rail splitter" that the court historians have created.

In a masterpiece of understatement, Starr comments that "Lincoln's rise [in politics] was coincident with that of the railroads" (p. 80). In addition to working for the Illinois Central, Lincoln also represented the Chicago and Alton, Ohio and Mississippi, and Rock Island Railroad corporations. As soon as the Chicago and Mississippi Railroad was built, he was appointed as the local attorney for that company as well. By 1860 Lincoln was the most prominent attorney/lobbyist the railroad industry had. He was so prominent that the New York financier Erastus Corning offered him the job of general counsel of the New York Central Railroad at a salary of $10,000 a year, an incredible sum at the time. Lincoln turned down the offer after agonizing over it.

Lincoln also used his status as one of the top political insiders within the railroad industry to engage in some very lucrative real estate investments. On one of his trips in a private rail car accompanied by an entourage of Illinois Central executives Lincoln "decided to go to Council Bluffs, Iowa, where he had some real estate investments" (p. 152). "Shortly before his trip to Council Bluffs," writes Starr, "Abraham Lincoln had purchased several town lots from his fellow railroad attorney, Norman B. Judd, who had acquired them from the Chicago and Rock Island Railroad. Council Bluffs at this time was a frontier town, containing about fifteen hundred people" (p. 195). To this day, this land in Council Bluffs, Iowa is known as "Lincoln's Hill."

Why invest in real estate in Council Bluffs, Iowa, of all places? Why not Chicago or even Springfield, the state capital? Because Lincoln the political insider knew that there was a very high likelihood that 1) the federal government would eventually subsidize a transcontinental railroad; and 2) the starting point for that railroad could well be in the vicinity of Council Bluffs. If so, the value of his real estate holdings would be wildly inflated and he would make a killing.

Indeed, the 1860 Republican Party Platform contained a sixteenth plank that read: "That a railroad to the Pacific Ocean is imperatively demanded by the interests of the whole country; the Federal Government ought to render immediate and efficient aid in its construction . . ." As the party's nominee, Lincoln pledged his wholehearted support of this plank. In the interests of "the whole country," of course.

When he became president legislation was immediately proposed, in a special legislative session called by Lincoln in July of 1861, to create the taxpayer-subsidized Union Pacific Railroad. "There was no firmer friend of the Union Pacific bill than the President himself," writes Starr. (In contrast, most mainstream "Lincoln scholars" make the preposterous assertion that he had nothing to do with such legislation). The bill was passed in 1862 and it gave the president the power to appoint all the directors and commissioners and, more importantly, "to fix the point of commencement" of the Union Pacific Railroad. And guess where Lincoln chose to fix the point of commencement of the railroad. He "fixed the eastern terminus of the Union Pacific Railroad . . . at Council Bluffs, Iowa" (p. 202). His financial gains must have dwarfed Corning's $10,000 salary offer. During the Grant administrations dozens of prominent people would go to federal prison for such criminal self-dealing but Lincoln, the ringleader of the whole enterprise, has up to now escaped scrutiny.

In addition to lining his own pockets with this piece of legislation, proving to his well-heeled supporters that he was indeed "one of them," the legislation was essentially the Mother of all Political Payoffs. One hundred fifty-eight of the prominent Northern bankers, industrialists, and railroad barons who had supported Lincoln's political career were appointed as "commissioners." As Dee Brown wrote in Hear that Lonesome Whistle Blow: The Epic Story of the Transcontinental Railroads,when Lincoln signed the bill creating the Union Pacific he "assured the fortunes of a dynasty of American families . . . Brewsters, Bushnells, Olcotts, Harkers, Harrisons, Trowbridges, Langworthys, Reids, Ogdens, Bradfords, Noyeses, Brooks, Cornells, and dozens of others . . ." (p. 49).