 Should shortline railroads upgrade their systems to handle heavy axle load cars?Michael W. Babcock and James Sanderson Transportation Research Part E: Logistics and Transportation Review, 2006, vol. 42, issue 3, 149-166 Abstract: Motivated by lower costs per ton-mile, US Class I railroads have been replacing 263,000-pound gross vehicle weight (GVW) covered hopper cars with 286,000-pound GVW cars. In many cases, shortline railroads would have to upgrade their tracks and bridges to handle the heavier cars. This paper used rate of return on investment analysis for a sample of US shortlines to determine if shortline owners will likely upgrade their infrastructure or abandon the railroad. Analysis revealed that the total cost to upgrade 1583Â miles of mainline track and 1352 bridges of five shortline railroads in one US Midwest state was estimated to be $308.7Â million. None of the shortlines in the analysis can earn an adequate rate of return on upgrading track and bridge investment. If the shortline railroads in the study are abandoned, the annual road damage costs will increase by over $58 million. Keywords: Shortline; railroads; Covered; hopper; rail; cars; Rate; of; return; on; investment; analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:transe:v:42:y:2006:i:3:p:149-166 Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from Access Statistics for this article Transportation Research Part E: Logistics and Transportation Review is currently edited by W. Talley More articles in Transportation Research Part E: Logistics and Transportation Review from Elsevier |
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