SHARED ASSETS. A railroad is not an open access facility. This sequence of pictures taken today at Rochelle illustrates why not. We first see track surfacing in progress on the Union Pacific where it crosses the Burlington. (I know it's BNSF but that sounds too much like a government agency.) The Track Renewal Train and the cleanup equipment has done its work, and the track is receiving the finishing touches to be ready for trains. Obscured behind the pole at left is a ballast regulator, followed by a car whose purpose I don't know, then by a ballast tamper with some equipment that allows the operator to calibrate superelevation on curves as well as to keep the tangents straight and level, and at right, another ballast regulator. (The crooked straight, and the rough places planed.)


Although the machinery is sophisticated, there is no substitute for the track foreman eyeballing the alignment.


Weekends on a transcontinental freight railroad do not mean a fall-off in traffic. Coal mines in Wyoming expect empty hopper cars, container ships on the Pacific Coast expect their loads, east coast power plants are at full power supplying those air conditioners (How hot was it?) and farmers want their Deeres to get that ethanol in the ground. There is no option of putting lighter loads on the roads, which British Rail does as a matter of routine (Shrewsbury to Telford in my logbook, 2004 Guildex) or of a skeleton service going the long way around (Bristol to Reading by way of the Salisbury Line as far as Westbury, also in my logbook) as the other freight lines are also stretched to capacity.

Thus, as work progresses on the north track, Main 1, here come those westbound containers on Main 2. When the rebuild campaign gets to Main 2, this will be quite the project getting container trains in and out of Global 3, just west of Rochelle.


The stacks were last in line after a train of Wisconsin Electric coal empties, a merchandise train, and a string of ethanol empties.

Then came the Deeres eastbound. The lead locomotive has the felicitous number 4001.


This work is going on at a crossing. Union Pacific can plan its operations (or plan to park trains) so as to work around maintenance possessions on its own track. That surfacing team, however, has the Burlington blocked. (The laws governing provision of interlockings and the responsibility of the second railroad to maintain them and the tactics used by the first railroad to impede the second railroad might be material for a different kind of post.) Burlington knows this, and Union Pacific and Burlington have made careful plans to offer windows during which Burlington runs trains.

The photos in this essay are not in chronological order. One such window opened around 3 pm. There's a very hot intermodal train on the Burlington bound for the Pacific Northwest which obtains all the deference once given to silk specials or President Theodore Roosevelt returning from big-game hunting along the Great Northern. The work crew takes advantage of the window to refuel. Stand back, do not delay this train.


There it goes. I'm always pleased to see over-the-road trailers that aren't on the road.


Now for the economics lesson. Ownership of the crossing includes negotiable rights to do maintenance on the crossing without delay to the other railroad's trains. That's a straightforward exercise for two railroads, each operating their own trains on their own track. My reading of the British railway press suggests that the division of operating from infrastructure companies has not carefully established those ownership rights, with the not surprising result that some operating companies accuse the maintenance division of the infrastructure company (whether it's the privately held Railtrack or the state-owned Network Rail) of doing them harm. When the same company owns the trains and the tracks, the operating department and the way and structure department have incentives in common. When these departments are properties of different companies, their incentives diverge.