We all know that Europe and Asia are the home of modern passenger rail, while North America lags far behind. Canada’s mainline railways move about 36 passenger-kilometres per capita[1] each year, while the European Union’s move 984. What many people might not know is that North America dominates in freight rail, while Europe largely lags far behind. The EU moves 833 annual rail freight tonne-kilometres per capita each year, while Canada moves 10,660. Canada alone moves more tonne-kilometres of freight by rail than the entire European Union combined. And that’s not just heavy natural resources in the West. It’s also vast amounts of intermodal and industrial goods. North American freight railways get thousands of trucks off the roads and that is something we should be genuinely proud of. I get concerned when I sometimes see passenger rail advocates treat freight railways as unreasonable obstacles. They’re simply trying to keep what has made them so successful. The problem is that the needs of modern freight and passenger rail are fundamentally different, and trying to run both on a single shared network will inevitably end with one far weaker.
North American freight railways do a brilliant job of the main thing that matters for freight, which is low cost per tonne. Freight shippers generally don’t care if it takes a little longer, whether it arrives a few hours earlier or later in the day, or how comfortable the ride is. They want it to get there cheaply. The way to do that is to pack as much cargo into each train as possible. North American freight trains make European freight trains look like toys. A typical European freight train is about 1,500 tonnes and 750 metres long. North American freight trains can be well over 20,000 tonnes and four kilometres. On an intermodal train, it works out to nearly ten times as many containers per train as in Europe. Technology allows the crew in front to control locomotives distributed throughout the train so that the couplers at the front aren’t pulling the train’s full weight. North American freight railways have undertaken massive reconstruction of their network over the past decades to increase clearances so that trains on most main lines can handle two containers stacked on top of one another. All of this means two people in a locomotive cab can move an incredible amount of cargo. Since labour is often the largest cost or close to it, that’s an immense efficiency difference.
