Amtrak can be a tool to help reduce transportation emissions since it can be more energy efficient than driving or flying. But weather events like wildfires, flooding and landslides can seriously impact passenger service. Earlier this year, the Coast Starlight, a route that runs between Los Angeles and Seattle, was disrupted by track flooding in California. The damage affected the route for nearly a month. Issues like coastal erosion and heat waves have affected service too. Mounting disasters have closed or impacted Amtrak routes across the country. L.V. Anderson, a news editor, has been covering the issues facing Amtrak for Grist. She joins us with details of her reporting.
Note: This transcript was computer generated and edited by a volunteer.
Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. Passenger rail in the US is in a curious position. It can be a tool to help reduce transportation emissions since it’s more energy efficient than driving or flying. At the same time, the service is increasingly being disrupted by extreme weather events like wildfires or flooding that are exacerbated by climate change. To make matters worse, Amtrak is limited in its ability to prepare for or respond to our changing climate. L.V. Anderson wrote about this recently for Grist and she joins us now to talk about it. Welcome to the show.
L.V. Anderson: Thank you. Thanks for having me.
Miller: Thanks for joining us. You started your recent article with a story of Andrew Bader. Can you tell us what he set out to do with his family in 2021?
Anderson: Yes. Andrew Bader is a school teacher who lives in the Bay Area in California and in the summer of 2021, he decided that he wanted to go on an Amtrak trip from the Bay Area all the way up to Seattle. It’s about a 24 hour trip. And he wanted to do this with his aging father and his six year old son. His reason for wanting to do this is when he was a child, he went on a very memorable cross country train trip with his parents. And he wanted to repeat that experience with both his father and his son to create a new family tradition. But unfortunately, a few weeks before the trip was scheduled to begin, Andrew found out that a wildfire in Northern California had burned a bridge that is part of the route that goes in between the Bay Area and Seattle.
As a result he wouldn’t be able to take the trip as planned. So this was obviously a disappointment and he hoped to repeat the trip the following year, as originally planned, just do it a year later. But then, unfortunately, by the time the next summer rolled around, his father had died of cancer. So he was never able to do the trip with his father and said he did do the trip with his son as a memorial to his father. But it was a pretty heartbreaking reminder of how canceled train trips can sometimes be really tragic for the people who are affected by them.
Miller: So that was a planned trip affected by a wildfire. What are the various ways that passenger rail is being affected by climate change right now?
Anderson: Passenger rail is being affected by pretty much any kind of climate disaster that you can think of: flooding, wildfires, extreme heat, sea level rise, coastal erosion. These are all ways in which trains can be delayed, tracks can be damaged, and often major repairs are needed to respond to these kinds of disasters. I should also say that infrastructural upgrades are needed to prepare for them as they worsen in the years and the decades to come.
Miller: Can you give us a sense for what this has meant in terms of lost service? I mean, how common is what Andrew Bader and his family dealt with from that one wildfire?
Anderson: So, Amtrak tallied up all of the sorts of climate disasters that had interrupted its service between 2006 and 2019 and found that there were 450 climate disruptions in that time period. They cost the company $127 million in lost revenue and affected 1.3 million customers. And that’s just between 2006 and 2019. The company has projected that they’re gonna experience another $220 million in climate losses over the decades to come.
Miller: If train service is disrupted, what options does a passenger have, compared to other kinds of travel disruptions?
Anderson: Great question. Amtrak is really limited by a lack of redundancy, which is to say that there often is not an alternative route on rails that can replace a train that gets interrupted because of some kind of climate factor.
Amtrak operates on about 21,000 miles of tracks around the country. By comparison there are 4,000,000 miles of roads around the country. So there’s just not the kind of redundancies and alternatives that exist for other forms of transportation.
Often what Amtrak does is pile people onto buses. So, for instance, when that bridge went down in 2021, some trains were stopped and the people who were on them were piled onto a bus. They call it a bus bridge. And so the bus takes you to the portion of the track that is not damaged and then you get on another train to go to your final destination. Obviously, that is pretty disruptive and a lot of people do not have the patience to do such a thing.
Miller: How does passenger rail compare to driving or flying in terms of carbon footprint?
Anderson: It’s significantly more energy efficient and significantly lower in carbon intensity. The precise carbon savings vary depending on whether the train is electric or runs on diesel. But some trains can be half as carbon intensive as flying if you’re looking at a per/passenger mile. So the federal government has recognized that improving access to passenger rail is going to be a really important strategy in getting the country to meet its decarbonisation goals. The goal of net zero emissions by 2050 across the economy. A report that the Department of Transportation put out earlier this year said that the country is going to have to really fully leverage passenger rail if it wants a chance of meeting those goals.
Miller: So how much can Amtrak either plan for or mitigate these disruptions?
Anderson: Amtrak does have a handful, well, more than a handful, a toolbox of solutions at its disposal for the tracks that it owns. These include things that are honestly, probably pretty obvious. Things like moving infrastructure. You can raise rails so that they’re not as affected by flooding. You can increase the size of culverts, the tunnels that carry water underneath rails to reduce the risk of flooding. You can paint tracks white, which is an interesting solution that can prevent them from buckling or warping in periods of extreme heat. So there are all of these sorts of technical solutions that Amtrak can apply to the rail that it owns.
The problem is that Amtrak does not own the vast majority of the rails that it operates on around the country. Amtrak owns about 3% of the passenger rail network around the country. It owns the Northeast Corridor, the segment of railroads between Washington, D.C. and Boston. But then the rest of the country it is operating on railroads that are primarily owned by freight companies. And these are companies like BNSF, Union Pacific, the companies that carry consumer goods and industrial materials from point A to point B. And so on those rails, Amtrak is pretty much at the mercy of these freight companies that have different priorities from Amtrak.
Miller: Well, how different are those priorities? Because I would imagine that Union Pacific or BNSF, that they too, after that bridge between San Francisco and Seattle burned in a wildfire, have a vested interest, it would seem, in fixing it so they can move their cargo north or south. So what are the ways in which the interests of Amtrak and the freight companies diverge?
Anderson: That’s a great point. And it’s true that in the case of that bridge that burned in 2021, Union Pacific owned that bridge. They repaired it in about a month. And they said that they considered that bridge vital. They considered the route vital and that was why they prioritized repairing that bridge. However, sometimes freight companies own sections of rail that are not really essential to freight operations, but are essential to Amtrak operations. And so if something happens to those rails, then it becomes an open question about who’s going to pay for the repairs. An example of this is that after hurricane Katrina disrupted Amtrak’s Gulf Coast service, in 2005, there was a dispute between the freight companies that owned those rails which wanted Amtrak to pay the cost of upgrading the infrastructure, as a condition of restoring Amtrak service down there. They eventually reached a settlement that’s gonna allow passenger rail to return to the area. But the freight companies are not always motivated to pay for major upgrades or major investments on sections of rail that are important for passenger rail, but not so important for freight operation.
Miller: So what potential solutions are there? I mean, it’s almost like we’re dealing with a version of absentee landlords who don’t have their own financial interest in the upkeep of something that they own. What are possible solutions?
Anderson: The one possible solution that the experts I interviewed for this article all talked about was having states be more involved in managing the relationship between freight companies and Amtrak. A couple of examples that stand out as great results are in Virginia and in North Carolina where the state level Departments of Transportation have made major investments in expanding passenger rail service. So these trains are run by Amtrak but they are funded by the state. And the state also is involved in mediating disputes between Amtrak and the freight companies. And in the case of Virginia, Virginia actually bought up the right of way for hundreds of miles of track, in order to just be able to control, more directly, which trains are going to run when. And it’s a way for states to really say that they are prioritizing passenger rail as a way of getting around.
And I should mention that the Cascades route in the Pacific Northwest is another example of one of these successful public/private partnerships that exists between Amtrak and state level Departments of Transportation. Washington and Oregon Departments of Transportation fund that route. And as a result, there’s frequent service, it’s reliable and the states are involved in making sure that everything runs smoothly.
Miller: L V., thanks very much.
Anderson: Thank you for having me.
Miller: L.V. Anderson is news editor at the online magazine Grist. She wrote recently about two things: the ways that passenger rails are being affected by climate change and also the limited options that Amtrak nationally has to respond.
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