It’s not in your head, your time stuck behind a train really is getting longer.
The freight train is now on track to stretch up to three miles long, with 200 cars or more. And it’s being powered, in part, by an unusual energy source: the activist investor.
Companies have plenty of reasons to keep adding train cars. Long trains save on fuel and crews, reducing the cost of rail transportation, The Wall Street Journal reports.
A confluence of pressures—from the long-term decline of coal deliveries to competition from trucking to activist investors—are forcing railroads to improve efficiency and cut costs. In a nod to activist investors, who have pressed for improved operations and the return of capital to shareholders, major railroads now report average train length with quarterly earnings.
The longest, heaviest trains may have four locomotives in front, two in the middle and two at the end.
Some critics say the railroads are moving in the wrong direction, given the demand for faster, more frequent deliveries of smaller batches of raw materials and goods. Long trains take longer to assemble and disassemble in freight yards and can lead to delays on main lines.
And as these superlong trains test the limits of physics, concerns are growing surrounding safety and the impact on the communities they pass through. Long trains can block multiple crossings, delaying emergency vehicles and other motorists, as they take five minutes or more to go from front to back through a crossing,
