Houston seeks to unclog rail traffic

Before highways, there were railroads - Houston's first circulatory system. Civic boosters bragged in the 1920s that Houston was the place "where 17 railroads meet the sea." The trains hauled cotton and grain. Downtown had three passenger stations, the Houston Chronicle reports.

Today, the freight trains
carry petrochemicals and toys from China. The city has grown up around the
tracks, tearing some lines out and hemming in the rest. Most people only notice
trains when they are blocking a road. That happens a lot: The Texas
Transportation Institute estimated 186,000 drivers are delayed every day by
regional train traffic. Shippers lose millions every year because of delays.
The circulatory system is clogged.

And that’s the dilemma:
Railroads that haul the freight essential to the area’ economic health and
growth also carry the baggage of traffic congestion and resulting pollution
that could jeopardize economic growth.

"It’s costing us in our
efficiency and in our environment," said Jeff Moseley, president and CEO of the
Greater Houston Partnership. "It is an important strategic infrastructure
upgrade that we must have if we are to be competitive in a global economy."

But the solutions are
expensive, and require coordination between numerous private and public sector
interests. Moving freight trains out of the urban core is not an option, since
it would cripple the petrochemical industry, said Mark Ellis, chairman of the
Gulf Coast Freight Rail District. The state Legislature created the district in
2007 to coordinate efforts at reducing rail congestion in the region.

Trains carry dozens of
industrial chemicals as well as plastic pellets used for hundreds of products.
Before the recession, almost 900 trains were moving in the Ship Channel area
every day. Region-wide, freight train traffic was growing 4 to 5 percent a
year.

"What’s interesting about
Houston compared to other cities is our railroad has grown considerably since
World War II," said Christof Spieler, a board member of the Citizens’
Transportation Coalition. "And that’s because of petroleum and because we’ve
grown as a city."

The recession has eased the
rail traffic problem temporarily, but transportation leaders warn the reprieve
will not last. Houston’s population will grow and the widening of the Panama
Canal could bring a massive influx of shipping containers to Houston’s port
starting in 2014. Train freight could triple by 2035, according to the
Houston-Galveston Area Council, a planning agency.

But clearing the blockages
in the rail system will not be easy. "Everyone agrees the system is broken,"
Ellis said. "But there’s a lot of fear of change and people wondering who would
pay for it."

Freight railroads are
private businesses, and the big players in Houston have already been spending
money to upgrade tracks and switches and keep traffic moving through. But they
want public help for the more expensive solutions, like building bridges to
separate streets from railroad tracks. In exchange, the railroads may consider
sharing their tracks or rights-of-way with commuter trains.

When interstate highways
were built, many people thought railroads would wither away. Across Houston and
elsewhere, rail corridors were sold off and developed. But now railroads seem poised
for a comeback. They have triple the fuel efficiency of trucks, and that makes
them cheaper and less polluting.

Freight trains could move
more smoothly through Houston if there were bigger rail yards and fewer points
where roads and tracks cross. The Ship Channel is also a big geographic
barrier.

Planners agree that the
fate of future commuter rail is intimately tied to the freight rail problem.
That’s because commuter trains must share tracks – or at least the rights-of-way
– with freight trains. There’s no other place to put commuter rail tracks
affordably.

Although it is done
elsewhere, Union Pacific, which owns most of the tracks in Houston, would
prefer not to share its tracks with commuter trains. "We would have concerns
about the safety of commingling commuter and freight operations," said Joe
Adams, a vice president for public affairs. "And we have concerns about losing
present and future freight rail capacity."

That means that commuter
rail along U.S. 90A is scarcely a possibility right now. That route, which
would serve commuters in Sugar Land and other Fort Bend areas, is a critical
Union Pacific route, bringing in containers full of Asian-produced goods from
ports in California.

But two other freight lines
have less traffic, and Union Pacific is working with government planners to
free them up for commuter trains. One runs out the U.S. 290 corridor and one
runs along Texas 3 to Galveston. TxDOT is considering granting $2 million in
stimulus funds for two engineering studies on those routes.

The engineering studies
will design routes that bring suburban commuters to the 610 Loop, but no
farther. The freight traffic inside the Loop is still too busy, and although
there is an abandoned rail line, it runs right through the Heights – a
politically vocal neighborhood. The compromise is to build some commuter lines
now, connect them to light rail or bus lines, and figure out later how to get
them inside the Loop, to downtown.