Trains Turntable: Commentary from Peter Wolff
Professor Danielle Zanzalari recently argued in Trains that rail’s loss of market share* results from poor coordination among railroads [see “Rail’s next phase is about coordination, not cost…,” Trains.com, May 23, 2026].
She writes, “each handoff (interchange) introduces friction — scheduling mismatches, terminal delays, service variability” and her solution to the problem is more end-to-end mergers. I agree that moving freight across North America is complicated. But, in my view, the real “friction” is not the handoff between carriers. Rather, it results from the longstanding and ever-present operations research task of routing railcars from thousands of origins to thousands of destinations while minimizing train handling and keeping costs under control. This task is not mitigated or eliminated in end-to-end mergers.
When I began my railroad career in the early 1980s at the Chicago & North Western, the railroad operated dozens of daily trains (intermodal, manifest, and unit auto, coal, and grain) through a seamless interchange with Union Pacific at Fremont, Neb. The CNW’s 1985 Train Operations Manual shows trains stopping 15 minutes or less to change crews and add power so a cab-signal-equipped locomotive could lead across CNW territory. Hard to imagine less friction than that. But 40 years later, in an age of computers and electronic data exchange, reliable interchanges are even easier.
However, run-through trains are not economically feasible for the vast majority of the origin-destination city pairs. “Interchange” is not the same thing as “where switching happens.” A terminal may switch cars without any interchange, an interchange may occur with no switching at all, and some terminals do both. The real friction lies in the sheer difficulty of connecting thousands of origins and destinations, which inevitably means switching at terminals and making tradeoffs among cost, efficiency, and transit time…