Nation’s tracks are red-hot
The trains are haunting Fred Arm’s dreams. Night after night, the Richmond resident bolts upright in bed. Sitting in the silence, he wonders why he woke up. Then the horn blasts again. And he knows.
“It’s every day and every night,” says Arm, who lives in a city sliced and diced daily by as many as 70 trains. “They blow the horn when they back up, they blow it when they go forward. It never ends.” It may sound like horns, but what the retired attorney is really hearing is an explosion. While many Americans may think railroads have been rusting away the past 30 years, the nation’s tracks are red-hot, especially in California.
Commuters are trading in clogged freeways for a fast train ride to work. And as products meant to feed the American consumer’s appetite keep pouring into California ports on ships from Asia, those goods are increasingly rolling across the country on a million steel wheels. Railroads in the state are “hauling more freight today than at any other time in their history,” says Kyle Wyatt, a curator at the California State Railroad Museum in Sacramento. “With intercity passenger traffic increasing and competing with freight, they’re running out of track space.”