Navigating rail disruptions

While shipping waste by rail can provide a number of benefits to waste companies, it also can have drawbacks.

A green choice

According to Union Pacific’s website, shipping waste by rail is environmentally responsible. Railroads move 1 ton of freight nearly 500 miles on only 1 gallon of fuel and generate a carbon footprint that is up to 75 percent smaller than that of trucks.

While those are impressive figures, Union Pacific says the advantages of shipping waste by rail don’t end there. It also is less expensive than shipping long distances by truck; accommodates more volume, with a rail car holding up to six trucks’ worth of material; offers simplified logistics; and reduces highway congestion.

These benefits were echoed by speakers during the Waste by Rail: Best Practices for Staying on the Right Track session at WasteExpo. Lewis Dubuque, vice president of the National Waste & Recycling Association (NWRA), Arlington, Virginia, moderated the session, which included panelists Daniel Elliott of GKG Law P.C., Kevin Fitzgerald of Recology Inc., Peter Kistner of WM and Will Flower of Winter Bros. Waste Systems. However, the panelists also said that shipping waste by rail is not a worry-free endeavor.

Disrupted service

Dubuque began the session by mentioning the threatened rail strike of last year. After U.S. railroad unions had secured a tentative labor agreement in September 2022, four unions rejected that deal in October and threatened to strike if an agreement was not reached by Dec. 9. Instead, Congress passed a bill in late November to impose a compromise labor agreement brokered by the Biden administration.

However, Dubuque said NWRA’s members had been feeling the effects of the turmoil in the rail sector since the spring of 2022. “In Boston, for example, NWRA members were unable to load rail cars due to ongoing service issues involving their delivery. Meanwhile, rail cars that were loaded with waste ended up waiting a significant period of time to be moved out of the rail yards. Other members pointed out that rail operations were being negatively impacted by excessive backlogs of cars waiting to switch at a particular rail yard outside of Albany, New York,” he said.

Other rail service issues NWRA members encountered included missed switches, extended transit time, unfilled car orders and the inability to contact customer service personnel, Dubuque said.

Rail reliability

Flower, vice president of Winters Bros., West Babylon, New York, said companies need to consider all modes of transportation for moving waste and that every form can be affected by various factors, including equipment, weather and labor problems.

He added that rail, generally, is a “fairly reliable” mode of transportation because it’s not susceptible to highway congestion. “There’s a lot fewer accidents with rail movement, but certainly when something does happen, as we saw in East Palestine, Ohio, it gets a lot of attention,” Flower said, referring to the train derailment and fire in that city last winter.

He said three derailments occur daily on average, while about 1,100 crashes involving heavy trucks occur per day.

In the case of a service failure, Flower said “railroads are pretty good at communicating and telling you when there are issues, and you can make arrangements once you know what the situation is and how long the outage is going to be for.”

Kistner of Houston-based WM said rail service outages can vary widely in terms of cause and duration. “Most frequently, the outages are due to carriers’ labor shortages. And that’s not something that’s quickly remedied by the carrier.”

Mainline track repairs or breach maintenance are the next-most-frequent reasons for outages, he said. “The infrastructure is aging. As it ages, it just requires more maintenance.”

In cases in which they own the infrastructure, waste companies also have maintenance-related responsibilities. Kistner said railroads can refuse service if a customer’s track does not meet standards. “It’s important for us to keep our own infrastructure up to par.”

In terms of a company’s legal rights to rail service, Elliott of GKG Law, Washington, said common carriers must provide service, but the customer’s request must be reasonable. “If your industry track is not up to snuff, and they can’t operate over it safely, they probably have a right to say no.”

Elliott continued, “But, in the big picture, they have to serve you. So, it’s different than most relationships between owners of businesses and their customers … technically, they cannot say no.”

He said railroads also must provide service in a reasonable manner. By way of example, Elliott said a railroad that is providing a customer with service four days a week cannot suddenly reduce that to two times per week. “That could be a violation of their common carrier obligation. And that could also be considered an unreasonable practice.”

He continued, “A lot of times, I think railroads will take advantage of a lack of knowledge about those laws and push it to the limit unless you call them on it. So, it’s very important just to be aware of those laws.”

When it comes to managing rail service, Fitzgerald of Recology Inc., headquartered in San Francisco, said it’s important to understand which crew is serving you, whether it’s a local dedicated switching crew or a mainline crew. “A lot of the class one carriers have shifted to precision schedule railroading, where you have a mainline train coming through to either pick up or drop off, and there’s no guarantee that’s going to be at the same time every day, when you need it or when you want it to depart,” he said.

Fitzgerald said it’s easier to build a relationship with a local crew than with a mainline crew.

Take it to the board

The Surface Transportation Board (STB) regulates the railroads, Elliott said. “If they’re not providing you the service that you’re requesting, or you think they’re behaving unreasonably … if you think your rates are unreasonable, they have jurisdiction,” he said, adding that the STB’s authority extends to detention and demurrage fees.

“Sometimes, they don’t move so quickly,” he says of the STB. “Sometimes shippers are afraid to bring cases because they’re worried what the railroad will do back to them.”

Elliott said waste companies can use formal and informal methods to bring the STB’s attention to a situation. He said he prefers the informal way when possible. “That’s probably the ideal situation,” he says, noting that it’s less expensive and causes less friction with the railroad.

“But, if it becomes a matter of life and death, where the business is really suffering, you may be forced to litigate, especially as the railroad says it’s refusing to budge.”