VitalRail: A Continental Freight Rail Growth Initiative

Introduction

VitalRail is a comprehensive strategy for enhancing the productivity and sustainability of our industrial systems by expanding freight rail service. The need and opportunity for railroad development to address environmental challenges and transportation efficiency has never been greater. While North America enjoys perhaps the world's most productive freight rail system, the industry’s $115 billion annual revenue starkly contrasts with the freight trucking industry’s $1 trillion yearly revenue.

Yet rail offers irreplaceable space, energy, and capital efficiencies. Growing freight rail service will contribute cascading benefits to all stakeholders. Consider the impact of space efficiency on highway capacity: a one-mile-long train moves the same goods as a 27-mile convoy of trucks on the road. And rail's energy efficiency allows it to move that freight on 1/2 to 1/4 the fuel and emissions.

However, we need more from railroads than they can do themselves. Fortunately, railroads do not need a government bailout; they outperform many other industries. That stability, combined with rail technology’s inherent efficiencies, will deliver a high return on investment when the involved stakeholder groups work together to expand the rail transportation system.

VitalRail Stakeholders

Collaboration among stakeholders is fundamental to achieving this tremendous growth opportunity for railroads, rail-related companies, and the industries and communities they serve. VitalRail engages fourteen “Interdependent Stakeholder Groups”: Class I Railroad Leaders, Class II and III Railroad Leaders, Investors and Banks, Rail Employees, Citizens, Customers, Suppliers, Economic Developers, Transportation Planners, Land Developers, Realtors and Site Selectors, Researchers, Other Transportation Services and Modes, and Government Leaders. Learn more about Stakeholders.

IntelliConferences

VitalRail convenes stakeholder IntelliConferences for planning at the level needed to advance this deeply interconnected, invaluable industry. We begin with the most important dialogues for expanding North America’s freight rail service.

• Rail Growth Capitalization
• Rail Business Culture Transformation

• Rail Management – Rail Labor
• Containerized International Freight
• Revitalizing the Rail Carload System
• Rail Energy Efficiency
• Freight Transportation Land Use
• Rail Technology Adoption
• Rail Trucking Coordination
• Rail Regulatory Excellence

Why Do This?

Significant growth and progress across many industries requires expanded freight rail service. There is a cogent opportunity for North America to reshore and reindustrialize with the least environmental impact as possible. Rail service and capacity are as essential to a community as internet service. You can have a community without them, but it thwarts opportunities and creates unhelpful costs and impacts. Each of us, no matter our stakeholder position or work sector, must gain core benefits in order to make a bigger pie for all.