The latest Infrastructure Report Card from the American Society of Civil Engineers gives rail a B- grade, which was above the C average given to American infrastructure overall.
The report recommends that railroads continue to harden their physical plants to better resist increasingly frequent, longer duration, and more powerful natural disasters.
“Rail lines face considerable threats from extreme weather, making resilience a key priority for future projects. In 2024 alone, Hurricane Helene damaged … rail lines in the Southeast, while rising waters caused the collapse of a rail bridge over the Big Sioux River between South Dakota and Iowa, and excessive heat along the Northeast Corridor delayed Amtrak trains due to fires and speed restrictions,” according to the report, which was released today.
The report also says that railroads will need $145 billion in infrastructure investments between 2024 and 2033. Some $113 billion of that work has funding sources, the ASCE said, leaving a gap of $32 billion.
The civil engineers group estimates that for every $1 invested in infrastructure upgrades, another $4 is saved by not having to address costs related to network failures.
Transit systems received a grade of D. The report says that 96.9% of transit track miles were in a state of good repair as of 2023, an improvement over the last report based on 2019 data.
Roads earned a score of D+ in the report, which grades infrastructure from aviation to wastewater and everything in between.
Charles, Wisconsin does have decent roads considering the kind of weather they get. Check out the roads in Washington State. They are in deplorable condition. In the one article I read relating to our roads locally on a local news website, only California, Alaska, and Hawaii keep us from ranking #50. We are ranked #47 according to the article. Our roads are congested, and the condition of the roadways in many areas is awful.
The Evergreen State needs to cut down the fast-growing evergreen trees that block the highway signs.
Highways get a D+, certainly there is inadequate maintenance, but part of the grade is due to inadequate capacity and congestion, part of a growing economy.
Railroads, of course, have had stagnant growth for almost 2 decades now and gave abandoned huge market segmens. They have NOT made requisite investments in capacity relative to the growth of the segments. The central economic planning on Wall Street wants 40-50% margins and mandates shrink-mode.
Customers, the public and environment suffer. I give the industry an F-.
Firstoff, I respect ASCE. I have known lots of ASCE members over the years. I don’t see how highways get a D+, at least not in Wisconsin. True some pavements are terrible (Wisconsin DOT specializes in cheap throw-away pavements) – but there’s much more to a highway than the pavement. There are bridges, drainage, erosion control, traffic signals, interchange ramps, surface highway intersection channelization, roundabouts, etc. Much of that stuff is better than ever.
Rail infrastructure can be excellent, as the corporations walk away from the branches and the secondaries to concentrate on the main lines.
CSX replaced 2 timber bridges here on the A&WP sub. Talked to a bridge worker and he said they were worried that one bridge was close to substandard and that a mega rain might scour the wooden bridge piling in the creek.
It is amazing how meticulous that replacing a bridge under constant traffic becomes.
Report did not specify what infrastructure items needed to be improved. IMO one big item is bridges. There are still too many wooden bridges that can and will burn sooner or later as weather patterns will change for long enough times. Then due to flooding of streams that have not flooded before there will be scouring of the columns supporting both wood and other types of bridges causing collapse.
Then of course new flood prone areas need mitigating to prevent flood closures for some length of time. Example the NC shutdowns of CSX and NS tracks.
Alan – Repeating my earlier comment to you regarding your indictment of timber railroad bridges. Roughly a quarter of all the railroad bridges in the US are timber railroad bridges, this down from roughly a third when I started in the industry almost 30 years ago. The blanket statement that there is a nationwide problem of “wooden” railroad bridges is simplistic and doesn’t accurately reflect situation at all. Timber railroad bridges, while no longer being built new in appreciable numbers, are still an effective and vital part of our railroad bridge infrastructure. They are simple, effective, and can be maintained at a relatively low cost while still providing sufficient structural capacity. Blindly condemning a timber bridge simply because it is made of timber is excellent way to waste money and direct limited funds towards the wrong priorities.
Timber bridges are fading from the railroad scene, but they are not some sort of “problem.” There are several reasons to replace a bridge, and when bridges are replaced these days they will most likely not be replaced by a timber bridge. So timber bridges are disappearing, but not because on a whole timber bridges are incapable of doing the job,
I have a few more decades before I hang up my hat in this industry, and I am confident that when I do there will still be a significant number of timber railroad bridges in services doing the job they were designed to do.
As for scour, you are correct in that scour is often cited as the leading cause of railroad bridge failures. However, whether or not the bridge has a shallow foundation system and what type of soils it is built in are key to determining scour susceptibility, not the material the bridge is built from.