HELLO FUTURE: A New Era for American Railroads?

Speaker 1 (00:07):
Trains these days are slower than ever, So today I'm
going to talk about how we get there faster. Remember,
you can download the Hello Future app across all iHeartMedia
apps and on the iHeartRadio app. Just check out Hello
Future with Kevin Sirely on iHeart Hello Future. It's me Kevin.
This is a dispatch from the Digital Frontier. The planet
is Earth, the year is almost twenty twenty six, and
my guest today is one of the leading experts on
rail innovation. His name is doctor Michael F. Gorman, the
Knee House Chair and Operations and Analytics at the University
of Dayton. All right, Mike, why do trains stink in America?

Speaker 2 (00:45):
Well, drinks don't necessarily stink.

Speaker 3 (00:48):
They are actually getting better and better every day with
new technologies coming along to help them operate more efficiently.

Speaker 4 (00:54):
I mean, I respect that.

Speaker 1 (00:55):
But if you've ever been to Europe or you've ever
and I get it, Okay, Like I'm proud that President
Abraham Lincoln helped to link all of the country together
with the Rail Innovation Act and everything that he's done,
I get it. I'm not trying to come against America.
I'm very pro America to be honest, but the trains
in Europe are faster, the trains in the Indo Pacific
are faster. And I'm just sitting here on the Asella,
not currently, but I have been, and I'm thinking this
is the fast version. This is the best Amtrak can do.
Is this a sella which is slower than molasses and unreliable?
I'm sorry, I got to come out and say it.

Speaker 3 (01:30):
Well, yeah, Amtrak definitely has his challenges, to be sure,
has a lot to do with the ownership of the infrastructure.
Where europe passenger trains are that they are operated on
a public infrastructure. In the United States and many places,
Amtrak operates on private freight railroad infrastructure, and balancing the
freight railroad with the passenger railroad is a challenge. They
operate at different speeds and with different needs as far
as on time delivery.

Speaker 1 (01:58):
And I love Amtrak in the sense that when I'm
taking my time, there is no better way to travel,
especially as someone who likes to write, than to stare
out the window in upstate New York, or in the
mid western part of the country, or even in the
Pacific Northwest. And I had the privilege of being able
to do that when I'm not in a rush. But
I'm telling you, Mike, when you're in a rush and
you've got to get to the Big Apple from DC,
it's a crapshoot whether that train is going to run
on time. And maybe it is this infrastructure problem. And
I believe we're at the start of the Second Industrial Revolution. Okay,
we can have a satellite out in interstellar space that
NASA knows how to talk to. When we can't make
the trains run on time, what is the issue? So
dig down deeper here. When you talk about modernizing infrastructure,
what does America need to do to have the best
trains in the world.

Speaker 3 (02:47):
Well, let's challenge it goes back one hundred and fifty
years because it's really impossible to undo how the infrastructure
was built, and that is with private rail companies, we're
kind of stuck with the infrastructure that we have because
of legacy reasons, and so there's a conflict of interest
in the sense that freight rail is one one freight
and they build a railroad for freight. Passenger needs are
very different, and interoperation of those two things is very challenging.
If we're talking about passenger on time performance, it would
really require an incredible infrastructure investment in track to have
the capacity and take other technologies signaling technologies, etc. To
allow the trains to operate with tighter spacing so that
there's effectively more space out there.

Speaker 1 (03:39):
I just had to meet the future moment, which is
a thread that we frequently get on this which is
systems and outdated systems and trying to make things that
are one way be beneficial to human needs. And this
idea of freight rail being built to help us through
the turn of the the nineteen hundreds, especially in around
nineteen sixteen, when the United States had the biggest, largest
most it was the envy of the world. The rail
system in the United States in nineteen sixteen, thanks to
former President A. Blincoln who had the vision. God bless them.
But it was built for freight. It was built to
connect us. Then America builds all the highway systems for
the cars, and suddenly people are like, I.

Speaker 4 (04:24):
Don't want to take the train one drive.

Speaker 1 (04:26):
I don't need a horse anymore either, And so that
transformation was paramount. And yet now everybody wants to get
to New York or to Chicago and under an hour,
and what Mike Gorman is saying, folks, is we'd have
to build an entire, entire new system. That said, I
also think, you know, there's conversations about linking coast to coast,
the railway and everything. What benefit would humans have, not
necessarily from a transportation of humans going from city to city,
but from getting there. I don't know their online package
is delivered on time right.

Speaker 3 (05:03):
Well, the US freight rail infrastructure is one of the
best in the world, if not the best in the world,
and although there's fewer tracks out there now than there
were at the turn of the century, they're being used
much more efficiently, and so the trains actually do go
faster and much faster. They have really fine tuned the
rail network and do essentially an interstate highway system for freight,
So that piece is very different than the passenger piece.
Where As you mentioned the cars, the interstate highway system
is kind of the foundation the transportation infrastructure in the US,
and people value their vehicles. We have lower coss fuel
here in Europe, and we have much more dispersed cities,
and so getting to a place isn't like you just
get your downtown and you're there. People need their cars
once to get to the city anyway. Not to mention
the US is three times the size of Europe. To
get from Prague to Amsterdam takes six to seven hours.

Speaker 2 (05:58):
But you cut to New York.

Speaker 3 (05:59):
Tell no matter what kind of train system put in,
is still going to take forty eight hours. Then we
get our air carriers that get there in six hours,
and so you're always gonna make that decision just because
of the geographic dispersion of the US.

Speaker 1 (06:12):
I think I think that's really interesting. And there's been
a lot from the Department of Transportation and the American
Public Transportation Association about where America needs to be by
the year twenty fifty, connecting a national high speed spine
for lack of a better word, and trying to create
this coast to coast high speed rail backbone that kind
of sounds science fiction, But there are some people who
are bullish about this, who are saying, essentially that high
frequency travel between zero and five hundred miles could be
where train in the future, if it's like a bullet train,
that's where this will all go. If you see that
future for us, do a way better job than me
and painting that picture for our listeners about what society
could evolve into in the year twenty fifty if we
adopt a more high speed travel mentality, because I'm sure
we have people listening sitting a bumper to bumper traffic
right now who are thinking, I wish I could get
on a magic a magic bullet train to get to
where I'm going and under and under time.

Speaker 3 (07:19):
Right it's going to take massive infrastructure investment that what
you're talking about. You cannot put a bullet train on
today's rail network because it's not made for three hundred
miles an hour, hundred and fifty miles an hour.

Speaker 2 (07:31):
It would be unsafe, and so you.

Speaker 3 (07:33):
Need to build an entirely new infrastructure just for that
bullet train, which is what some countries have done.

Speaker 1 (07:39):
Well, how fast is the Amtrak from DC to New
York travel? How many miles per hour?

Speaker 2 (07:44):
That's a good question. I think it max is that
around ninety.

Speaker 1 (07:46):
But that's good so I can do that in my car.
I don't do that if there's any cops listening. But
that's not as fast as I thought. If it max
is out at ninety, it's average speed is probably what
like seventy miles per hour.

Speaker 4 (07:56):
I mean, it can't be gone.

Speaker 3 (07:57):
It's probably much lower than that lute all the slowdowns
and this inherent in any transportation.

Speaker 1 (08:03):
So a bullet train could go three hundred miles per hour,
which is more than three times the mac speed of
a current train. Correct, Yeah, okay, is that in your industry?
Is that what people are most talking about, like a
three hundred mile per hour trainer? Just wanted to define
what we mean we talk about the future of the
speed component.

Speaker 3 (08:22):
I can't say most people are talking about that because
it the whole different question is what we have now,
and so it's really a matter for public authorities to
decide to invest in high speed rail.

Speaker 1 (08:32):
Walk me through the end goal of what society would
look like, Like, throw out your wonk hat for a
second and your infrastructure expert hat, and just paint the
picture of the benefits of a society that is interconnected
with trains moving at three hundred plus miles per hour
and what that means for our society.

Speaker 3 (08:55):
Right, Well, absolutely means if you're cars on the road,
and of course cleaner air. So that's super great for
the world around us. Right, it's just a matter of
making that happen, and by the way, Kevin, I want
to correct myself. I misspoke when I said three hundred
miles per most countries measuring colmmbers perts three hundred colomers
splus there two hundred miles pro So, so I want
to correct myself because I realized when I said it.

Speaker 1 (09:17):
No, he's a two hundred miles prior. It's still like
more than double what exactly? But the reason I like
this is because one, you've got humans being able to
travel larger distances, and in addition to that, you have
fewer reliance on cars and traffic. I mean, anyone who's
in LA has suffered through traffic or even trying to
get into the city. I mean that is something that
is definitely needed. But trains are data centers, Trains are
data companies, and with the advent of artificial intelligence, to
be able to have more information, more data on how
this could be going. It really is a matter of
national pride, I would argue. And to be able to
transport packages, medicine, food across the country. I mean, lord knows,
there's national security implications for everything I just said. But
in addition to people being able to travel like it's
the year twenty twenty five or twenty twenty six versus
nineteen ninety two. I think is really important. And I
know there's like this big rail merger and people have
different opinions of whether or not this rail merger. Maybe
you can just give us a snapshot of it should
go through or not. But I think everyone can agree
on it's a part of a conversation of modernizing the
United States infrastructure. We talk about modernization and transformation a
lot on Hello Future, especially with grid infrastructure, power infrastructure
for AI, for data centers, but we don't talk a
lot about the practicalities of it, which is why I
think rail hits all of the target right in the
middle of it for US.

Speaker 3 (10:51):
Mike, Yeah, so a more interconnected nation is going to
be good for us. Absolutely, there's no doubt about that.
How we get there's another question. The merger does help
freight more than passenger get from one end of the
country to the other more quickly. It's just it produces
one handoff. It's like if you went to an airport
and you switch from Delta to America, you're kind of
lost in between two different airlines. And that's what happens
now in the US with East and West. There's two
east eastern areas, two western railroads, and if it was
just one trans continental railroad, there'd be one less handoff
someplace in Kansas City or Chicago, right, And so that
speeds things up, but it's a marginally increasing speed. It
doesn't make the trains go faster. It just produces a handoff.

Speaker 4 (11:34):
Why should the average person care about that, Well.

Speaker 3 (11:37):
Things will get there faster and more reliably and ideally
less expensively. Railroad ship more stuff than you can imagine.
I mean coal and lumber, heavy stuff like that. That's
kind of the traditional view of railroads. But there's also
intermodal rail, which is basically putting a truck container on
a train and moving that train, and that does move
at sixty five miles an hour, and it gets across
the country. Can get across the country work than a
truck because we interchange crews from place to place and
that doesn't have to stop and sleep overnight. Okay, So
trains can be faster that overhead of trains, of handoffs
of freight between railroads and even within a yard. So
list things down now, you're the stuff and trucks is
anything you want, including ups packages or Amazon packages. So
those things, you know, can affect how quickly we get
the software ordering online.

Speaker 1 (12:27):
Do you think in the year twenty fifty that America
will have a futuristic style bullet trains and getting to
where we need to go?

Speaker 3 (12:34):
Or no, it would be wonderful, But I'm a doubter
that in this regard of Los Angeles is our California
is they've tried to put in a high speed rail
from Los Angeles to San Francisco, and that started decades
ago and it's still unfinished. And so building that kind
of infrastructure is a real challenge because they tend to
because it's high speed, be very expensive put together.

Speaker 2 (12:57):
It's got to be very self contained.

Speaker 3 (12:58):
There can't be any railroad crossings with a train coming
in three two hundred miles an hour, right.

Speaker 2 (13:03):
It's got to be totally isolated system.

Speaker 3 (13:06):
And just the reality is in California kind of say
that doing something transcontinental would be a massive undertaking, very
likely to be in the middle of the interstate. You'd
have a track running right down the middle. That would
be the one way of contiguous land from one end
of the country to the other. Imagine I seventeen if
you like, or whichever highway you there, you go, imagine
in between the all those lanes of cars, there's a
train that goes down and races right alongside the trains.
Because that's a closed system, that train could operate that quickly.

Speaker 4 (13:41):
Why don't we do that, Mike?

Speaker 2 (13:43):
It's so expensive, it's so expensive.

Speaker 3 (13:45):
It takes such incredible wolf power to UH to put
forth a budget that that would.

Speaker 4 (13:52):
How much money are we talking, I'll hundreds of millions.

Speaker 3 (13:56):
Take your sea, what would happen from New York to
philadel You start there, and once you build that, then
you can go Philadelphia to Washington and then maybe go
to New York to Boston or Philadelphia to Boston segment
at a time.

Speaker 2 (14:08):
That's it.

Speaker 3 (14:08):
And of course the highest dens of population areas are
the ones that are going to get that first, because
they're the most useful. That's where the traffic is the worst.
That's where they demand would be the greatest. And you
need enough ridership to justify such an investment for just
what we have now. It's at one point five million
dollars a mile to put in the track. And then
once we're talking about require really really precise engineering, not
a single bump.

Speaker 4 (14:32):
Otherwise, not a single bump. Literally.

Speaker 1 (14:34):
The reason I like that is because we just had
an expert on about driverless cars and client cars and stuff.
And if you subscribe to the notion that driverless cars
are the future, which I happen to believe, and then
you think what that could mean for public transportation, a
ride share where you're getting in a bus for lack
of a better word, with other people, and a driverless vehicle.

Speaker 4 (14:58):
And then you could have a.

Speaker 1 (15:00):
Modern highway where you have maybe it's not a train
the way that we think of it, but it's a
bullet bus for lack of a better word, with you know,
the size of a seven thirty seven or something. And
suddenly you have the bullet bus lane for three hundred
people and they it's a driverless vehicle and it just
zooms through. But then you don't have to build the infrastructure.
But you could build a train that kind of is
a conceptual train, but isn't really a train. This is
how this show works. Like I just riff and then
and then the train goes to Philly a lot faster.
You got what I'm saying, And people thought about that absolutly.

Speaker 3 (15:40):
You need that dedicated lane to be sure it'd be
closed off from the other traffic so.

Speaker 2 (15:44):
They wouldn't interact.

Speaker 4 (15:45):
Correct.

Speaker 3 (15:45):
But once she had that, and so let me tell you,
rails a better option for that. And here's why. There's
no steering wheel on a train. That magic lane with
the seven thirty seven on it. Put that on two
pieces of steel where the wheels are locked in more
less locked.

Speaker 4 (16:00):
In, Okay, like railroad train tracks.

Speaker 3 (16:03):
Railroad tracks exactly so that that that imaginations showed it
would be perfect in a rail setting. You've already been
on a driverless train before at the airport.

Speaker 2 (16:13):
Right, that happened.

Speaker 3 (16:14):
It happens all over the place. One, it's a closed system.
You won't have interaction with other vehicles.

Speaker 2 (16:19):
Right. And even though.

Speaker 3 (16:20):
Railroad does cross roads, those crossings are basically the train
has the right of way somebody moving this fast. You
couldn't do that. It would be unsafe. Two, there's no
steering wheel. You don't have to worry about getting on
and off. You know once once you're on that rail
and you're kind of locked in. So operating in higher
speeds is actually safer and quite frankly, it's more efficient
when you steal on steel, there's less friction and so
it'll actually get there with less fuel.

Speaker 1 (16:45):
We already have trucking stops. They could be turned into
bullet train stations. So we have the infrastructure. So why
don't we just make the Maryland House, which is the
one I always drive through with the good coffee, Why
don't we make that that could be in the future
where the bullet bus train thing pulls in and then
you get out off of that like you already had
the station's Mike, you know what I'm trying to say,
Why don't they just do it?

Speaker 4 (17:12):
I mean, people hate traffic. It's horrible, it's horrible. I agree,
Have people thought of that? I mean, are we are?

Speaker 1 (17:19):
Is a way to modernize the infrastructure, to turn the
rest stops into the bullet train stops. Mike, is this
like a plans?

Speaker 4 (17:26):
I mean, I am.

Speaker 1 (17:26):
I'm not an expert, but I'm just saying I'm good
at imagining things.

Speaker 3 (17:31):
Sure, if that rest stop was for I would suggest
for a rail network that were road network.

Speaker 2 (17:37):
Quite frankly, that's dedicated to that one.

Speaker 4 (17:39):
You gotta merge.

Speaker 1 (17:41):
My whole thing is you got to merge them because
if we can pun see I don't want to get political.
Mic that's my old line of thinking. I will say
during lockdowns, they were able in the city that I
live in, Washington, d C. To have outdoor dining on
the sidewalks, and then they added the bike lean, and
then you've got all of these other lanes. If we
can add lanes for all of these other modes of transportations,
I think we should be able to figure out a
to use the highways for a strategic bullet bus vehicle
of the future by the year twenty fifty. Professor Michael Gorman,
He's got a PhD. He's real smart on this stuff.
Nihou's chair and Business Analytics and Operations at the University
of Dayton School of Business are really, really, really appreciated.
He's also a former journalist, former editor in chief of
Informs journal on Apply to Analytics.

Speaker 4 (18:33):
So how did I do, Mike?

Speaker 2 (18:34):
Get a great Kevin, that's really enjoyable.

Speaker 1 (18:36):
Thank you.

Speaker 4 (18:36):
Hopefully we get to talk again soon. Have a great tomorrow.
Today