Rail network transformation offers many opportunities for justice
For rail workers, trackside communities, native tribes and rural areas
7 minute read
Solutionary Rail’s plan for decarbonizing our transportation and energy infrastructures has a focus on justice for all those impacted, reducing harm and spreading benefits. This is our approach to just transition, a term that has been used extensively, but often without specificity, sometimes devolving into manipulative jargon. For Solutionary Rail, our approach to a just transition is steeped in relationships built and lessons learned. Whether for labor, Native American tribes, rural communities or trackside communities, a decade of investigation and collaboration with allies informs our evolving vision for how to benefit those most impacted by our current systems.
Solutionary Rail is built on three main pillars:
1. Shift freight from trucks to rail, already 3 to 5 times more efficient than trucking, reducing pollution, road damage and accidents;
2. Electrify primary rail lines using renewable energy, providing zero-carbon freight and passenger transportation key to combatting climate disruption, and,
3. Leverage electrification to lay high-voltage direct current lines along rail corridors to transmit remote solar and wind resources from remote regions where they are most abundant to metropolitan centers where demand is concentrated.
What follows is how this vision can promote just transition.
Just transition for railroad workers and unions
The concept of just transition originated in the labor movement, so it is appropriate to start here. Railroads were built across the continent in the 19th century predominantly by Chinese, Irish, and Black laborers. The first African-American labor union in the U.S. to be chartered with the AFL was the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters founded by A. Philip Randolph in 1925.
Today, the U.S. railroad industry is the most unionized sector of the economy, with almost all big 6 railroad company jobs organized into unions. Solutionary Rail has worked closely with Railroad Workers United, an inter-union, cross-craft coalition of railroad workers and their supporters across North America. (You can learn more at the Campaigns button on the RWU site.)
Once 2 million railroad workers labored on the nation’s railroads. A century of line closures and abandonments, job consolidations, and new technology have drastically reduced these numbers. Electrification and restoration of tracking along key mainlines would dramatically increase demand for railroad construction and maintenance workers as well as engineers and trainmen. Winning high priority freight traffic back from the highways, together with increasing passenger service, will result in many more scheduled jobs for train and engine service workers.
Currently, the major rail carriers aligned with shareholders have been operating under a profit maximization regime referred to as Precision Scheduled Railroading. Many note it is neither precise, scheduled or particularly good railroading. This has led to industry pressure for further cutbacks in infrastructure maintenance and smaller work forces, for example, in the current campaign to reduce two-person-minimum crew size to single-person crews.
It has also led to longer trains, posing increased danger of derailments such as the crash in East Palestine, Ohio in 2023 that released toxics on neighboring communities. Unit trains are now 100 or more cars long, carrying the heaviest freight, including coal, oil, liquefied natural gas and grain. Workers endure long work hours, short staffing, limited time off work, chronic crew fatigue, and harsh discipline in addition to furloughs and layoffs in all crafts, adding to safety hazards.
A just transition for workers in a revitalized, electrified railroad system could be ensured by union representation in all stages of planning, implementation, and oversight. Safety would be a joint effort to remove hazards. A well-organized system would mean more predictable and rational work schedules. Trains would run at reasonable lengths based not simply on lowering labor costs but on track capacities and expediting service. Railroads would return to judging success by traditional metrics including employee and customer satisfaction, train speed, increased train numbers, increased shipments, increased business, and upgraded physical plants, rather than shareholder payouts and stock buybacks.
Just transition for trackside and hub-side communities
The extraction, transportation and burning of fossil fuels has impacted low-income communities living close to these sites, many of which are predominantly communities of color. The negative health impacts are increasingly well known, from elevated rates of premature and underweight newborns, to cardiovascular disease and shorter life expectancies. Black carbon and other pollutants from trucks, trains, and diesel-powered machinery affect both workers and communities living near ports, train yards, truck hubs and warehouses. Trucking electrification, shifting long distance freight back to the railroad, and railroad electrification would produce immediate health benefits for individuals, families, and communities living, working, and going to school near transportation routes and hubs.
A just transition for these communities requires inclusion of groups such as the Moving Forward Network, a coalition dedicated to environmental justice in transportation infrastructure in which Solutionary Rail participates. The groups must be involved throughout the planning and oversight process in the mode shift of freight from trucks to rail and in railroad electrification. Construction of a renewable energy grid running along the railroad corridors could help ensure that trackside and hub-side communities receive employment benefits as well.
Just transition for native tribes
The history of U.S. westward expansion is one of war and genocide against the indigenous peoples. Railroads played a critical role in that conquest and settlement. On the Great Plains, rail lines cut buffalo migration routes and facilitated the near extinction of the buffalo on which plains Indians depended for sustenance and their way of life. Railroads opened the way to establishment of towns and ranches, displacing and forcibly removing tribes from their traditional lands and waters. Railroad rights of way were the earliest easements granted by U.S. Secretaries of the Interior. Because they were granted in perpetuity, they remain in effect despite laws that have been passed restoring other tribal rights.
Proposals, such as Solutionary Rail concept for a Steel Interstate system under public ownership, offers an opportunity to deliver some measure of redress. In the process of transitioning, justice can be served by partnering with tribes through the Indian Land Tenure Foundation and other organizations to determine the future of railroad rights of way across tribal lands along with accompanying renewable energy power lines and infrastructure.
Native tribes would benefit in ways beyond right-of-way justice. Electrified rail lines with restored freight service would open up new opportunities for goods manufactured and harvested by tribal enterprises. Renewable energy infrastructure would open possibilities for the buying and selling of renewable energy.
Right-of-way justice and economic benefits could be ensured by tribal involvement throughout the planning and oversight process to create a transformed rail network.
Just transition for rural communities
Rural communities have suffered chronic depopulation and consequent dwindling tax bases for schools and services. Much of that traces to declining transportation access. Large railroad companies have abandoned many lines serving rural communities. Even though short lines have picked up some of the slack, it doesn’t fully compensate for lost service. Even along primary lines, railroads have eliminated many stops at small-town stations, eliminating mixed freight service. Grain is the only agricultural product that many railroads transport. So rural communities have to use more expensive trucking service, putting them at a cost disadvantage while increasing wear and tear on county roads and rural highways.
The decline of rural communities even as economic activity has leaked to metropolitan regions has increased social tensions and political polarization. Many rural communities feel they are left-behind “flyover” people. A revived rail network focused on serving public interests can help heal those divides and reconnect America. The Steel Interstate, which would run as an open access toll road, would open the way for new players to offer services which today’s railroads do not provide.
Restoring freight service would help save farmers through reducing costs. Rural manufacturers could be connected to each other and to markets in larger towns and cities. Rural electric cooperatives could access power transmission lines to develop new markets for renewable energy resources, benefitting rural landowners. All would help keep people in communities and improve local government tax bases. We write more about that here.
Conclusion
Mode shifting from trucks to rail, electrifying main rail lines, and leveraging electrification to create new long-distance transmission for remote renewable energy resources can provide a just transition for:
● Railroad workers through improved working conditions and new employment opportunities;
● Trackside and hub-side communities by reducing and eliminating health-destroying fossil fuel pollution;
● Native tribes by right-of-way justice that restores rights taken when railroad were built, and,
● Rural communities in need of new economic development opportunities.
But this can only happen if we change the way railroads are managed so they will serve the public interest, either through re-regulation or public ownership in whole or part. It will take a broad coalition to make this happen. The just transition opportunities offered by the Solutionary Rail vision can bring such a coalition together.
Join the Solutionary Rail team
We invite you to be part of this people-powered campaign to put American railroads in service of the public interest through rail electrification, shifting freight and people from roads to rail, and using rail corridors to transmit renewable energy. Participate in webinars, strategy sessions and skill sharing with community and technical experts by signing up at SolutionaryRail.org. Support this work with a tax-deductible donation here. To buy our book, Solutionary Rail - A people-powered campaign to electrify America's railroads and open corridors to a clean energy future, go here. And please sign up below for a free subscription to our Solutionary Rail substack.