A shortline railroad is a small or mid-sized railroad company that operates over a relatively short distance relative to larger, national railroad networks. The term is used primarily in the United States and Canada. In the former, railroads are categorized by operating revenue, and most shortline railroads fall into the Class III or Class II categorization defined by the Surface Transportation Board .
9-577: The Thoroughbred Shortline Program was a system of shortline creation devised by Norfolk Southern in the late 1980s. It involved an alternative to the typical practice of a Class I railroad selling rail lines outright to shortlines in the post- Staggers Act era. Defining features of the program included leasing lines to shortline operators, as opposed to outright sales, keeping stations available in Norfolk Southern marketing campaigns, and crediting carloads delivered to Norfolk Southern towards
18-416: A Class III is a railroad with an annual operating revenue of less than $ 28 million. In Canada , Transport Canada classifies shortline railroads as Class II . There are three kinds of shortlines in the U.S.: handling, switch, and ISS (Interline Settlement System). It was reported in 2009 that shortline railroads employ 20,000 people in the U.S., and own 30 percent of the nation's railroad tracks. About
27-440: A quarter of all U.S. rail freight travels at least a small part of its journey over a short-line railroad. An ever-growing number of shortline operators have been acquired by larger holding companies which own or lease railroad properties in many states, as well as internationally. For example, Genesee & Wyoming controls over 100 railroads in over 40 U.S. states and four Canadian provinces. A consequence of such consolidation
36-716: The beginning of the railroad age, nearly all railway lines were shortlines, locally chartered, financed and operated; as the railroad industry matured, local lines were merged or acquired to create longer mainline railroads. Especially since 1980 in the U.S. and 1990 in Canada, many shortlines have been established when larger railroad companies sold off or abandoned low-profit portions of their trackage. Shortline operators typically have lower labor, overhead and regulatory costs than Class I railroads and therefore are often able to operate profitable lines that lost money for their original owners. Shortlines generally exist for one or more of
45-542: The following reasons: In France, the equivalent of shortlines railroads are the opérateurs ferroviaires de proximité (local railways operators). Because of their small size and generally low revenues, the great majority of shortline railroads in the U.S. are classified by the Association of American Railroads (AAR) as Class III . As defined by the Surface Transportation Board (STB),
54-472: The lease and eventual purchase of the line. The program ran from 1988 to 1991, creating more than a dozen new shortline railroads, nearly all of which are still in operation today. The period following railroad deregulation under the provisions of the Staggers Rail Act of 1980 spawned a plethora of railroad rationalization programs. In addition to outright abandonment of low density routes, many of
63-592: The more promising lines were sold to shortline operators. A reoccurring problem was that many of these new railroads were often so overburdened by the costs of purchasing the infrastructure they operated on, that they lacked the capital to expand their customer base and improve their railroads. Norfolk Southern explored the creation of its own rationalization program in 1987, with the goal of reorganizing 2,700 miles (4,300 km) of low density lines spread throughout their 27,000 miles (43,000 km) of track. 1,500 miles (2,400 km) of track were abandoned outright, with
72-548: The remaining tracks slated to be distributed to shortlines. The result was the creation of the Thoroughbred Shortline Program. A key fixture of the Thoroughbred Shortline Program included leasing, as opposed to selling, railroads to shortline operators. This spared the new startups from expensive costs of taking out loans for mortgage payments on the railroads. The second component of the program involved crediting carloads delivered to Norfolk Southern by
81-447: The shortlines towards the lease. So long as the shortline could maintain the same annual carloads on the line as Norfolk Southern, they owed no payments towards the lease. This also kept traffic directed on Norfolk Southern interchange points, as opposed to competitors lines. Leases under the program spanned between 3 and 20 years, after which the shortlines had the option of purchasing the railroad outright. Shortline railroad At
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