Types and Functions of Rail Freight Corridors

Rail is of primordial importance to support long distance trade corridors and has experienced a resurgence in the recent years, particularly in North American. It accounts for close to 40% of all the ton-km transported in the United States, while in Europe this share is only 8%. Still, rail freight corridors have a functional typology which simplistically can be differentiated by the distance (scale) they service. All the types of rail corridors fit within a specific freight distribution strategy but are imbedded to one-another:

• Short distance. Conventional transport economics underlines that rail is not a very suitable mode for short distances. Short distance rails corridors are thus established under very specific circumstances, namely where there is acute congestion and a modal shift to rail is required to improve the capacity and throughput of a gateway or hub. This often concerns on-dock rail facilities where containers are exiting / entering a port terminal on rail instead of on truck, but the destination of these rail shipments often goes much further inland. The Alameda corridor is an example of a short distance rail corridor of 20 miles (32 km) aiming at expanding the throughout of the San Pedro port cluster by shifting away containerized traffic from trucks. The “Agile Port” concept is an expansion of this strategy by linking directly on dock rail facilities to a nearby inland rail terminal where containers can be sorted by destination. On one side, the maritime terminal increases its throughout, in theory up to 40%, without additional land, while on the other side, a nearby inland rail terminal facing less land pressures is used to sort containerized shipments to their respective inland destinations. The Port of Tacoma is considering implementing this strategy. The Panama Canal Railway is a dedicated corridor for maritime shipping lines to shuffle containers to and from the Atlantic to the Pacific side.
• Hinterland access. In this case, the rail corridor is a strategy to expand the market area of a gateway, often linking on-dock rail facilities to an inland distribution center where containers are moved to trucks to their final destination. It applies well when there is a dense hinterland such as along the Boston-Washington corridor where the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey has established the Port Inland Distribution Network to expend the port’s hinterland and provide alternatives for trucking over medium distances. The Port of Virginia has also established an hinterland access strategy with the Virginia inland port, a rail terminal located about 220 miles inland. It is thus not surprising that most initiatives have taken place in this context.
• Landbridge. A landbridge is a long distance continental rail corridor linking gateways which insures the continuity of global commodity chains. The North American landbridge is mainly the outcome of growing transpacific trade and has undergone the containerized revolution; container traffic represented approximately 80% of all rail intermodal moves. Landbridges are particularly the outcome of cooperation between rail operators eager to get lucrative long distance traffic and maritime shippers eager to reduce shipping time and costs, particularly from Asia.
• Circum-hemispheric. This goes beyond rail corridors to integrate a sequence of maritime and land transportation corridors in a seamless fashion. A circular transport chain across a hemisphere is thus established. Such a corridor does not yet exist and is likely to be decades away. The Northern East-West Corridor the Atlantic with the Pacific through the transsiberian has been in the design phase for decades.