Rail Terminals

Authors: Dr. Jean-Paul Rodrigue and Dr. Brian Slack

1. Rail Terminals

Rail terminals, while not quite as space-extensive as airports and ports, suffer less from site constraints. This involves two major issues:

• Location. An important distinction concerning rail terminals concerns passengers and freight terminals, which commonly involve very different locations. Many rail terminals were established in the Nineteenth Century during the heyday of rail development, and while the sites may have been on the edge of urban areas at the time, they now find themselves surrounded by urban development, leaving limited opportunities for expansion. Passenger terminals tend to occupy central locations while freight terminals have seen a growing separation from central locations, with new facilities often built in an exurban location, particularly for high speed train stations.
• Setting. Because of the linear characteristic of the mode they serve, rail terminals are dominantly rectangular shaped facilities. Individually rail terminals may not be as extensive as airports or ports, but cumulatively the area of all the rail sites in a city may exceed those of the other modes. For example, in Chicago the combined area of rail freight yards exceed that of the airports.

Before the prominence of the automobile and trucking, economic activities tended to cluster around their respective rail terminals. However, as the trucking industry matured and highway infrastructure was expanded and improved, rail terminals lost a great deal of their primacy. Even if rail transportation is generally more fuel-efficient than other modes, the mobility of passengers and freight quickly responded to the availability of the ubiquitous highway infrastructure.

2. Passengers Terminals

Passenger rail terminals tend to be functionally simple facilities and in their most basic form, they include a quay for passengers to embark or disembark and a common area for ticket purchase, waiting, and for activities servicing large volumes of passengers (e.g. retail and restoration). While some are along a line that require a stop of a few minutes so that passengers can embark or disembark, others are terminal locations at the head of an intercity corridor.

Central railway stations are typically in the heart of downtown cores. At one time their sites may have been on the edge of the pre-industrial city, as is the case for London and Paris but today they are very much part of the CBD. The stations are typically imposing buildings reflecting the power and importance represented by the railway in the Nineteenth Century. For many cities, railway stations are the key elements of urban centrality and activity and represent an impressive architectural achievement unmatched in any other type of transportation terminal and occupying a large amount of real estate. Notable examples include the Grand Central Station in New York, St. Pancras station in London, the Gare de Lyon in Paris, or the Shinjuku train station in Tokyo (the world's busiest). Since many central rail stations handle large amounts of commuters, that also tend to be the nexus of public transit systems, namely subways. Even if in several cases, particularly in North America, the long distance function has subsided, the imprint of passenger rail terminals on the structure of urban transit systems has endured.

As rail passenger traffic has declined the need for many of these stations has diminished, and a rationalization has resulted in the conversion of many stations to other uses, sometimes with striking effects, such as the Musee D’Orsay in Paris and Windsor Station in Montreal. Rail yard conversion has been less spectacular, partly because the sites are less interesting from an architectural standpoint, but nonetheless important. Many former downtown freight facilities have been completely redeveloped in residential developments (Montreal) or commercially (Toronto). Indeed, the CN Tower-Skydome complexes in Toronto are on former rail land.

3. Freight Terminals

Unlike passengers terminals, Rail freight yards did not have to be quite so centrally located, and because they required a great deal of space for multiple tracks for marshaling they were more likely located on entirely greenfield sites than passenger terminals. However, rail yards tended to attract manufacturing activities, and thus became important industrial zones. They also tend to be more complex because of the different freight markets they service (e.g. grain, coal, cars, containers). Rail freight terminals perform two major functions:

• Intermodal. The function of loading and unloading freight from railcars. Depending on the nature of what is been carried, it requires specific equipment. For cars, roll-on and roll-off ramps are required while for grains, grain elevators are commonly used to store, mix and load grain into railcars. Containerization has greatly expanded the intermodal productivity of rail terminals since it permits quick loading and unloading sequences, but at the expense of more trackside space available.
• Shunting. The function of assembling, sorting and breaking of freight trains. Since trains can be composed of up to about 100 railcars, often of various nature, origin and destination, shunting can be a complex task performed on several occasion. Comparatively, unit trains which carry the same commodity, such as coal, cars or containers, require less shunting. Bailey yard in North Platte Nebraska is the largest classification yard in the world and handles 10,000 railcars per day.

The first forms of intermodal appeared in the late 19th century with practices dubbed "circus trains" because lorries were rolled in on flatcars using a ramp, a practice that was pioneered by circuses (Barnum in 1872). This simple ramp-based technique enabled many rail terminals to become "intermodal" by offering "piggy back" services. By the end of the 20th century many of the industries around rail freight yards had relocated or disappeared, and in many cities these former industrial parks have been targets of urban revitalization. At the same time, new intermodal practices emerged, notably lifting trailers or containers directly onto a flatcar. However, this required capital investments in intermodal equipment as well as paved terminal surfaces for storage. Only terminals with sufficient volume could be profitable. This has been accompanied by closure of some of the rail yards, either because they were too small for contemporary operating activities, or because of shrinkage of the local traffic base. In spite of a growth of intermodal traffic, the number of intermodal terminals declined.

In North America many older rail freight yards have been converted into intermodal facilities because of the burgeoning traffic involving containers and road trailers, a process which started in the 1960s. The ideal configuration for these terminals is different from the typical general freight facility with their need for multiple spurs to permit the assembling of wagons to form train blocks. The loading and unloading of wagons tended to be a manual process, often taking days, tying up terminal rail capacity. Retrofitting conventional rail yards for contemporary intermodal operations proved problematic. Intermodal trains tend to serve a more limited number of cities and are more likely to be dedicated to one destination. They offer the notable advantage of being able to be quickly loaded or unloaded, thus tying up less terminal rail capacity. The need here is for long but fewer rail spurs. The configuration typically requires a site over three kilometers in length and over 100 hectares in area. In addition, good access to the highway system is a requisite as well as a degree of automation to handle the transshipment demands of modern intermodal rail operations.

One of the important growth factor of rail transportation in many contexts, particularly in North America, has been its closer integration with maritime shipping. This is particularly the case at port terminals with new on-dock container rail facilities. The term "on-dock" can itself be a bit misleading since a direct ship-to-rail transshipment actually does not take place. A dray carries the container from alongside the ship to alongside the rail (and vice versa). Transloading, the practice of transferring loads between truck and rail transportation, has also experienced a remarkable growth in recent years. As long distance trucking is getting increasingly expensive due to growing energy costs and congestion, many shippers see the advantages of using rail transportation to a location in the vicinity of their markets. At this location, freight loads are broken down into LTL and then shipped by short distance trucks to their final destinations.

Former rail terminals and port sites have been among the most important redevelopment areas in most major urban centers over the last 20 years. The redevelopment of old port sites, because of their scale (very large), location (adjacent to downtown), and sites (waterfront), have been at the forefront of the process. Their renovation has had a major influence on the surrounding regions. Many cities have experienced significant benefits from waterfront redevelopment in downtown revitalization and economic revival. Similar experiences have occurred in the United States (Boston, New York, Baltimore, San Francisco, Seattle), and Europe (London, Manchester, Bristol, Liverpool, Rotterdam).