All Tickets, Please

As oil prices rise, businesses and consumers alike are ditching planes and cars for more-efficient rail.

If the cargo aboard a freight train that rolled into Hamburg, Germany, earlier this year

It’s an extreme example of how rail is resurging around the world. The trend, fueled by concern over the environment and frustration with the hassles and congestion of road and air travel, has been building for some time. But in recent months, interest has exploded thanks to the rising price of oil. “The whole movement to rail is going to accelerate because we are now facing an energy crisis and an environmental crisis at the same time,” says Guillaume Pepy, president of the French state-owned rail company SNCF, and chairman of Eurostar. Businesses and commuters eager to save money on fuel are opting for train travel, which can be exponentially more efficient than a car or plane journey, particularly as distances grow. For example, even a diesel locomotive at its most efficient can move a ton of weight 436 miles on a single gallon of fuel, according to the American Association of Railroads, making a full train about 10 times thriftier than a hybrid car, let alone a typical 18-wheel truck. “Hands down, traveling by rail is the most fuel-efficient and least carbon-intensive way you can go,” says Nancy Kete, director of the World Resource Institute Center for Sustainable Transport.

As the real-world cost of carbon increases, not least because of growing regulation (most notably European Union controls on emissions), it’s no wonder that a host of new investors are pouring money into rail travel, and engineers across the world are laying fresh tracks to carry a generation of faster and lighter trains. Europe alone should see 6,000 kilometers of new high-speed line by 2010; China aims to complete 10,000 kilometers by 2020. Even in the United States, where car culture has resulted in years of rail neglect, there’s talk of a new package of government subsidies for rail giant Amtrak (which has seen passenger numbers rise by 17 percent in the last two years). Says Gelfo Kroeger, a spokesperson for Deutsche Bahn, the German rail company behind the Beijing link: “We have companies looking at us now who would never have looked at us before.”

Newsweek