06/15/2026
Thank you to Railroad Weekly for highlighting last week's New York Rail Conference and for also sponsoring the event.
Shortline Update
New York City was filled with excitement last week. No, not because of the thrilling Knicks championship run in the NBA Finals. What really had Gotham abuzz was a rail conference hosted by Andrew Young, who chairs the Global Rail Group linked to the Chartered Institute of Logistics and Transport (he’s also Principal Rail Consultant for Latin Rail Intelligence). The programming was mostly passenger-focused, though one speaker was James Bonner of a freight shortline called the New York, Susquehanna, & Western Railway. It runs between upstate New York and northern New Jersey, interchanging with CSX and Norfolk Southern. Bonner explained how in dense markets like northern New Jersey, “the constraint is at the edge,” meaning the first- and last-mile. Such places are subject to physical space limitations, neighborhood regulations, interchange friction, and so on. But shortlines, he said, are often “close enough to the local constraint to solve it.”
Auto engineers say it’s hard to build a race car that’s cheap, fast, and reliable. Usually, they can achieve just two of the three. For Bonner, the analogy for railroads is with people, power, and committed business. It’s hard to have all three in adequate supply simultaneously. People take time to train. Locomotives take time to acquire. Sometimes, you have to invest in people and power long before new business from a project comes online. Indeed, it’s vital to “build capacity before the carload arrives.” Or put another way, “to prepare the option before the market or project reaches the constraint.” Capacity, however, doesn’t just mean additional track. It can mean offering a customer more physical space, more time options, more interchange options, etc.
Speaking of new business, the NYSW hopes to benefit from the massive Gateway tunnel project under the Hudson River, one of the country’s biggest infrastructure projects. The goal is more capacity for passenger rail, not freight rail. But the construction itself will involve moving huge amounts of stone and other materials. And the NYSW’s Bergen yard just happens to be right near one of the construction sites. Bonner is determined to create new capacity to support that. Unlike trucks, moreover, which are subject to overnight curfews, rail service can operate around the clock.
Railroad Weekly June 15, 2026
