The Economics of Owning a Train

Added: 2026-05-23

[00:00:00]This is a map of North America's freight rail network. Unlike airlines, which fly through public airspace and land at public airports, or trucks, which drive on publicly built highways, freight railroads own everything. The tracks, the bridges, and the tunnels. All 140,000 m of it. Since 1980, they've spent close to 1.4 trillion in today's dollars maintaining and building infrastructure that belongs entirely to them. No other transportation industry in the country works like this. And yet, despite all of that, the economics of actually owning a train are far stranger than you'd expect. Because here's the thing, there's no such thing as actually owning a train. The locomotive, the rail cars, the track, the terminal, and the cargo inside are often owned by five completely different entities. And the economics of each piece are radically different. So, how does any of this actually make money? Well, let me explain. When most people picture a freight train, they imagine one company running the whole operation. But that's not how it works. On a major class one railroads network, which are major freight railroads with annual operating revenues exceeding $1 billion, of which there's only six of those left in the US. Roughly half the cars rolling over its tracks at any given time belong to someone else. They belong to shippers, leasing companies, or railc car pooling organizations. And this split has been growing. In 2008, railroads owned about 28% of all freight rail cars in North America. By 2025, that's dropped to just 15%. Meanwhile, leasing companies have gone from owning 43% to 57% of the entire fleet in the same time period.

[00:01:44]For tank cars specifically, lessers, which are leasing companies, own 83%.

[00:01:50]Railroads own less than 1%. This isn't an accident. It's deliberate. Railroads figured out decades ago that owning rolling stock ties up enormous amounts of capital in assets that only serve one function. So, they offloaded that risk to someone else. The question is, who actually wants to own a rail car? Well, to answer that, you have to understand what a rail car actually is from a financial perspective. Every rail car type is a bet on a specific slice of the economy. Covered hoppers carry grain.

[00:02:20]Tank cars carry chemicals and energy products. While cars carry shipping containers from international trade, auto racks carry vehicles. Each one is essentially a financial instrument shaped like a piece of steel. A new freight rail car costs between $100,000 and $150,000.

[00:02:38]And here's what makes them unusual as assets. They last 35 to 50 years. That's an extraordinarily long life for something that gets loaded, hauled, unloaded, and sent back thousands of times. Most shippers don't want to tie up that kind of capital in something so specialized, so they lease instead. And the companies that own and lease these cars aren't railroad companies. They're financial institutions. Take GATX Corporation for example, founded in Chicago in 1898 as a leasing company starting with just 48 used cars. Today, it owns roughly 111,000 rail cars and over 660 locomotives. Trinity Industries started as a manufacturer before becoming a lesser and now owns about 101,000 cars. Then there's Wall Street.

[00:03:27]Wells Fargo owned $ 105,000 rail cars before selling the entire portfolio for $4.4 billion in 2025 to a joint venture between GATX Corporation and Brookfield Infrastructure. The people who own the majority of America's freight rail cars aren't railroad people. They're financial managers running long-lived depreciating assets on spreadsheets.

[00:03:50]Now, the physics of why rail exists in the first place are genuinely remarkable. Steel wheels on steel rails produce roughly 1/10enth the friction of rubber tires on asphalt. A single train can move 1 ton of freight, nearly 500 m on a gallon of fuel, which is 3 to four times more efficient than trucking. Rail freight typically costs 2 to 4 cents per ton mile compared to 8 to 20 cents for trucks. A full train is one of the most efficient machines on Earth. But an empty train is just expensive steel sitting on expensive track and most of the fleet is empty most of the time. On any given day, more than 900,000 of America's 1.65 million freight rail cars aren't moving. A typical freight car spends only about 15% of its entire lifetime actually in motion. So if most cars aren't moving most of the time and the handling costs more than the hauling, how does anyone actually make money owning railroad cars? Well, the answer is utilization. It's everything.

[00:04:51]The difference between it being a money machine and a money pit. GATX is the best case study for this. They've maintained 99% average fleet utilization from 2013 to 2024. Even during the 200809 financial crisis, they never dropped below 96%. All through extreme diversification. Their fleet serves more than 830 customers across roughly 170 different rail car types and 550 commodities. Their largest single customer represents less than 6% of revenue. No single commodity, no single customer, no single sector can sink them. The financial structure underneath is just as deliberate. A rail car purchase is financed with longdated predominantly fixed rate debt aligned to the 30 to 40year life of the asset, not to the 3 to 7-year lease term. That mismatch is intentional. It means the lesser can survive a bad lease cycle without being forced to refinance at the worst possible time. The lease rates themselves tell you exactly where you are in the economic cycle. And that leads us to what's arguably the most important variable in all of this, commodity cycles, because every rail car is a financial bet on a commodity, and commodities disappear. Coal is a textbook example of this. It was once the single most important thing American railroads hold. Yet, car loads of coal fell from 7.7 million in 2008 to just 2.9 million in 2024. Now, you might think environmental regulation killed coal, but that's not the full story. The real causes were more counterintuitive.

[00:06:27]The first was railroad deregulation itself. The Staggers Rail Act of 1980, which gave railroads the freedom to set market-based rates for the first time, ended up dropping rail rates 44% in real terms over the following decades. This made it cheap to ship low sulfa coal from Wyoming's Powder River basin all the way across the country which displaced the more expensive labor intensive coal from Appalachia. The second cause was productivity gains.

[00:06:55]Western mines produced nearly six times as much coal per worker hour as eastern ones. And the third and ultimately decisive factor was the rise of hydraulic fracturing or fracking for short. Cheap natural gas displaced coal in electricity generation. Meanwhile, the Clean Air Act of 1970 had actually extended Cole's life for decades through its grandfathering clause, which let old power plants keep operating without modern pollution controls. But eventually, economics won out. No new rail cars for coal have been built since roughly 2016. Crude oil tells a different but equally dramatic story.

[00:07:32]Oil byrail car loads went from 9,500 in 2008 to 493,000 in 2014. The fracking boom, particularly in North Dakota's Backan Formation, was producing oil in places far from existing pipeline networks. Rail was the only way to move it. Then oil prices crashed and pipeline capacity caught up.

[00:07:53]By 2017, originated car loads had fallen to 129,000. Tens of thousands of shiny new tank cars ordered at the peak suddenly had nowhere to go. On the other side, Intermodal has been the growth story. It surpassed coal as the top revenue source for US freight railroads in 2012, bringing in $15 billion that year. By 2023, it accounted for roughly 25% of class 1 revenue and still held the top spot. But the commodity a wildcar is exposed to isn't grain or coal. It's global trade itself. When trans-Pacific container volumes surged through the 2000s and 2010s, driven by Chinese manufacturing, US well-car demand surged with them. When tariffs hit or exports slowed, those same cars piled up in yards. 38% of all rail traffic is directly tied to international trade, making railroads far more exposed to tariffs and geopolitics than most people realize.

[00:08:50]The worst rail car to own is one built perfectly for a world that no longer exists. Now, up to this point, we've mostly talked about the rolling stock side of the equation, but there is an entirely separate business underneath all of it, owning the track. And the economics are fundamentally different.

[00:09:06]See, track ownership is a natural monopoly. You can't build a second rail line to every factory and mine. About 34% of all tonnage shipped by freight rail is captive to a single railroad, meaning those shippers have no economic alternative. Those captive shippers can pay 75% or more than shippers on competitive routes. That's enormous pricing power. And it's something a rail car lesser could never dream of. In Europe, a 1991 European Union directive required the opposite model.

[00:09:35]Infrastructure and operations must be legally separated, so multiple train operators can compete on the same track.

[00:09:42]One result of this structural difference is that European leers own only 38% of rail cars compared to 57% in North America. The private leasing market as we know it is a direct product of the American ownership model. There's one more thing that makes train ownership uniquely risky, and it's something most people don't think about. A rail car doesn't have to become unprofitable to be worthless. On July 6th, 2013, an unattended 72 car crude oil train rolled downhill into Lakmagantic, Quebec, killing 47 people. The derailed tank cars were all DOT 111 models, a design from 1964 that was still in widespread service 50 years later. 94% of them were breached. The regulatory response was sweeping. An entirely new tank car standard, the DOT 117, was mandated for transporting class 3 flammable liquids, thicker steel shells, protective jackets, and improved valves. Every non-compliant car had to be retrofitted or phased out, with the major deadline coming into effect May 1st, 2025. GATX alone invested over $760 million in compliant cars. And since the DOT17 standard was implemented, there hasn't been a single death or serious injury from a derailed DOT17 carrying flammable liquids. Obviously, this is welld deserved. I mean, safety first. But the broader point is this: regulatory change, commodity disappearance, a route losing traffic, or a shipper switching to pipelines. Any of these can make an entire rail stock useless. Don't get me wrong, though. Even an abandoned rail car has a flaw. GATX generates an average of $74 million a year just from selling older cars out of its fleet. The scrap steel alone ensures that end of life is itself a profit center. Its top 10 customers have an average relationship tenure of 51 years. That kind of durability doesn't come from luck. It comes from understanding that a rail car isn't a piece of transportation equipment. It's a financial asset with commodity exposure, regulatory risk, and a 40-year time horizon. A full train moving on a busy corridor, connected to the right network, leased to a stable customer, and financed with long-term debt. That's one of the most profitable assets in transportation. Take away any one of those conditions, and the math falls apart. Thank you for watching.