According to the American Association of Railroads (AAR), railroads are committed to moving the products that Americans use every day in an environmentally sound and sensitive manner. Railroads move 43 percent of the nation’s freight and are the “greenest,” most fuel-efficient form of ground transportation today.
Below is a list of AAR statistics:
- A freight train can move a ton of freight an average of 436 miles on a single gallon of fuel. That's close to four times as far as it could move by truck.
- A train can take the load of 280 trucks off the road. That's like removing 1,100 cars from the road.
- Each ton-mile of freight moved by rail rather than highway reduces greenhouse gas emissions by two-thirds or more.
- Freight trains are three or more times more fuel-efficient than trucks.
- If only 10 percent of freight currently moved by highway switched to rail, national fuel savings would exceed one billion gallons of fuel a year and greenhouse gas emissions would fall by 12 million tons.
- By improving their fuel efficiency, freight railroads have, in effect, reduced their greenhouse gas emissions by 20 million tons every year since 1980.