The Lettuce Train

Sometime in the last couple of years I saw a show on PBS about a train that carries produce from California to New York non-stop everyday. Okay, they stop to change crews and maybe they only run it once a week, not every day. Something got me started on this topic this afternoon (I don't even remember what it was now), and I could not find anything I was all done with my first draft and went back looking for links and pictures. Then I found something. But before that, all I found was all kinds of related stuff, like how they used to do it, and how some railroad is going to start service from Walla Walla Washington to Rotterdam (a suburb of Schenectady) New York. But I could not find any reference to such a train being run now. I did find one reference that mentioned it was laughable for the railroads to try and compete with trucks in shipping produce:

"Shippers and motor carriers may be excused for laughing when they hear railroaders talk about reefer traffic as a growth opportunity. Reefer traffic--freight moving in mechanical refrigerated boxcars or intermodal trailers and containers--is a business from which U.S. railroads have virtually been expelled over the last two decades."

I think what happened was the Clean Air Act. All of a sudden anthracite coal from Appalachia becomes carbona-non-grata and the coal companies start digging up low sulfur coal in the Powder River basin in Wyoming and shipping it to the East Coast at the rate of 300 million tons a year. That basically consumes all of the railroads resources and they can no longer be bothered with a single express train full of perishable vegetables, they have real work to do. So the lettuce train fell into disuse and the trucking industry took over. The railroads have had a couple of decades or so to adjust their business to this new long distance coal transportation model. They have automated their systems and now they are ready to start competing with trucks for the less than "100 fully loaded trains a month" deals. 

Coal Trains at North Platte, Nebraska

Update April 2021 replaced missing view of coal trains.