In American ports, reindustrialization is all the rage. The prospect of new shipyards, new technologies and new manufacturing methods are all making America’s long-ignored industrial waterfront trendier than ever. That excitement, unfortunately, has yet to be matched by key logistical partners. For all the present-day “whiz-bang” and Navy engagement on the docks, America’s stodgy and slow-moving railroads risk putting a damper on America’s technological “sprint” to the seas.

It wasn’t always this way. From the late 1800’s to the mid-1900’s, American rail was a key enabler of waterfront industrialization. In emailed comments, Captain Stephen M. Carmel , the Administrator of the U.S. Maritime Administration ( MARAD ), cited the Pennsylvania Railroad Company as an example of how railways were once tightly integrated with waterfront manufacturing. “The Pennsylvania Railroad Company was a leader in developing the maritime port interface, investing in steel, shipbuilding and the waterfront to advance innovative intermodal transportation solutions.”

This kind of integration can happen again, at speed, in America.

Return Rail To America’s Industrial Waterfront

If rail is unready to move quickly in supporting waterfront manufacturers, the Department of Transportation, via the innovative application of funding tools like the Federal Railroad Administration’s Consolidated Rail Infrastructure and Safety Improvements (CRISI) Program, can take a more active role in pushing America’s rail to more tightly integrate with America’s reindustrializing waterfront.

Beyond rail’s routine efforts to bolster rail service to container and bulk freight-oriented ports, America’s rail companies can do far more to facilitate innovative, grand-scale waterfront manufacturing projects that are underway in Solano County California , the Great Lakes , and elsewhere along America’s vast waterfront.

Through the CRISI program and other funding tools, President Donald Trump and the Department of Transportation can encourage waterfront states to modernize old regional rail service alignments by incentivizing the replacement of obsolete rail infrastructure, the reactivation or activation of new waterfront-focused rail service, or other efforts in support of new intermodal frontiers. This pressure is good for rail. Even though trucking and other modern “last mile” solutions are within easier reach than ever, rail, if pushed to do so, can entrench itself as a very welcome contributor to America’s awakening industrial waterfront.

The Trump Administration can do a lot more to expand waterfront rail service if it acts quickly. With an $85 billion merger between Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern working through regulatory review, the Trump Administration, if it articulates a case to support modern shipbuilding and other waterfront innovators by early December, has enormous leverage in encouraging some “big swings” from rail in support of America’s maritime manufacturing industrial base.

Waterfront Rail Is More Important Than Ever

For most manufacturing sectors, the case for rail is easy to make. But, in the current economic environment, rail access is becoming an existential requirement. According to the Association of American Railroads, rail operators offer cheaper, cleaner and more reliable options for long-distance freight, saying “on average, rail moves one ton of freight nearly 500 miles per gallon of fuel.” As the seas get less secure and the price of oil continues to skyrocket, the business case for waterfront rail gets stronger by the hour.

For shipbuilding and other waterfront manufacturers, rail-based transportation savings adds up fast. Some 20,000 tons of steel goes into each of America’s relatively simple, 689-foot military-oriented cargo ships. U.S. shipbuilders need 40,000 tons of steel, carried in about 400 train cars, to fabricate even a puny double-hulled oil tanker. If carried by road, getting steel for the same small tanker to a shipyard would require between 1,600 to 2,000 truck loads.

It’s not just shipbuilding. In August, the White House affirmed the importance of rail in ship repair, mandating that a network of Navy Component Repair Centers built to “receive new and refurbish old” submarine components must be located near a rail transportation network. Large, heavy and complex pieces of Los Angeles , Virginia , Ohio and Columbia class submarines are poor fits for American roadways.

It won’t be an easy task. For most legacy-era shipyard towns, rail has been in a sustained retreat, pushed out by residential development and outcompeted by legions of UPS and Amazon delivery trucks. While boutique rail sidings and limited rail service to individual industries dried up and disappeared, air pollution and traffic concerns drove rail to chase scale and volume. Waterfront rail focused largely on supporting massive container ports and bulk cargo terminals. With heavy industry returning to the docks, and the Navy becoming an enormous national security priority, rail has a national duty to get, in the Pentagon’s preferred parlance, more “skin in the game” faster than it ever has before.

On a large enough scale, rail improvements can open entire river systems to economic development. In Solano County California, the Benicia-Martinez Railroad Drawbridge is obsolete and seismically dangerous. For marine traffic, the railroad bridge across the Carquinez Strait is too low, constraining ship traffic to the upstream ports of Sacramento, Stockton, Pittsburg and Antioch. The rickety 96-year-old bridge has become a threat to national security by reducing the utility of the U.S. Army’s irreplaceable Military Ocean Terminal Concord .

The Trump Administration can use a range of tools to push California and Union Pacific to solve the problem, raising the height of the Benicia-Martinez Railroad Drawbridge or forcing a larger, collaborative effort to rebuild the entire regional Bay Area rail network on a more efficient orientation. Better rail service and better bridges will unlock the Sacramento and San Joaquin river systems, opening a new inland harbor frontier to modern ships and to economically favorable Asia-U.S. trade networks.

For both shipbuilders and the Navy, the failure to maintain and preserve the “last mile” rail service to shipyards is, today, a chronic irritant. Encroaching residential neighborhoods, chronically suspicious of nearby manufacturing centers, often focus on constraining truck and vehicle traffic.

In shipbuilding, rail’s absence in the “last mile” of a delivery can be catastrophic. In 2007, a 200-ton diesel-electric Fairbanks Morse-built engine, in a mere mile-long road transit from the rails at San Diego’s 10th Avenue Marine Terminal to the General Dynamics NASSCO shipyard, slipped off the truck , nearly crushing a person sleeping in their car. The damaged engine interfered with NASSCO’s tightly-managed production line and delayed the Navy’s critical T-AKE logistical support ship program. America’s fragile maritime industrial base cannot easily absorb these types of accidents.

The case for waterfront rail is obvious. Unfortunately, the critical contribution “last mile” dockside rail service offers shipbuilders and the Navy hasn’t been adequately captured in economic data the U.S. government uses to justify rail expansion funding. A century ago, when America’s legacy shipyards were built, rail was the dominant waterfront logistical provider. Rail was a fact-of-life that needed no particular justification. Today, the Navy’s waterfront rail support has dwindled down to a few switch engines at Washington’s Puget Sound Naval Shipyard and Intermediate Maintenance Facility

Rail’s contributions to American shipbuilding have been overlooked and forgotten. In World War II, rail facilitated one of America’s first experiments with innovative distributed shipbuilding techniques. The aptly-named “ Shipyard of the Rockies ”, built around an array of eight otherwise underutilized Denver-based companies, fabricated “ship hull sections, bulkheads, decks, and other parts” for 31 much-needed destroyer escorts and 87 tank landing craft. Prefabricated modular parts of destroyer escorts and landing craft were shipped by rail to the California Port town of Vallejo for final assembly. Today, distributed shipbuilding is all the rage, but, with the Vallejo segment of the railway gone and sidings for Denver module manufacturers absent, a similar effort is no longer possible.

Far too many shipyards have eschewed rail entirely. That is a mistake. As rising fuel prices push maritime shippers to explore nuclear propulsion, rail becomes much more important. Captain Carmel, busy pushing the American maritime into the future, warned that “those who ignore the value of rail to the transition to nuclear propulsion and the system level changes it introduces do so at their own peril”. That warning should be enough for the Trump Administration to add to the few remaining rail networks still dedicated to shipbuilding and ship repair.

The Department Of Transportation Must Act

Getting rail to the waterfront is not an easy task. Right now, rail improvement initiatives are locked in an unproductive “chicken or egg” bureaucratic loop that only foresighted leaders at the Department of Transportation can unravel.

Waterfront railbed is missing and the physical infrastructure is gone, so there’s no way for waterfront manufacturers to employ real-time data in justifying their pleas for Department of Transportation rail funding. And with no legacy economic studies to draw from and no physical use cases available to model, America’s industrial waterfront is in something of a Kafkaesque bind, stuck without a means to argue for rail investments. To resolve things, all rail projects with potential to support waterfront manufacturing deserve special consideration for Department of Transportation funding, Federal permitting acceleration, and active political support from every level of the Federal government.

Speed is of the essence. America’s industrial waterfront is a strategic asset that is getting more important by the day. There is no reason a dearth of economic studies or slow-moving railways should prevent America’s emerging waterfront manufacturers from accessing the multifaceted efficiency, innovation, and safety contributions offered by America’s increasingly mission-critical rail systems.