THE GEOGRAPHY OF TRANSPORT SYSTEMS
| Mode | Fuel Consumption | Infrastructure Capacity | Costs | Safety |
| Railroad | 455 ton-miles per gallon | 216 million tons per mainline per year | 2.7 cents per ton-mile | 0.61 fatalities per billion ton-miles; 12.4 incidents per billion ton-miles |
| Trucking | 105 ton-miles per gallon | 37.8 million tons per lane per year | 5.0 cents per ton-mile | 1.45 fatalities per billion ton-miles; 36.4 incidents per billion ton-miles |
Source: Brown, T.A and A.B. Hatch (2002) The Value of Rail Intermodal to the US Economy, http://www.aar.org/pubcommon/documents/govt/brown.pdf
Rail transportation has obviously several key advantages over trucking, particularly in terms of energy efficiency (4 times), capacity (6 times) and costs (2 times).