Long shot of short line railroads

AVON, N.Y.

After an hour of shunting rail cars aside, a 1964-vintage locomotive operated by Tim “Brown Dog” Carney nudges six hopper-loads down

an embankment into a pasta factory. It’s a routine delivery: 540 tons of semolina flour milled in St. Louis from durum wheat grown in North Dakota.

The Livonia, Avon & Lakeville Railroad, a scrappy private firm with 30 employees and $4.5 million in sales, owns just 27 miles of track in a pocket of rural western New York. But it offers bulk freight shippers like the Barilla Group based in Parma, Italy, customized access to America’s 140,000-mile rail network.

Never mind tax breaks, cheap land or owner Guido Barilla’s delight at the proximity of the Finger Lakes wine region. Without that rail ribbon, the world’s biggest pasta maker wouldn’t have contemplated putting a $100 million-plus Northeast hub in this neck of the woods in 2007.

“It was a must for us,” said Kirk Trofholz, president of Barilla’s U.S. subsidiary.

Spawned by a grass-roots “Save the Railroad” campaign in 1964, the LA&L; is a vital ingredient in keeping a namesake trio of small towns humming in farm country about 20 miles south of Rochester.

With patrons like Kraft Foods, Archer Daniels Midland, Cargill and Perdue churning out Cool Whip, corn sweeteners, cereal grains and chicken feed, the little railroad helped hatch a food corridor that has once again ducked hard times hitting vast sectors of the economy - not least, the bellwether rail industry.

As big carriers abandoned old branch lines considered too short or remote to be profitable, microenterprises conjuring a bygone era filled the vacuum, bearing quirky or parochial names like the Wiregrass Central in Enterprise, Ala., and the Middletown & Hummelstown near Harrisburg, Pa.

Since federal deregulation in 1980, so-called short line railroads have surged in number from 200 to about 520. Dwarfed by behemoths like Union Pacific of Omaha, Neb., each has freight revenue below $28 million a year. Two-thirds operate along less than 50 miles of track and only 50 extend beyond 250 miles.

They employ nearly 20,000 people, own 30 percent of track and handle a quarter of all freight, although it’s often just the first and last few miles of a transcontinental journey. They offer businesses big and small - foundries, grain elevators, power plants, mines - high-volume advantages that trucking can’t match. A rail car can carry up to 125 tons, triple the capacity of a truck.

Overall rail volumes have slumped 15 to 20 percent this year, the steepest drops on lines hauling metals, lumber and other raw materials and industrial products for manufacturing and construction.

Spread across every state but Nevada, few short lines have folded but employees’ hours have been cut back, said Adam Nordstrom, a lobbyist with the American Short Line and Regional Railroad Association in Washington. “We’ve been hit very hard. If our customers aren’t moving goods, they’re in trouble, too.”

One bright spot is food.

“That’s been fortunate for us because obviously, even in an economic downturn, it has to get pretty bad to stop eating,” said LA&L; Chief Executive Officer Gene Blabey.

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