How a rail strike could impact Georgia

ATLANTA — A potential Friday strike could impact your life in a significant way.

Freight train workers are set to begin their strike on Friday as a protest of poor working conditions.

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Those trains play a big role in keeping shelves stocked, and trips to the grocery store are already painful.

“We try but when we are coming, we have $100, $200. It’s more than $200, $300 plus the gas,” shopper Ana Randall told Channel 2′s Candace McCowan.

Now, there are real concerns about what will happen to prices and store shelves if tens of thousands of workers strike on Friday.

“Rail moves close to 40 percent of the long-distance trade that we get into the United States,” said Chip White.

While some unions have a tentative agreement, others are still hashing it out.

Channel 2 reached out to White, Georgia Tech Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering, to find out the impact if workers were to strike.

He says a strike would certainly impact rail service.

Amtrak is already canceling long-distance trains and the impact on the economy is expected to hit about $2 billion a day during this crucial time for rail.

“Rail moves a lot of grain; they’ve always moved a lot of coal but particularly grain during harvest season,” White said. “Also, retailers are stocking up for the year-end holiday season and as a result there is a greater flow right about now.”

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While some have alerted the trucking industry, White said it won’t make up for the halt in train service.

“We have all seen these long freight trains with 120 cars. That means a lot of trucks and drivers would be needed. We simply don’t have that capacity in the trucking fleet,“ White said.

But before anyone makes a run on items at stores, it’s not necessary.

“They tend to order ahead to avoid a strike, so we are probably seeing more movement of goods in the past six weeks or so than we normally would,” he said.

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