The study identifies opportunities for and barriers to increased use of railroads to promote fuel conservation. Transportation officials were interviewed from 9 companies in the processed food, metals, chemicals, and transportation vehicle industries. These industry personnel identified unreliable delivery times and equipment shortages as the key issues in their decision not to use the railroads. A range of actions that railroad management could take to improve transit time reliability is identified. Barriers to implementing changes include (in increasing order of difficulty) changes in operating practices, capital outlays, increased operating costs, and changes in work rules. Ranked by increased order of difficulty to implement actions to improve reliability are as follows: rationalize train schedules, yard crew assignments in terminal areas, system blocking plan, and configuration of complex terminal areas; schedule freight cars from door to door; and operate freight trains more frequently.