Growth and displacement of free product automorphisms

Abstract: It is well known for an irreducible free group automorphism that its growth rate is equal to the minimal Lipschitz displacement of its action on Culler-Vogtmann space. This follows as a consequence of the existence of train track representatives for the automorphism. We extend this result to the general - possibly reducible - case as well as to the free product situation where growth is replaced by `relative growth'.