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Here's the deal: You are all arguing against a possible solution to the problems of lost business and underutilization of our rail infrastructure by using the British experience as the poster child for the alleged shortcomings of open access. The problems of the British experience were simply the expected growing pains of a radical shift in ownership of the infrastructure and occurred several years ago. Part of the problem was that the British open access experiment was somewhat akin to the California partial deregulation of the energy markets. Instead of having multiple infrastructure ownership, they allowed a single company to own the entire rail grid, thus there was no competitive incentive to keep the lines in tip top shape for the users. The regulators had to come back in and make sure RailTrak lived up to its responsibilities. Now that they have had time to adjust, it seems to be working just fine, at least according to TRAINS and other railroad press. Yes, I'll admit it will take more time to truly give a reasonable evaluation of the open access experience, but that is preferable to not trying it at all. Secondly, the rail lines which are threatened with abandonment due in part to the spector of 315k cars do not carry "25 trains a day". They are lucky to run trains once or twice a week (and at 10 mph if that). It's not that the traffic potential doesn't exist, it's that the potential shippers by and large got or are getting fed up with unreliable service because the big RR's won't provide cars in an expedient manner, and/or at the competitive rate. Sometimes the big RR's won't even provide a quote for a new service. Nine times out of ten that shipper is going to abandon the railroad and shift to trucks, even with the inherent added expenses. Examples of such are abundant here in the Pacific Northwest, where the state government is having to take over ownership of some critical shortlines just to keep the prospect of future rail service alive. Unfortunately, the lines in question used to have a connection to the nearby barge ports, but before the Class I sold the lines to the shortline operator, they abandoned the key connection to the river ports to keep the shortline operatory from running shuttle trains to the barge lines. Then the Class I decided a few years later that they'd rather have the farmers truck their grain a few hundred miles to the Class I's mega grain loading station instead of allowing the short line to gather the harvest in rail hoppers and pass them on to the Class I at the nearest connection. Obviously, the farmers pretty much en masse started trucking ALL their grain to the nearest barge port rather than the mega rail terminal. It's not that the traffic isn't there, it's that it isn't moving by rail, and all logic says that it should be moving by rail. But for the monopolistic situation, it would. Can you imagine what would happen if an electric utility decided to tear down a 10 mile length of transmision line prior to selling to another entity, just to keep the new owner from accessing a prior end market? Needless to say, there would be Senate hearings and prison time for the corporate CEO's. So why are railroads allowed to take such actions? No one here would deny that the nation's shortline and regional rail infrastructure is severly underutilized, thus not enough trains to pay the overhead, thus a whole lot of defered maintenance, thus an inability to handle the heavier cars. If all the nation's shortlines and regionals could shed their captive status and get competitive rail quotes from any and all Class I operating companies for their online shippers (both current and potential shippers), there would be more than enough traffic for most of them to have the revenues necessary to maintain the track to its optimal status. If anyone else has a better solution to the 286/315k crisis without resorting to using tax dollars for private captive lines, I'm all ears.
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