Home
»
Trains Magazine
»
Forums
»
General Discussion
»
The economics of shortlines and regionals..

Edit post

Edit your reply below.

Post Body
Enter your post below.
[quote user="beaulieu"] How long will the Class Is keep accepting single carload traffic from shortlines. Certainly the customer will be better off if the final delivery is by another shortline. The big problem with the Class Is is operational discipline. If you want to see true precision railroading look at the Swiss Federal Railways domestic carload network, next day delivery of your load from anywhere in Switzerland to anywhere else in Switzerland overnight. And if you are along one of the mainlines it will be by noon the following day. So say you are the Brewery at Rheinfelden, east of Basel, and you need a carload of Beer shipped to Geneva. Your carload will be picked up by 5 pm, humped at Basel, put on a mainline train to Lausanne, humped again, and delivered to your warehouse near Geneva by noon the next day. On a US railroad you might be lucky if they completed the hump switching at Basel by noon the next day. A big part of the problem is the very big size of carload trains in the US. It cuts down on the linehaul cost of carload movement, but tends to create real problems in execution of switching. BTW SBB delivers 98% of the carload traffic on time which is defined as within 30 minutes of schedule. US railroads can't achieve that percentage within 24 hours of schedule.  Of course the corollary for the Swiss is that your carload better be ready on time, or it won't move at all. [/quote] Undoubtedly one of the factors that help the Swiss Federal Railways (SBB) achieve the laudatory results that you reference is the fact that approximately 29 per cent of its revenues comes from the public sector.  Read taxpayer subsidies!  And a total of 21 per cent of these revenues are plowed into infrastructure that is used by passenger and freight trains. This is a fact and not a political statement.  I am a strong supported of free markets with minimum regulation. Having said that, I believe a case could be made to have a public sector corporation take over the rail infrastructure in the United States and allow anyone who meets its standards to operate over it.  This could put rail infrastructure on a par with highways, waterways, and airports, which are really owned by the public, and for the most part paid for by the users.  Of course, it would never happen, at least in my lifetime, but it is an intriguing idea.
Tags (Optional)
Tags are keywords that get attached to your post. They are used to categorize your submission and make it easier to search for. To add tags to your post type a tag into the box below and click the "Add Tag" button.
Add Tag