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"The root cause: the public. The public wanted a transportation system to fulfill all sorts of mutually exclusive and impossibly expensive objectives: make everyone wealthy from track laborer to shipper, serve everyone equally well from big city to tiny hamlet, look forward to the future and live in the past, and make money, too. The tool the public expected to advance its goals was regulation, and any time anyone pointed out that regulation was a miserable failure, grinding not only railroads but vast swaths of the economy into the dirt, the public put its fingers into its ears and demanded that someone else feel the pain." regulation usually has some sponsor. someone is interested in drafting the law, pushing it through the legislative process, lining up legislators, planting impelling stories in the media ad infinitum. these sponsoring persons have some bottom line agenda, ie, labor wants more money and asks for more government involvement in the bargaining process, shippers wanting cheaper rates and permanent service ask for legislative help in harnessing carriers. legislation is rarely driven by the "man on the street" , "the public". if we look around hard enough, there is always a list of "usual suspects". can you offer any concrete examples of which market participants were responsible for what you might consider the most onerous aspects of the railroad legislative environment of the 1960,s and 1970's? what were the underlying motivations of these folks and how have these people responded to the lessened regulatory atmosphere we are currently in? thanks, cbt141
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