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Why do railroads run intermodal so fast?

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smalling, <br /> <br />It's isn't so much that the concept of shorter more frequent trains is the wave of the future, rather that it really should have been the primary business model for today's railroads. This two pronged approach to business (increasing the cycle of availability of services for customers, and getting the product from point A to point B ASAP) is how a business would normally expand their customer base, thus increasing their accumulation of marginal revenues which then reflect in greater overall profits. But of course the current railroad industry is anything but normal. Having to again rehash another old (but contemporary) argument, this rejection of an ever expanding customer base has it's roots in the monopolistic tendencies inherent in the proprietary closed access rail system. Monopolists' primary directive is to increase profit margins of their captive customers (we'll call it vertical marketing), as opposed to competitive marketeers whose prime directive is to sell to an ever increasing customer base to maintain and expand overall profitability (we'll call that horzontal marketing). If we were living in a fascist dictatorship or a socialist regime, the monopolists would be the primary distributors of goods and services. But we ostensibly live in a free market society, so the competitive marketeers should be the primary distributors of goods and services here in the U.S. <br /> <br />But I digress. The bottom line is this: As long as the railroad system in the U.S. is of the extremely retrenched closed access system, we will not again see the shorter faster train model of the Milwaukee and D&RGW. Rather, we are stuck with the longer, slower trains of diminished customer services. Because that is what economic theory says will happen in a monopolistic business sector.
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