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Why do railroads run intermodal so fast?

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1. It isn't the railroad industry that's cyclical so much as it is the degree of normally increasing demand for transporting products that is cyclical. Usually, you'd have to have a decrease in population before the transportation industry would ever experience a true decline in demand for their services. The reason railroads have lost business (the apparent "down" side of the observation you made) in the recent past is that they no longer wanted it, and the reason they no longer wanted it was because their business approach is rife with those nasty tendencies which I previously mentioned. Without that masochistic "safety net" invoked by the monopolistic playing fields, they would never engage in the practices of turning away business, rather they would aggressively go after that marginal business. <br /> <br />2. It is my belief that the public sees RR management as typical corporate types, who are ever tempted to cook the books and give themselves a huge bonus before they invaribly jump ship. There's more Enron in the railroad industry today than the traditional mustachioed villian of yore. <br /> <br />3. Therefore, in answer to your last question, there are no Snidely Whipla***ypes in the railroad industry, nor are there anymore Asa Whitneys or Ted Judahs. Rather, they are more of the soulless corporate raider types, whose major aim is to max profits short term for the benefit of the insider holdings and the foreign stockholders, after which they'll all take the money and run, leaving a run down rust pile, and the taxpayers of the nation will be left to hold the bag. When the megamergers came about, all the innovaters and forward thinkers were kicked out of the industry because they were just to "risky" to have around, and what remains is less than reassuring for the future of railroad transportation in this nation. What we have now is more representative of the current contributors to Railway Age magazine than to the past contributors to TRAINS magazine. There are no more David P. Morgans, no more John G. Kneilings, just a bunch of Larry Kaufman clones. That, indeed, is a sad state of affairs.
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