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Here's from the perspective of someone that has seen the direct consequences of a RR stonewalling competition: Intermountain Power Project, a very large power plant in central Utah gets most all of its coal by rail. UP refuses to allow anyone but UP to use its rails to the plant. While it is POSSIBLE to ship the coal by truck, it simply isn't practical. We're talking about close to 1 million tons of coal a year required for this plant fellas. When negotiations broke down once they DID shipt the coal by truck for 6 months, but it was an absolute disaster for everyone involved, especially the roads and the public. UP STILL charges per mile rates MUCH higher for that last stub of line than for any other section of their line for hauling the coal. Competition is available for hauling the coal 80% of the way, so the rates are low, but not on that section of line. It's a csh cow for UP, and they refuse to allow anyone else to use it. Sure if you're shipping only one car of soy beans you can consider going by truck, but not if you need to ship 250,000 tons of coal. As for the arguement that you'd destroy the RR by requiring them to allow anyone to use the rails, that's bull honky. Guess what the electric utilities have had to do? We have to allow anyone to run power over our transmision lines, and we can't charge more for them than we have to charge ourselves. It gets you into a TRUE cost of service plan for each route. No longer can you subsidize rates on one route only to make it up on another. It levelizes the playing field, and the final customer has to pay much closer to the actual cost of doing business. Lets face it, the RR's don't want to change how they're doing business. Those executives that are afraid of going out of business don't know HOW they will have to be running their business in the future. Mark in Utah Been there, done that, life's still O.K.
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