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[quote]QUOTE: Originally posted by oltmannd No, again. You don't understand capital markets very well. It's not my area of expertise, but I'll try to explain anyway. Any RR, right now, could operate as a "toll road" for all comers. All it would take is mgt will to make it happen. If it's such a great idea, capital mkts would fund the purchase of the RR to install mgt to make it happen. Stock would go for a premium and no board would refuse to sell under those conditions. [/quote] Hmmm, I don't understand capital markets? My econ degree says differently. What you don't yet understand, though I've explained it to you twice, is that capital markets will not jump into an enterprise for which there is no legal parameters yet set up. OA can take on any number of forms, varying degrees of regulation, FRA and STB requirements, etc. As of yet, there is no such groundwork in place to define what OA in the USA would even look like. Even if one of the railroads decided to try out the OA concept, what guidance regarding government oversight would be needed? What you are suggesting is something better left to the venture capitalists, and even they would have to wait for a set of parameters before they would jump in. The markets hate uncertainty, you should know that. [quote]QUOTE: Did you read Don Phillips column in Dec Trains? The top three frt RR countries are US, Russia and China. None of these have open access. What does that say to you? [/quote] That's not entirely true, in that the Russian and Chinese networks are nothing like the North American rail networks. They are either government owned or formerly government owned, and as such the shippers on those networks do not experience anything close to differential pricing, bottleneck rate gouging, paper barriers to shortlines, et al. OA is about shippers having access to competitive rates, whereas government run railroads give shippers access to subsidized rates. If the other railroads of the world aren't OA, then they are nationalized, or at least engender some characteristic thereof. One thing is for sure: They ain't proprietary, closed access oligarchies like we have here in North America (although the Russian lines could certainly be headed that way, given the whole Yukos thing.)
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