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Quotes of interest: "The ultimate competition, after all, is trucks." Yep, those trucks were right at the cusp of winning those coal hauling contracts and all that land bridge container business.[;)] (The preceeding smilie is the closest this forum has for representing sarcasm) The truth is, there is no real compeition for railroads right now. Intramodal competition is confined to limited areas e.g. the Gulf Coast. Obviously, there aren't enough trucks in existence to handle that aforeto mentioned traffic which the article credits for railroads' revival. Until and if the Panama Canal is enlarged to handle the post-Panamax ships, land bridge traffic is safe. And as far as I know, there are no new plans for coal slurry pipelines (the only concievable competition for transporting coal). "But the long train brought costs of its own. Ten trains would arrive in the span of two hours, then there would be none for eight hours. Locomotives and crews got bunched up in yards when they were needed elsewhere, so the company had to pay for extra crews to move the locomotives around. The longer other railroads' cars were sitting on Norfolk Southern's tracks, the higher the fees charged to those companies. And, of course, the delay might rankle customers whose stuff was sitting on the tracks for an extra day." Exactly what some of us had been saying for months now. The long train model, while being the bean counter's pet, has flaws that end up hurting the bottom line. Granted, NS hasn't yet endorsed the IT "packet" equivalent of shorter faster trains, but the idea has certainly gotton back on the board. "A train can carry a ton of goods 202 miles on a gallon of fuel, while a truck can take it only 59 miles." Using the old numbers shows the writer hasn't kept up with the times. " Also, railroads don't pay as much fuel tax as trucking companies. Fair enough, since the taxes pay for asphalt." Hmmmm, that statement is discredited by the following admission: "Norfolk Southern is spending up to $100 million to upgrade its main route from Norfolk to Columbus, Ohio, where it is building a yard at the old Rickenbacker Air Force Base to offload the double-stacked containers. (The federal highway bill includes an additional $90 million for this project.)"
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