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[quote user="greyhounds"][quote user="futuremodal"] [quote user="greyhounds"]    Open Access has not been shown to have any advantages over the more traditional integrated system where the same organization owns the trains and tracks.[/quote] OA is a relatively new concept, still in the growing pains stage in Europe, perhaps more successfully entrenched in Australia.  The closest North American examples in spirit would be those rail lines which host two or more Class I's, and certain shortlines/regionals that act as feeders for two or more Class I's (Ed Blysard's railroad being a prime example).  The purpose of OA or toll railroads is to facilitate intramodal competition among Class I carriers.  Most economists agree competition is a good thing for a free market economy, as it keeps prices down and services up for the consumers. [quote]Toll roads will work while toll railroads won't work principally because of the need to aggregate freight into trainload lots on a railroad.  If you split the train operation between several entitites you wil make this aggreagation much more difficult and make rail transportation more costly.[/quote] Greyhounds is absolutely correct in this statement...... [:O] .....if we are talking about rail lines that only host one or two trains per day.  Then there wouldn't be enough traffic available to sustain two or more rail transporting companies with decent sized trains, e.g. economies of scale.  (Or course, we are assuming that price competition of two or more railroads would not draw business off of over the road trucks, the long haul mode of last resort.) However, most major rail terminals in the US and Canada host double digit numbers of trains per day, so it would be quite easy for even a single track CTC rail line to host sustainable consist sizes and train frequencies for each rail transporting company to optimize the economies of scale in terms of labor utilization, marketing reach, et al.  As stated above, this is actually happening on a few rail lines in NA, where one Class I will host it's own trains and those of one or more other Class I's.  In these situations, separation of infrastructure from the owning Class I could be done without disruption.  But elsewhere across NA, separting infrastructure from the owning Class I would not occur without at least some semblence of the growing pains being experienced in Europe.  Of course, Europe's railroads are dealing with the double whammy of privatizing previously nationalized railways in addition to adapting to separation.  US railroads are already privatized, so the process of introducing OA in the US would probably go alot smoother than it has in Europe. [/quote] Nope. This misunderstanding of the freight market is, IMHO, the reason the RoadRailer concept has failed to fire.  You've got a lot of trains originating at any given terminal and terminating at any other given terminal, but those trains are going to, and comming from, a lot of different terminals. It's the traffic between any origin-destination pair that counts.  There are OD pairs than can support daily trainloads.  The Powder River to a major generation plant is an example.  But when it comes to the movement of general frieght, your household appliances, your newsprint, your canned green beans, etc., there are almost no OD pairs that can support even one solid train per day. So the railroads have to aggregate.  A Chicago to Boston intermodal train doesn't really carry just Chicago to Boston loads.  It aggrregates loads from all over at Chicago and takes them to Boston. The rapid aggregation into blocks and trains that are of economical size to operate (a two car freight train ain't gonna' work) is a critical key to railroad efficiency.  That's one of the reasons we've seen the railroad consolidation we have seen.  Concentrating the traffic on fewer carriers allows the more rapid and efficient aggrregation of loads into blocks and trains. Any open access system will make aggregation more difficult and reduce railroad efficiency.  It will drive railroad costs up and divert freight to highway movement.  The more rail carriers there are, the more difficult it will be for each one to do the aggregation.  It's bad idea that has no proven benifits. The RoadRailer people - and I worked there, and helped set up the 1st commercial RoadRailer operation, never understood this.  They didn't understand the aggregation thing.  And in 26 years of commercial operation they've gone basically nowhere beyone the initial Triple Crown network.  They have never understood that a Chicago to Boston train is more than a Chicago to Boston train.  It includes aggregated loads from multiple destinations.  Their equipment was not to mix with the loads going to Boston from other origins.  And that's a basic reason there is no RoadRailer service from Chicago to Boston, it can't be aggregated into an economical train size. Open access proponents don't understand the need for aggregation either.  And they have absolutely NO empirical evidence that OA will benifit anyone.  The quicker you can aggregate a block or a train, the more efficient you will be.  Spliting the traffic between multiple train operators will make aggregation more difficult.  It's not hard to understand.[/quote] What's not hard to understand except by you is that aggregation and intramodal competition are not incompatible.  You're falling into the "it's never been tried, ergo it won't work" trap of illogic.  As for bi-modal, the truth is aggregation itself is more compatible with bi-modal than for carload, because truckload lots are hardly ever one homogenous commodity, and bi-modal truckloads are easier to disperse to the various destinations than carloads.  Most major corridors host enough over the road truckloads to make up profitable-sized rail consists.  It is the disconnected reluctance of the railroads that has prevented greater acceptance of the bi-modal concept, not any percieved shortcomings you may envision.  The same can be said for the almost vitriolic reaction to the idea of open access and/or toll railroads.  The idea that you can't split 30 daily trains among two or three separate entities and still have all three be profitable is ridiculous.  What is your empirical evidence to support such nonsense?
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