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[quote user="n012944"][quote user="futuremodal"] Two things regarding the NS slide show:  First, this is an NS slide show, so it's going to be favorable to NS's side of the story, right?  (insert cynical smilie here)  [/quote] OK I will give you that we should take the NS slide show with a grain of salt, however should we also take the numbers given by Mr. Sol with a grain of salt too?  They were studies that were paid for by shippers who  claim to be captive.   Why is it that certain people on this board use numbers from studies done by "captive" shippers as examples, yet when other sides are shown, be it from an independent goverment office like the GAO or the railroads, we are told to take them with a grain of salt?    [/quote] Two different things going on here, not necessarily related.  My comments on the NS slide show is more pertaining to the usual corporate slide show characterization, e.g. such are presented to show only a favorable aspect of the company's decisions, e.g. they are not going to present the downsides.  It is similar to the stuff we get on the corporate PR Newswire items - it's "rah rah" stuff, not a cost/benefit analysis.  It's hard to justify a claim that NS's domestic double stack program is taking freight off the highways, soley because the gain in domestic double stack exceeds the gains presented by the trucking industry.  Did we also see the trends in NS's boxcar loadings in that slide show?  Is it possible that the upward trend in domestic double stack is inversely correlated with a downward trend  in boxcar loadings over the same time period?  If so, do ya think NS is going to tell us? As for the ongoing debate over rail captivity, the GAO determination is pretty well tight-sphinctered as to how they define captive.  If it is theorectically possible for a commodity to move via truck, barge, or pipeline (even if it is not commercially practical to do so), then the GAO has determined that such a commodity or producer is not captive to a railroad.  Under that auspice, there is no such thing as captive intermodal, because intermodal means more than one mode, and there will *always* be a truck available if the railroad doesn't want to play ball.  This is a very disingenuous way of making that determination, because without a commercial/practical standard for making that determination, you've left out the real world scenarios.  Optimizing intermodal means utilizing the best of each mode where physically possible.  That's why we had that shorthaul intermodal study a while back, someone was trying to determine the practical theorum absent actual willing participation by the monopolist railroads. The reason we have no intermodal terminals between Portland and Salt Lake City isn't because there is no market for such, it's because one railroad controls that whole territory and since they have a monopoly over that territory they don't have to worry about losing business to another railroad.  The end result is that JP Simplot and the others have to truck their Pacific Rim export containers to Boardman Oregon and transload to barge, or truck all the way to the Puget Sound to restuff from OTR vans to outbound ISO's.  Yeah, they could truck to SLC for intermodal service, but that's in the opposite direction for PR exports. But, hey, under the GAO's divine wisdom, Southern Idaho is not captive to Union Pacific.  So we have the GAO and Ken Strawbridge in one camp saying there is no significant rail captivity, and everyone else (including the Class I's themselves) saying the opposite.  Not hard to figure who's out on a limb on that one!
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