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[quote user="arbfbe"] The free enterprise, competitive market, economic model is based upon four ASSUMPTIONS to work.  The one that seems to get passed over in this forum is the "Complete ease of entry and exit into the market (industry)" portion of the model.  That assumption means anyone with an interest can open shop and begin a viable business.  In the transportation industry this works pretty good in the trucking segment.  It may even describe the barge segment.  Unless you are talking about commercial service in Alaska the assumption gets tenuous when describing the airlines.  Railroading? Forget it.  Account capital costs associated with right of way acquisition there is no freedom of entry and exit into the market or industry.  The freedom of entry assumption is in the economic model to balance the trend towards monopoly.  If that feature of the model is missing then the railroads follow the model perfectly, the tend towards the monopoly position.  I think that pretty much describes the railroad/captive shipper situation in the US.  Yes, folks, the economists have great models.  They can get an outstanding view of how it is going to shake out.  The problem is the unwashed glom on to the model and treat the assumptions as facts.  Just because the US has a free market economy it is not true all the needed assumptions are truths in each segment.  That is just too far a stretch. Futuremodal believes the answer is to grant open access on rail lines and build entirely new lines to make competition a reality.  Sure that would work according to the economic model.  The capital cost realities of new construction work against that solution.  The political realities of new construction or existing owners allowing tenants onto their nicely functioning monopoly property are not promising either.  Trucks, barges, airplanes, ox carts and back packs are all competitive with railroads in a very limited sense.  For specific products in specific instances each could blow the doors off a railroad and in most of these cases I would bet they are now the primary mode of transport having relegated the railroads irrelevant. So if we cannot provide ease of entry and exit into the industry by making capital free, and who knows where capital would flow under that circumstance, we have to deal with the reality of the economics.  One only has to look at the problems faced by the DM&E in their quest to provide competition in the Powder River Basin to imagine the cost and challenge to provide competition to the myriad of captive shippers across the rest of the country.  Since that is not likely going to happen soon it falls on the STB to provide fairness to the captives.  Now the railroads will defind fairness far differently than the captives will and so far then have been able to keep the STB at bay even to the point of blunting their rulings so far.  The econimic model can predict how that will work but cannot predict how the politics will play out.   [/quote] Actually, that's a very succinct synopsis, very well put. To correct something though, what I believe as you stated needs clarification.  What I want for the US rail network is to facilitate some form of comprehensive intramodal competition.  Whether that's open access or some variation of the concept is left to debate.  The utility/transmission model seems appropriate for the US rail system - allow competitors overhead rights on the rails.  At least that's a start.  But keep in mind, if all Class I's could access all Class I trackage via current trackage rights protocols, then half the battle is won.  The new infrastructural requirements then would be focussed on the bottlenecks, not on long stretches of redundancy, so it's not like there'd be a sudden need of doubling of the US rail network (and the subsequent decades long delays).  And with competitive access, you now open the door for regional and state consortiums to fill the gaps using fuel tax revenues - after all, it is the regional and state interests that are most concerned with eliminating bottlenecks so their little part of the world is most attractive to economic investment capital.  Public capital is used to build highways, why not bottleneck-eliminating OA rail lines?  At least with public capital we can direct the rail infrastructural investment to the places WE need it, aka those areas that would serve the interests of US producers and exporters, and not the places that only seem to serve the purposes of Asian importers (think Santa Fe). You are well aware of the current rail bottlenecks we have here in the PNW - The Funnel, Stampede Pass, Stevens Pass, Deadman's Pass, the Columbia Gorge - as well as the embargoed lines that would work great if the subsequent owners would cooperate to get things moving, aka the I-15 corridor in Montana.  Public investment to fluidize these bottlenecks in exchange for some form of public access across the rail spectrum wouldn't seem to be an objectionable idea, would it?
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