I saw an old post on here where a poster said the AAR is essentially a group of Class 1 railroad head honchos looking out for themselves. Is this true? Wikipedia says the AAR sort of runs the rolling stock testing facilities outside Pueblo, CO - if the AAR is an industry trade group isn't it odd that they'd be in the business of regulating/policing themselves? Or are they just running tests the FRA or STB then has to approve? I don't know anything about these acronym agencies so I'm curious how the three relate to one another - I suspect the poster in the old thread I found here may have been indulging in some hyperbole (said something about class 1 big wigs lining their pockets - wish I could find it again).
AAR is what it appears to be: the representative group (for lobbying and other purposes) of the American Class I railroads.
It has 'trusted status' as an organization to take up standardization and testing for the 'group' of member railroads as a whole, and of course their methodology for testing and approval is no worse, or biased, than a nominal Federal agency would use. This is not 'regulating' or 'policing', it is things like standards development, assessment and testing of new products, and other research of interest to member railroads overall.
The FRA (and predecessor ICC) and STB are regulatory agencies, more involved with what they have been tasked by the Government to do. In the case of the FRA that predominantly involves issues of 'safety'; in the case of the STB mostly issues of economic regulation and 'fairness' (e.g. in rate determinations for shippers or proposed line abandonment or service change).
As a perhaps interesting case study, you might look at the (checkered) history of the Bituminous Coal Research development of the coal-burning gas turbine in the '40s and '50s, which specifically foundered on the issue of whether 'railroads as a whole' should be underwriting detail design of systems that would profit specific manufacturers or railroads.
AAR has a sense of humor. This is from their website. https://www.aar.org/article/10-frigid-freight-rail-facts/
Wind lashes through gusts of snowflakes. Dense, white powder piles up around cars, houses and anything else in Mother Nature’s way.
It’s freezing.
So how do trains stay warm as the weather turns frigid? They wear big, custom-made sweaters.
No, we’re just joking!
AAR is much more than a typical trade association. It (and its affiliates Railinc and TTCI) is an organization through which the railroads set the procedures, standards and systems which allow the individual railroads to operate as an integrated network, not a bunch of individual actors each doing their own thing.
These days, we take for granted the "network" nature of the railroad system without too much thought. Everybody knows that you can load a shipment at a BNSF origin in Washington in a BNSF car and ship it to a destination on FEC in Florida without much ado (just look at all of the cars of different ownerships in a freight train). But that doesn't just happen. There are a whole bunch of industry standards, rules and systems that allow it to happen. Take car repair. What if the BNSF car in my example is found require maintenance while on CSX? For most running maintenance, CSX will just make the repair to keep the car moving. How can it do this without BNSF's explicit permission? Who pays for the repair - BNSF or CSX? How much will it cost the responsible party? How is the money transferred? This is just one of many examples - for example, the requirement for industry compatible AEI tags on freight equipment so that a freight car can be automatically tracked anywhere on the railroad network, procedures and systems for establishing and settling car hire, procedures and systems for settling freight revenues. There are lots of other examples. In other words, the stuff that AAR and its affiliates do is largely unseen by the public (or, for that matter, the railfan community) but is vital to the day to day operations of the railroads as an integrated network.
Railroads, by the way, are not the only "network" industry where the individual industry players have to work together to produce their products even though they may also be in competition with each other. Professional sports are another example (particularly appropriate today, since its Superbowl Sunday). How could you have a football industry if each individual team made its own rules for the game and made its own schedule? These things have to be ageed upon by the teams, or else there would be no product at all.
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