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Jay, Charlie, Eric: You'll get no disagreement from me. Open-access is a hopelessly inappropriate scheme for railroads. We don't even have to invoke history for a reason: the technology of railroading is a sufficient argument against open-access. It simply doesn't lend itself to open-access. Unlike air, water, and highway, railroads are constrained in orders of freedom--you can't go up, down, left, or right to go around something, so someone has to manage the traffic flow constantly, and the imperatives of traffic are inviolate, rigid, and constantly operative. It is a horrible problem at railroads already to decide what train or traffic or car gets precedence. Fracturing the current management structure into hundreds of competing entities would grind it all to a halt. There are too many uncontrollable variables to use a logic system or a set of rules to provide rank and order. We'd have to build an immense government bureaucracy to adjudicate all the disputes, and wouldn't that be efficient! Unlike highways and oceans and to some extent air, railroads require operational rigor--you can't just get on the track anytime you feel like it. Unlike air and water and for most purposes roads, railroads have a huge, inflexible, fixed, expensive, complicated, fragile, and constrained infrastructure that someone has to design, manage, and pay for. The oceans and the skies are free infrastructure. We do have to build port and airports, but these are very simple compared to a railroad yard: again, you can just drive around on a big piece of concrete or in a big pool of water if some idiot breaks down in front of you. Actually, we already HAVE true open-access: nothing is stopping someone from building a new railroad and thus destroying the so-called monopoly enjoyed by existing railroads. Nothing, that is, except the fact that it could never pay for itself. If there really, truly, was all this excess profit being made by railroads, or the tremendous waste through mismanagement that is alleged by many, then shrewd entrepreneurs would have already solved the problem by building new, parallel railroads, and forcing existing companies to cut their prices and become more efficient, or forcing them out of business. That is exactly what happened until about 1900, then stopped, because by that point the amount of railroad infrastructure vastly exceeded the ability of the market to support it. The market has never caught up. Recall that the ICC, which was created to correct the evil of overpricing, found out that the true problem was underpricing. That is what it restricted in its desperate gambit to keep weak railroads from collapsing one by one until there were no railroads left at all. It was all for naught once the U.S. government built a virtually free highway and waterway system, thus kicking the props out from under the ICC's mandate. Consider the Powder River Basin, the greatest prize in railroading ever. The DM&E has beat back one legal challenge after another, but yet it still hasn't built the line. Is there funding to build it? Not that I have heard of. Good lord, if the PRB can't justify a new railroad, what can?
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