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[quote]QUOTE: Originally posted by MichaelSol That's the irony of this: it costs the customer more in increased transportation costs to the shuttle elevators, and increased costs to build and operate shuttle elevators, and the railroad receives less revenue. This is one bright idea. Nobody wins. [quote] I'll disagree with you on that last point. Clearly the trucking companies win, and do so at the expense of both the grain marketers and the railroads. Yet another inadvertent gift from the railroads to the so-called "enemy" aka truckers. [quote] Rather, longer, slower trains appear to result in increased system congestion, do result in increased track maintenance expenses, and do result in longer terminal dwell times as a system effect that "suggests" that increased efficiency is not the result, but rather statistically measurable inefficiency is apparently the result. That all trains are affected by the increased congestion resulting from bigger, longer, slower grain trains. [/quote] It would appear that this bent toward clogging the tracks with ostensible "efficiency" consists is a disease that is systemic, hard-wired into the railroad management culture. If this idea of product consolidation onto as many cars as will fit onto a siding was developed from an economic model, it is easy to see that it was a model developed with limited variable analysis. Such is the heart and soul of the Staggers Act, on the surface a "no-brainer" while in its long term impacts a "no-brainer" of a different sort. Staggers only partially "deregulated" the railroads, providing independent rate setting and price contracting, but doing nothing to effect head to head rail competition for all rail shippers. The latter is crucially necessary to ensure innovation, the only way to keep the entire industry from homogenizing into a star-crossed bandwagon of eventual economic failure. Some of you have explicitly or implicitly infered that competition is bad for the rail industry, because if railroads are forced to compete for each and every potential customer they will not be able to achieve revenue adaquacy. This is simply circular reasoning, because without competitve incentives the customer base will be put off (via capacity reductions, service consolidations, service delays, service refusals, et al), and without an ever increasing customer base a company, any company, not just railroads will not be able to achieve revenue adaquacy. How many more examples of railroad management underachievement will this nation have to put up with before you all will concede that Staggers is ultimately a failure? It's not that deregulation is not a desirable application of government oversight, it's that partial deregulation is sometimes worse than no deregulation at all. Staggers is partial deregulation, evidenced by the railroads' balance sheets, and evidenced by the tremendous loss of railroad employment/trackage/market share over the last two decades. If we want to do this thing right, then we need to fully deregulate the industry into a competitive venture that pleases both the investors and the customers. You all know my idea for full deregulation (it goes by the initials "o" and "a"), but I am willing to consider any else's ideas for implementing full deregulation in the broadest sense of the word. If anyone has an idea for bringing back the rail saturation of the 1970's, wherein all but a few areas of the country had true head to head rail competition in the form of the private closed access system, then let's hear it.
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