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[quote]QUOTE: Originally posted by MP173 Without Staggers, this country's rail system would have been a MESS. Dont know about you, but I remember the 70's quite well, and not only was it not pretty, but it was financially ugly. The question still remains, how will you provide open access? ed [/quote] This country's rail system is still a mess, albeit a much retrenched one. Look at how much has been lost in railroad employment, relative market share (especially in terms of $$ share), customer access to rail lines, railroad responsiveness to customer demands, etc. There's enough evidence that railroading was in far better shape pre-Staggers than post-Staggers if you use these benchmarks. Indeed, if it wasn't for PRB coal and free trade policies (which have given new life to COFC) you can almost make a case that Staggers has accellerated the decline of railroading in this country, perhaps by allowing monopolistic management to hang themselves with their own rope, a rope that exists soley due to lack of head to head competition. The point I am trying to make is that neither the pre-Staggers era of comprehensive regulation, nor the post-Staggers era of comprehensive retrenchment, is doing much to guarantee that railroading will finally achieve it's promise. The only way to guarantee railroading's long term prosperity is to (1)make sure all rail customers have access to competitive rail rates and services (which will dramatically increase market share on the demand side), and (2) equalize the cost of constructing and maintaining the rail infrastructure with the cost allocation associated with constructing and maintaining highways, waterways, and airports, so that we may finally see if indeed railroads would assume a 70% natural market share. My views on how to achieve this are well known on this forum: Separate the current Class I oligarchy into infrastructure companies and transporter companies, regulate the infrastructure companies as public utilities while providing public track construction via a share of the federal fuel tax (which would be paid by all transportation modes and then reallocated to better reflect intermodal realities) and maintenance support in the form of maintenance tax credits (plus a property tax exemption, recognizing open access rail lines as public right of way by proxy), and then let the rail transporters go at it in a relatively unregulated environment, similar to trucking transporters. Market forces that have been absent since the beginning of the railroad era would finally be unleashed. Some transporters would fail, while others would prosper, and outsiders would finally be able to test their own theories of rail service innovations. The bottom line is this: If BNSF doesn't want to provide carload or small carset service offerings, then let someone else fill that void. Right now that void is being partially filled by truckers as best as the free market allows, but with predictable long term driver shortages resulting (due to the inherent inability of the trucking genre to handle large volume commodity movements on a consistent efficient basis), it is probably the consensus on this forum that some form of rail transport would be much better at filling that void, and it is a consensus that is well founded. But this can only occur if the proprietary closed acces system is opened up to competitors, or if we can somehow return to the days of multiple railroad company tracks laid into each customer's facility. Even the most ardent anti-open access opponents would probably prefer this scenario to that of pre-Stagger's regulation.
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