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[quote user="greyhounds"]    Open Access has not been shown to have any advantages over the more traditional integrated system where the same organization owns the trains and tracks.[/quote] OA is a relatively new concept, still in the growing pains stage in Europe, perhaps more successfully entrenched in Australia.  The closest North American examples in spirit would be those rail lines which host two or more Class I's, and certain shortlines/regionals that act as feeders for two or more Class I's (Ed Blysard's railroad being a prime example).  The purpose of OA or toll railroads is to facilitate intramodal competition among Class I carriers.  Most economists agree competition is a good thing for a free market economy, as it keeps prices down and services up for the consumers. [quote]Toll roads will work while toll railroads won't work principally because of the need to aggregate freight into trainload lots on a railroad.  If you split the train operation between several entitites you wil make this aggreagation much more difficult and make rail transportation more costly.[/quote] Greyhounds is absolutely correct in this statement...... [:O] .....if we are talking about rail lines that only host one or two trains per day.  Then there wouldn't be enough traffic available to sustain two or more rail transporting companies with decent sized trains, e.g. economies of scale.  (Or course, we are assuming that price competition of two or more railroads would not draw business off of over the road trucks, the long haul mode of last resort.) However, most major rail terminals in the US and Canada host double digit numbers of trains per day, so it would be quite easy for even a single track CTC rail line to host sustainable consist sizes and train frequencies for each rail transporting company to optimize the economies of scale in terms of labor utilization, marketing reach, et al.  As stated above, this is actually happening on a few rail lines in NA, where one Class I will host it's own trains and those of one or more other Class I's.  In these situations, separation of infrastructure from the owning Class I could be done without disruption.  But elsewhere across NA, separting infrastructure from the owning Class I would not occur without at least some semblence of the growing pains being experienced in Europe.  Of course, Europe's railroads are dealing with the double whammy of privatizing previously nationalized railways in addition to adapting to separation.  US railroads are already privatized, so the process of introducing OA in the US would probably go alot smoother than it has in Europe.
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