Edit post

Edit your reply below.

Post Body
Enter your post below.
[quote user="Datafever"]The article brings up an excellent point against open access:  Why bother spending a lot of money to build/maintain infrastructure if your customer base can be taken away from you by another railroad? [/quote] Read Dick Hassleman's quote on Open Acess: "‘Open access’ is another misnomer. The industry needs to describe that as confiscation of plant, using an example such as ‘government forcing GM to let Ford build autos in one of GM’s newest plants.’ How can companies be expected to spend billions for plant improvement and maintenance if they cannot be the beneficiary of those improvements?” What he and others in the railroad industry are doing is using a narrow doomsday spin to describe a concept which inherently has wide open divergent possibilities.  And it makes him and the others look like idiots in the process, because the only aspect that fits the "taking of property" scenario is nationalization, and virtually no one on the open access side, not ag interests, not coal interests, not UPS, is taking it to that extreme. The GM and Ford example is just plain nutso.  A GM plant is engineered to build GM cars to GM specs.  All the automation is programed to fit those specs.  Ford ain't gonna want to use a GM plant to make it's cars (and vis versa) unless Ford and GM get married.  Production and it's inherent confidentiality aspects is a far cry from transporter services.  If Dick wants a more apt non-railroad analogy of open access, he needs look no farther than the utility sector, where pipelines and transmission lines are now hosting the offerings of non-owners.  But of course, that analogy would only play to the benefit of open access advocates, since for the most part it has been a glorious success for the utility and energy sectors.  Nope, let's go back to the nutso analogy, since that plays better to the railroad drama queens. Privatized separation of infrastructure from transporter services is not confiscation.  No property is being taken by force, since ownership shares would remain undiminished.  It's basically a stock split, with part of it dictating ownership of ROW, and the other part dictating transporter services.  And Mr. Hassleman, that is how the infrastructure owner will be the beneficiary of improvements - you host paying customers to use your line, whether they be the former integration partner, or the transporters of former integration competitors, or even the former pissed off customers running their own trains now.  Once you've eliminated the anachronism of closed access integration with true intramodal competition, your customers lose their reason to b***h. The big question here is why railroaders simply cannot discuss open access honestly, even to disagree on it's desirability?  Why all the end of the world dramatics?
Tags (Optional)
Tags are keywords that get attached to your post. They are used to categorize your submission and make it easier to search for. To add tags to your post type a tag into the box below and click the "Add Tag" button.
Add Tag