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"Open Access" and regulation of railroad freight rates.
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<P>[quote user="Lee Koch"]Marc Immeker wrote: "The German federal government (this one and the former) is hell bent for leather to get Deutsche Bahn to the stock exhange. Or rather, Hartmut Mehdorn, the CEO of DB, is. Wether it is good for the company or not. Wether it is good for railroading or not. And with some very questionable business practices too (think bookkeeping)." Yes, and the Federal Government keeps picking up the tab (using taxpayer Euros) for deficits encrued through poor business decisions made by Mehdorn. The DB has a current operating deficit of 19 billion Euros, most of which was spent on the High-Speed corridors Frankfurt-Cologne and Nuremburg-Munich as well as the erection of a new central train station in Berlin. Now none of those investments are any good for freight customers, nor are they accessible for private railroads, but we have to pay for them. The money they hope to make through their IPO, Mehdorn wants to invest in the buy-up of several eastern European state railways. Their goal: trade with China via rail! Even if Germany does end up with OA, freight traffic will be transported over at least 3 seperate railroads: Chinese, Russian and DB-Railion. What difference would there be to NA railroading, other than customs formalities? OA could only work in NA if the railroads were coerced into handing their ROWs over to a neutral entity (the FRA? the AAR? franchisers?) to be maintained and managed. Certainly consolidation of MOW equipment and manpower as well as dispatching/rail traffic control COULD make the system more efficient and perhaps less expensive for the shippers. But the whole logistics side of things would become very complicated. As Greyhounds wrote: "Again, it's not the total amount of business in the terminal (whatever you're calling a 'terminal'), but the amount that can be aggregated into any one train. If you split that aggrergation up between more rail carriers you'll make that aggregation more difficult and drive up the cost of rail transportation." Why is this a problem? With total OA, each customer/shipper could theoretically pick the railroad offering the lowest daily shipping rate, and each customer along the line could pick a different RR than the next guy. Let's assume 10 customers along a local industrial line, and each has chosen a different railroad to ship with. The local disptcher now has to figure out how to get 10 different locomotives with loads and empties onto and off of the line. Now, where do the RRs collect or set out the cars for pickup? The local yard can't possibly have a track for each railroad. Solution: as in ports of harbor, you will have to operate a switching and terminal RR which will in turn have to interchange with 10 different RRs somewhere. Or, you have to have transloading facilities every so many hundred miles, where the shipment is transferred to truck and delivered to the customer. None of this really sounds like a good alternative to what we currently have in NA.[/quote]</P> <P>Lee, you're following the same flawed logic as Ken. Why do you focus on the spector of multiple rail carriers having to compete for 10 branchline customers (with the subsequent need to barter for access to that single track), rather than focussing on the more reasonable scenarios of splitting the multiple trainsets among multiple carriers that currently are hogged by one railroad? The single branchline connundrum is a highly exceptional scenario, with multiple carriers each day picking up and setting out a few carloads each highly unlikely in an OA system.</P> <P>Current Class I branchlines and shortlines could be franchised to a single rail carrier as the likely alternative to your doomsday spector. It may not be true OA, but at least the franchise can be yanked from poor service providers and re-bid out to others. That's a much better situation for those captive customers than what they have to deal with now.</P> <P>Captive customers located on mainlines will of course have more OA options.</P>
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