by 2nd trick op
All through the years I was growng up, years of decline for the rail industry as a whole, its advocates always emphasized its flexibility and adaptability .... the willingness of the roughly 100 Class I's which were still around in those days to accept just about any shipment, to provide siding-to-siding delivery, and to operate under a uniform set of standards.
And those of us familiar with the history of the industry over the succesive forty years know that an awful lot of what what made it so fascinating -- branch lines, LCL and express shipments, ferries and carfloats, most refrigerator and all stock cars --- disappeared as a mass-market economy focused on movements of goods in greater volume and smaller frequency.
Now I am quite certain that most of this stuff is gone for good, but economic trends in recent years, spurred in part by fuel concerns, have argued in part for a revival of the separable car technology. And the spin-off of most branch and terminal operations to "short line" firms, many of them in multipe locations, clearly demonstrate that many of the obstacles are "artificial" ... the laws of supply and demand impeded by regulatory or contractual constraints.
The separation of passenger and freight traffic along the Northeast Corridor for safety reasons is only the most prominent symbol of that conflict. Amtrak faces similar problems on some of its California routes, and both the Chicago-Springfield-St. Louis and Chicago-Detroit service/speed upgrafdes are planned around main lines for which freight service is no longer a major player. The push for higher speeds will surely intensify this trend.
And finally, and most importantly, if you envision a region bound roughly by Buffalo, Atlanta, Mobile, El Paso, Denver and Billings (in short, the largely-flat ineterior of the United States) .... you have an area honeycombed with abandoned railroad rights-of-way, most of them in areas likley to be economically hurt by re-concentration of economic activity in the cities due to energy concerns, and not likely to raise much NIMBY opposition to tying a few of those shortlines together.
Furthermore,there are a number of key routes through the mountains --- Pipestone, Tennessee and Raton Passes --- lyng dormant or nearly so. The easiest ruling grade through the Alleghenies, between Driftwood and DuBois, Penna, on the Buffalo and Pittsburgh, requires no helpers, yet sees only a couple of locals and unit coal moves each week. And a second, separate grade once occupied that gap.
Fantasy? ..... Maybe. Surely not likley to get too far in the time I'm likley to have left on this side of the cemetery. But the trend away from one-size-fits-all rail systems, while moving slowly as all megatrends do, seems to be pointed in that direction. And the handful of remaining super-systems could participate under a subsidiary just at the communications giants took a stake in the Internet. When the need for innovation is driven by something as far-reaching as our current economic paralyis, just about anything needs to be examined.
And those of us familiar with the history of the industry over the succesive forty years know that an awful lot of what what made it so fascinating -- branch lines, LCL and express shipments, ferries and carfloats, most refrigerator and all stock cars --- disappeared as a mass-market economy focused on movements of goods in greater volume and smaller frequency.
Now I am quite certain that most of this stuff is gone for good, but economic trends in recent years, spurred in part by fuel concerns, have argued in part for a revival of the separable car technology. And the spin-off of most branch and terminal operations to "short line" firms, many of them in multipe locations, clearly demonstrate that many of the obstacles are "artificial" ... the laws of supply and demand impeded by regulatory or contractual constraints.
The separation of passenger and freight traffic along the Northeast Corridor for safety reasons is only the most prominent symbol of that conflict. Amtrak faces similar problems on some of its California routes, and both the Chicago-Springfield-St. Louis and Chicago-Detroit service/speed upgrafdes are planned around main lines for which freight service is no longer a major player. The push for higher speeds will surely intensify this trend.
And finally, and most importantly, if you envision a region bound roughly by Buffalo, Atlanta, Mobile, El Paso, Denver and Billings (in short, the largely-flat ineterior of the United States) .... you have an area honeycombed with abandoned railroad rights-of-way, most of them in areas likley to be economically hurt by re-concentration of economic activity in the cities due to energy concerns, and not likely to raise much NIMBY opposition to tying a few of those shortlines together.
Furthermore,there are a number of key routes through the mountains --- Pipestone, Tennessee and Raton Passes --- lyng dormant or nearly so. The easiest ruling grade through the Alleghenies, between Driftwood and DuBois, Penna, on the Buffalo and Pittsburgh, requires no helpers, yet sees only a couple of locals and unit coal moves each week. And a second, separate grade once occupied that gap.
Fantasy? ..... Maybe. Surely not likley to get too far in the time I'm likley to have left on this side of the cemetery. But the trend away from one-size-fits-all rail systems, while moving slowly as all megatrends do, seems to be pointed in that direction. And the handful of remaining super-systems could participate under a subsidiary just at the communications giants took a stake in the Internet. When the need for innovation is driven by something as far-reaching as our current economic paralyis, just about anything needs to be examined.
What a revoltin' development this is! (William Bendix)