The Erie and Chaplain canal was busy up untill the 1970s caring fuel oil and coal. Halifax-Portland ME-Boston has a container shuttle serive by water.
There is now a contaner barge from Albany NY to New Jersey that runs 4 times a week that seems more viable then rail. CSX has just about given up and joined the tugs by having there own tug and barge company. ----
So somebody tell me here when railroad and water are built side by side why does water win out in delivering bulk shipments? even not so bulk such as conatiners despite the railroad being able to go faster?
Cost- Shipping by water is the cheapest form or freight transportation. Ships are slower but can haul a whole lot for very little. Railroads, can to haul tons of freight and still are cheap but, not cheap enough in certain circumstances.
What about labor costs in that it takes longer? and therefore more labor…
It doesn’t take that many people to run a barge and it takes about the same number of people to unload a barge as a train.
If its any consolation it took about 4 years in the 1840’s for the P&R railroad to drive the canal system that paralleled it out of business.
Dave H.
On a larger scale, an example of how much of an advantage water borne carriage has for time-insensitive commodities was the shipping of iron ore from Minnesota. Of course the steel mills could have had it shipped all they way by train. Instead it was taken by train to Lake Superior, loaded onto ship, carried to Cleveland, unloaded onto train again, and carried to Pittsburgh.
In general, at a relatively low speed, the amount of horsepower required to move a ton of cargo over a land surface is 10 times that required to move a ton of cargo over water.
This website gives a good explanation:
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/95/10/5448
As speed is introduced, water shipment falls out of favor in deference to railroads (up to about 125 mph), e.g. the cost of shipping tonnage at speed is lower for railroads than for water craft.
Also, elevation differentials play a part. To gain elevation, barges need locks, which themselves take alot of energy potential. In other words, the water being forced through the locks is water that did not go through a dam’s turbines, so that is energy lost.
Railroads also can reduce the theoretical energy differential by expending initial energy building improved ROWs of limited gradient and curvature, smoothing out the friction surface by laying welded rail, superelevating curves, and maximizing load factor (the ratio of tare weight to cargo weight). If and when stored energy technologies become commonplace, railroads will also be able to use gravity to store energy via dynamic/regenerative braking.
One of the most important points has not been mentioned yet. Water transportation may seem less expensive than it really is. Water transportation does not have to pay the full cost of constructing and maintaining their facilities. Taxpayers pay for dams and locks and for maintaining the waterways. Railroads pay for their own facilities and then pay taxes in addition to that. If water transportation had to pay for the full cost of their systems, as they should, then they would have more difficulty competing with railroads.
Right on cnwrwyman.
It might suprise you to know that there is a waterways trust fund, similar to the highway trust fund, and all the barge lines pay into it. In return, the money is allocated to the Corps of Engineers for the maintenance of locks, navigation aids, and dredging. The rest of the waterways system is simply a benefit of the dams which are primarily constructed to produce electricity and provide flood control. Most economists will tell you that these dams and waterways have initially paid for themselves many times over. Unfortunately for the barge lines, the true benefits of the dams do not get reinvested into the waterway systems. Rather, it is electricity rate payers who get the benefits of lower than market pricing for their electricity, and irrigators who get the benefits of lower than market pricing for their water. If you want to gripe at anyone for waterways being subsidized, gripe at them.
You should also remember that waterways are used by as many companies as are willing to start up a barge line. Waterways are open access. Thus, you have many companies who contribute to the maintenance fund. Contrast this with the N.A. rail system, in which a single company is soley responsible for the contruction and maintenance of the rail line.
Finally, don’t forget your railroad history. Most of the current Class I’s got their starts via land grants, a gift from the taxpa
It’s more complicated than that. In the case of the UP almost all of that land was nearly worthless until the RR was built. That is the fair value at the time of being granted was pennies per acre, or even less such in the desert areas, where it was zero. In other words, in market value terms, the government was giving up virtually nothing. In addition, the US government gave up only a fraction of its land holdings to get it built and the value of that which it retained went up hugely. A pretty good deal for the taxpayer, I think. If I had owned the land, I would have done the same. In addition, you could hardly say the US Government got it fair and square from its original occupants. The French merely had the presumption to claim ownership, and Napoleon “sold” it to finance his war efforts.
So, it was the railroads that made the land “valuable”? That’s straight from the AAR manifesto.
The important point to remember is that land inherently has appreciated value the farther into the future you go. This is a key aspect of a corporation and it’s holdings: Corporations are virtually timeless, in that they go on in life long after it’s founders have passed. A corporation that gets undeveloped land can still sell or borrow on that land for a higher value than an individual, because the individual is constrained by a much shorther life expectancy, thus is unlikely to gain from land speculation if it’s future value doesn’t come around until a hundred or so
Yes. Access and transportation constitute a large part of the economic value of land. If that’s what they say in the AAR manifesto, they’re just following orthodox economics. Without the railroad the land was worth zip.
No asset (land in this case) has inherent value, nor is future appreciation of anything a given. An asset is worth only what the market is willing to pay. As a matter of fact, corrected for inflation, real estate on average in the US has barely risen in value since 1900. As someone who works in corporate finance, I would daresay that the life of the average US corporation is shorter than a human’s! Of the hundreds of thousands of corporations in the US, a corporation older than 100 years is extremely rare. BTW, the UP has the distinction of being one of the oldest continuing corporations in the US, and it’s less than 150 years old. Even so, it’s been o
[quote]
QUOTE: Originally posted by eastside
Yes. Access and transportation constitute a large part of the economic value of land. If that’s what they say in the AAR manifesto, they’re just following orthodox economics. Without the railroad the land was worth zip.
No asset (land in this case) has inherent value, nor is future appreciation of anything a given. An asset is worth only what the market is willing to pay. As a matter of fact, corrected for inflation, real estate on average in the US has barely risen in value since 1900. As someone who works in corporate finance, I would daresay that the life of the average US corporation is shorter than a human’s! Of the hundreds of thousands of corporations in the US, a corporation older than 100 years is extremely rare. BTW, the UP has the distinction of being one of the oldest continuing corporations in
If the locks and dams are paid for by the barges please explain why they want to raise my taxes? All we have heard about is how bad the lock system is here in this part of the Mississippi. Now they want taxpayer funds to help rebuild the locks. FYI the study was proved to be skewed so who knows whats happening on this front. most CofE guys are laying low.
Not all the roller damsn make electricity. If they did the QC generating stations wouldnt need all that poweder river coal
Eastside has it right.
Dave:
What are your feelings on intellectual property?
Certainly, with your feelings of open access, you must have strong feelings about the patent protection of drugs, software, recordings, etc.
Even Trains magazine, then in an open access environment, would not be able to copywrite protect it’s work.
ed
Ed,
I’m not sure where you’re going with that. Railroad ROW is not intellectuel property, it’s real estate. Are you suggesting that real property revert to the public domain after 17 years or so? Don’t forget patents, copyrights, et al, are only good for a limited amount of time. Patents become part of the public domain after that time, but copyright holders can refile. This process is essential to make sure the innovators have a period of reward (to inspire more innovation), while still allowing the public to eventually utilize the innnovation without penalty.
Transportation ROW’s tend to be public domains, with the exception of railroads, pipelines, transmission, and telecommunications. The latter three are mostly private (transmission can be either) with the caveat of competitor access a recent change. That leaves railroads back in the Dark Ages of closed access. Logic dictates that the railroad industry will eventually have to evolve into some form of open access, return to stringent regulation, or go broke.
Railroad management reminds me of the doomed folks in the movie “Poseidon Adventure” who insist that the way out of the capsized ship is to move down toward the “top” of the ship (e.g. mast), while the handful of innovators knows that they need to get up to the nominal “bottom” of the ship to affect survival. Railroad management is simply doing what they know, apparently without realizing that things have been turned upside down from decades ago.
Eastside: You are right, but only on the most
Let us not forget that as late as WWII, military shipments, including troop movements, on all land grant railroads were at half rate. The taxpayers were more than repaid for the land grants.
To be more concise, the land grants were not an expenditure, they were a gift of a present holding in return for certain favors back to the government, so there was no “repayment” per se to any taxpayers, rather a general benefit to the nation. In that vein, all transportation support has resulted some sort of return to the nation that has “more than paid for” itself.
What I am trying to point out is that it is erroneous to suggest that the land grants have a diminished present value compared to public support for other transportation modes. Look at it this way: From a perspective of interstate infrastructure, the land grants occured roughly 100 years before federal support for highways and waterways. We all have been taught that if someone put 1000 dollars into a general investment account 100 years ago, it would be worth thousands of times more than it’s original amount. By the time the feds began de facto large scale public support for interstate-type highways and waterways (circa 1950), the value of the railroad land grants by 1950 would have accrued by a factor of a thousand or more. I would argue that the land grants value in 1950 was many times more the level of public support for highways and waterways, and the same trend would be true today.
Just because the railroads have squandered this advantage is no reason to impose a guilt trip on the citizens who (rightly) demand more from our rail system than what we’re currently getting.
One other fact that should be considered is that barge rates can and do vary with water levels in the navigable channels. During a prolonged drought when river levels are low, barge operators will charge a higher rate to cover the fact that barges can’t be loaded as much without grounding.