Video conferencing may convey information between parties in different locations - but business meetings are about much more than just then interchange of information - they are about building working relationships and trust between the parties involved in ‘up close & personal’ interaction. Interactions where you see who you are dealing with as a person - not as a image on a video screen.
East of the Mississippi airlines and roadways are approaching gridlock during normal high traffic periods - and the non-high traffic periods grow closer to gridlock each passing year. Since I put 25 to 30K miles on the Interstate System East of the Mississippi - it is a accurate observation. There is a need for increased transportation options.
There are two groups you don’t mention but who are a significant proportion of travelers: People in the military and college students. Do you see video conferencing as influencing these groups?
I’m not proposing anything. I’m asking if the train that hauls freight off the highway is doing more for the infrastructure and petroleum issues than the passenger train that is running now in that spot.
I think there will be a contraction of transportation forced upon us by its rising cost against a falling wage base. Transportation will soon become a luxury that is best avoided. Video conferencing can work for the face to face stuff. Individuals working as a service corporations will offer the same productivity as a direct employee with no other strings attached. Everyone engaged in independently performing some vital function in the whole endeavor, will remove a lot of the need to commute into a big central corporate hub.
It is about time! What a waste to just roll into town every day to gather under a big tent so the boss can keep an eye on you. We are technologically beyond that. Every player is responsible for adding to the output, and we have the technical means to monitor exactly that. It is absurd for an employee to spend one quarter of his or her production in just transporting their bodies to and from the big tent.
For nearly 30 years now, we are discussing how to employ information technology to rid us of the need to be physically available at our place of work, yet all attempts have utterly failed. All business finally is people business. A quality issue you may have with your manufacturing resource in China will not be solved by a bunch of emails or a series of video conferences - you will have to go there.
For a number of reasons, the modes of transport we currently use start failing to meet our transportation needs. These reasons may be safety, comfort, cost, time, ecology and even political reasons. Rail transport will be the only answer to that, be it light rail for commuting purposes or fast trains for intercity transport.
Video conferencing may convey information between parties in different locations - but business meetings are about much more than just then interchange of information - they are about building working relationships and trust between the parties involved in ‘up close & personal’ interaction. Interactions where you see who you are dealing with as a person - not as a image on a video screen.
East of the Mississippi airlines and roadways are approaching gridlock during normal high traffic periods - and the non-high traffic periods grow closer to gridlock each passing year. Since I put 25 to 30K miles on the Interstate System East of the Mississippi - it is a accurate observation. There is a need for increased tran
None whatsoever. However, for the past 40 years, host railroads have had to accomodate and allow for Amtrak to use their rail capacity without any profit margin to the host railroads. Had that not been the case, would not the past 40 years of railroad freight operations and operating costs been different?
Would a 10,000 ton freight train, hauling freight that used to be on the highway eliminate more traffic, more wear & tear on the infrastructure, and more use of fuel, than a typical passenger train or traier train using the same train slot?
Well yes. Had not Amtrak been available for the last 40 years things would have been different. The difference would be that Federal Law would have required the railroads to operate their own passenger service. Do you believe host railroads made a mistake when they agreed to accept Amtrak trains in return for being able to stop running their own passenger service?
There is also another intangible issue. Although railroads seem to be very powerful organizations for most of the 20th century they lost at the Federal level when public opinion opposed them. This is true even when the public issues were not directly anti railroad but had an impact on railroads such as the highway building legislation in the 1930’s and again in the 1950’s. Private railroads ran passenger service as long as they could even when it lost money because they believed in the public relations value of the service. Was this a mistake? And do freight railroads get no public relations value from Amtrak?
The railroads agreed to Amtrak, not because they wanted to, but because they were forced to make a choice between the lesser of two evils. Given the choice of A) Being forced to lose $$$$ a year, or B) Being forced to lose $$ a year, which would you logicaly choose?
The railroads weren’t running passenger service long after it was unprofitable juft for the public relations value, they were doing it because they were being forced by the government. There’s a big difference.
Can you show a single instance where a railroad was compelled by government to add a passenger train? I don’t know of any. However, railroads did start running passenger trains believing it was in their best interest. It was when railroads wanted to discontinue passenger service that the government intervened to refuse to allow them to discontinue the service to the degree that they wanted to.
Railroads, from their earliest days, always operated within the legal framework of the United States. Believing as you do that they were “forced by the government” to provide passenger service do you think that it is likely the government would have stopped forcing them to provide it in the absence of Amtrak?
I do recognize there is a lot of truth in what you say especially when it comes to commuter service. However, it is also true that railroads did believe their most famous trains had public relations value and they did operate them with that value in mind.
But my real point here is that in my opinion railroads were right to consider the public relations value in operating certain trains and that I think there is still pr value for freight railroads in Amtrak trains. The closest that many of us will ever get to seeing freight railroads operating conditions is in riding an Amtrak train. By riding Amtrak we see first hand that a railroad is about a lot of individual human beings, both the ones we see and those behind the scenes, who are working to provide something we need whether it is our own transportation or the passing trains carrying wheat, automobiles or containers of consumer goods. That knowledge can never hurt the freight railroads. </
Railroads started running passenger trains from the very beginning, and often it was at least as important to the bottom line as the freight service. They had an effective monopoly on transportation, charged accordingly, and passenger trains turned a handsome profit. Fast forward a hundred years and that monopoly had vanished entirely. The regulatory regime, however, was still stuck in the past. The old fare structure, indexed for inflation, would have meant completely empty trains so the railroads had to judge the price point at which their losses were minimized.
A few specific trains probably came close to covering their direct out-of-pocket costs but only because the infrastructure such as mainlines and coach yards were covered by the rest of the network. A few roads were willing to absorb modest losses for the public relations and advertising value. That value, while real, is also very intangible. The bean counters can’t measure it, therefore it doesn’t exist for them.
What railroads really had a monopoly on and still do is the transportation of coal. Coal provided the power to run our factories until it was replaced by fractional horsepower electric motors. Coal provided the power to send our ships all over the world until it was replaced by diesel fuel. Coal heated our homes until it was replaced by oil. Coal even cooked our food until it was replaced by gas and electricity. Gas and oil are transported by pipelines and electricity is transported by wires.
Coal is still around and what we move we still move by train but we don’t burn nearly as much as we used to and as we left coal behind we left a lot of trains behind too.
Quoting John WR: "Can you show a single instance where a railroad was compelled by government to add a passenger train?
Yes, I can. When the unions struck the FEC in 1963, the railroad ceased running any passenger service–until the state of Florida forced it to run a passenger train between Miami and Jacksonville. When I rode from West Palm Beach to Jacksonville in the fall of 1967, there were no more than two other passengers on board.
This is an example of the Florida government requiring a railroad to continue service it started rather than creating new passenger service. I don’t suggest that the requirements to continue service were rational of that they should have happened. But it was a case of railroad companies being denied the right to abandon passenger service rather than being compelled to create new service.
Another example, perhaps even more illustrative, is the requirement that LV maintain the Hazleton accommodation RDC after all other passenger service to which it might connect was terminated.
Most of the discussions in earlier years didn’t involve ‘new’ service of any kind: they either came out of perceived common-carrier or charter obligations to provide service, or involved ‘maintaining the franchise’ via retention of service where it had been historically been provided. (I won’t get into government-vs.-management issues, of which there are certainly a large number…)
I don’t think this part of the discussion hinges at all on whether governments or any other agencies ‘mandated’ new service, or even non-reduction of historical levels of service on particular corridors. The exception would probably be in wartime… and that’s a whole different kettle of fish…