Boy, Dave, you’re reading a lot into this! There’s no reason to read between the lines on this. All the info is written on the lines. The railroad did lose the business to trucks. It lost it, because it couldn’t be competitive, with the boxcar rates it offered. If the railroad could have made money by lowering the boxcar rate to the hopper rate, as you infer,they would have. The point is, they couldn’t make money doing that,so they didn’t do that. At that given point, under those circmstances. the railroad lost the business to trucks, due to that “matter of rates”. The railroad could have kept all the business away from the trucks. All they would have had to do was charge a nickel per carload. That wouldn’t profitable either. So, yes-the railroad did lose business to trucks. To reach a different conclussion isn’t being realistic.
You sure have a way of twisting words to fit things into your own scenario.
Oh, I’m twisting words?
Let’s look at some basic facts. Feel free to disagree with any if you so choose:
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Railroads are better at the long haul. Agree or disagree?
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Trucks are better at the short haul. Agree or disagree?
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Amending #'s 1 and 2 above, railroad unit trains are better at the short haul than trucks. Agree or disagree?
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Specific to your anecdotal example, the likelyhood that the truck hauls were long hauls is zero percent. Agree or disagree?
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The likelyhood is that boxcar grain shipments were anything but prefered by mainline managers and grain terminal handlers. Agree or disagree?
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By your own admission, it is likely that the railroad in question kept the longhaul, therefore trucks did not take this business from the railroad. Agree or disagree?
Datafever
Typical simpleminded use of a convential wisdom generalization to try to prove something. The guy is really good.
Be warned. Don’t disagree with anything he says as you will then be branded as a (gasp) liberal.
Take a branch line (about 50 miles long) that has 5 grain elevators (a fairly seasonal commodity) and 2 lumber yards (also a fairly seasonal commodity) as its only customers. The longest train that I can ever recall seeing was probably 12 cars. And that was a train that ran once a week. It certainly would not take much to convince anyone that the line was unprofitable. As long as the track was capable of maintaining speeds of 35 mph or so without maintenance, I reckon that the railroad was willing to just keep things at the status quo. But with business not even paying the salary and expenses of the railroad agent (who drove that line every day), the engineer, and the conductor. (Well, that might be a bit of an exaggeration.)
And therein comes the benefit of not having to pay for your own infrastructure costs directly. A short haul trucker can move those goods faster and cheaper to get them to a facility which can produce enough volume to put together a unit train (which may or may not have been on the same railroad at that point - there was another railroad within 100 miles).
So, for those grain elevators (and the lumber yards), truckers were able to take the business away from the railroad for the short haul business. Therefore, the truckers were in direct competition with the railroad in providing short haul services.
Oh, and railroads are not always better at the long haul. Depends upon the commodity being moved.
Me? A liberal? That’s a real hoot!
[(-D] [(-D] [(-D]
Okay, I have managed to obtain a little more information. The railroad agent (who is now 82 years old) maintains that it was not a case of the railroad raising rates. Trucking companies managed to do a good job of marketing and selling a niche market - short haul transportation of grain to facilities that were able to negotiate lower rates because of volume (i.e. units trains), thereby providing an overall cost savings to the customers in question. Which is kind of what I had been trying to say.
The agent was given early retirement and the line was abandoned years later under a rule that allowed lines to be abandoned is there had been no traffic over the line for at least two years.
I don’t know how you see it, but the agent and I see it this way - the trucking industry was able to undercut the railroad and drive them out of business (the business of providing short-haul transportation). To me, that sounds like competition.
Now, I can’t say that this was the case in a majority of cases, or even in a small minority of cases, but it was the case on this particular branch line. Therefore, it is not always the case that only another railroad can be competition for a railroad that is servicing a “captive shipper”. Which is possibly why researchers have a difficult time in trying to determine exactly which shippers are captive and which are not.
That was interesting…I suppose one could then approach the argument about how if trucks had to pay for the road they were driving on perhaps this would have leveled the playing field with the railroads. Railroads had to pay for their land, maintenance, and so on while trucks get to drive on a big federal subsidy - the road.
Well, from Idaho Ronald Reagan looked like a liberal, so if it comes up don’t take it too hard.[:)]
As usual FM you are engaging in gross over generalizations to fit a square peg in a round hole. It can be done, but it is very messy and not what was intended.
Concerning railroads and short hauls you should read George Betke’s articl
Well, just to be a stick in the mud and point out the other side, it could also be argued that government ownership of the railroad infrastructure would be an equally acceptable solution. It isn’t a stance that I would take, but…[;)]
It depends.
It depends.
They can be, but it’s situation specific.
Disagree, if they preferred carboxes, they wouldn’t have switched to trucks.
How do you know the grain moved a long distance? What do you define as a long distance? Most US grain never gets in a railcar. (rail market share of grain is 32%) Most grain is trucked to a river terminal or a processor that turns it into flour, animal feed. ethanol, whatever. It’s a low value commodity that can’t support much in the way of transportation costs.
What you’ve got to realize is that the branch line/small country elevator grain gathering system was built when farmers moved the grain out of the fields with a team of horses pulling a wagon. (I grew up in Mason County, IL - which had around 14,000 folks. It was
Same thing with alot of the produce yes there is that new train going to upstate New York however by the time they get it loaded and unloaded at each end a team truck could have been loaded made its run to Hunts Point in New York City dropped off and be on its way back to WA to PU another load. I for one have made a run from Salinas CA to Greencastle PA in 48 hours with spring mix which is baby lettuce mix and that stuff is hotter than hot trucks do offer some advantages over trains. And by the way Dave trucks do pay for the roads what do you think all the taxes they pay for on the fuel goes for right now the federal fuel tax on diesel alone is 33 cents a gallon plus the state taxes add all the other taxes the avarage trucke pays 30K a year in highway taxes a year alone that is BEFORE any income taxes.
You contradict yourself. You say trucks were the competition, yet you admit the trucks were hauling to the railroad’s unit train terminal. Since the railroad didn’t lose the business other than the carload traffic off the branchline, the trucks acted as collaberators with the railroad rather than competitors.
It’s not competition if said competitors are delivering to the same railroad’s facility. Sounds more like the trucks were the non-union alternative to local carload. All the railroad cared about is the u
Guess again, cluss! If you read Datafever’s explanation, the railroad kept the business via terminal consolidation. The trucks just delivered to the unit train terminal to save the railroad the hassle of operating a marginal branchline. It was the railroad’s preference.
So, no - the railroad did not lose business to trucks. They simply utilized trucks to feed the consolidated terminal, e.g. the trucks acted as the railroad’s cargo collection system. The trucks were probably non-union, so there was a certain degree of labor cost reduction in the supply chain.
However, there was no increase in supply chain efficiency, rather a reduction. Carload freight is still 3 to 4 times as fuel efficient as the largest trucks out there, and even with unit train consolidation there is no reason carload’s cannot be aggregated into unit train configs.
A shortline outfit (read: non-union) probably could have run the line profitably, but this was pre-Staggers.
Ed, pay close attention - I have never said that trucks don’t pay their way. On the contrary, I have stated quite conclusively that truckers do pay most of the cost of maintaining inter-state highways (e.g. including but not limited to those blue and red shield Interstate Highways), with state and local highways being partially subsidized with property taxes, sales taxes, etc. This segues into one of the myths being perpetrated on this forum and other railroad information venues - that trucks are subsidized while railroads are not. Obviously, it’s not a simple as that, there are complexities to the various levels (federal/state/local) of public road funding. The truth is that on the federal level trucks do pay their fair share, and since a comparison of railroads to highways is mostly limited to the interstate corridors, at that level it can be argued that there is an equivalence of “paying their own way” among both truckers and railroads. And since railroads more and more are using trucks as the intermediaries between railhead and dock, there is no partiality at the state
Not the stance I would take either but I see your point. In other words, federalize the system, right? I think we would see disaster on a grand scale. Part of the reason railroads are doing so well now is that they are money making machines in a market - they survive because they trim and expand at will were needed in order to maximize their profits. Give this control to the government (just like the ICC before Staggers) and you will have a rash of bankruptcies and the like - just like the 70’s.
Let me throw this hypothetical out there:
Let’s say that the government said that trucks must pay their way on the road system - and I don’t mean a small increase in their license fee, I mean someone actually sits down and figures out what a truck will do to a road during it’s lifetime and how much it will cost to fix it. Then let’s say that they charge trucks accordingly (in other words - the truck is paying for the infrastructure as if it owned the portion affected by the truck). Basically leveling the playing field with the railroads, so to speak.
Railroads already do this with their infrastructure - all the track, signals, land, etc. is bought and paid for. Which one would survive? Which one would turn a profit and continue to function with least amount of interrupt
[quote user=“solzrules”]
Not the stance I would take either but I see your point. In other words, federalize the system, right? I think we would see disaster on a grand scale. Part of the reason railroads are doing so well now is that they are money making machines in a market - they survive because they trim and expand at will were needed in order to maximize their profits. Give this control to the government (just like the ICC before Staggers) and you will have a rash of bankruptcies and the like - just like the 70’s.
Let me throw this hypothetical out there:
Let’s say that the government said that trucks must pay their way on the road system - and I don’t mean a small increase in their license fee, I mean someone actually sits down and figures out what a truck will do to a road during it’s lifetime and how much it will cost to fix it. Then let’s say that they charge trucks accordingly (in other words - the truck is paying for the infrastructure as if it owned the portion affected by the truck). Basically leveling the playing field with the railroads, so to speak.
Railroads already do this with their infrastructure - all the track, signals, land, etc. is bought and paid for. Which one would survive? Which one would turn a profit and cont
[quote user=“futuremodal”]
You contradict yourself. You say trucks were the competition, yet you admit the trucks were hauling to the railroad’s unit train terminal. Since the railroad didn’t lose the business other than the carload traffic off the branchline, the trucks acted as collaberators with the railroad rather than competitors.
It’s not competition if said competitors are delivering to the same railroad’s facility. Sounds more like the trucks were the non-union alternative to local
If anyone would like to access some facts instead of FM’s propaganda, the details are in the previously cited GAO report. Pages 62-63. “…combination unit trucks paid 80 percent of their cost responsibility and the heaviest combinations paid (only) half of their cost responsibility.” Barges are also heavily subsidized.
The GAO concludes that this is a really bad idea.
Read it and realize it FM. This is the second time it’s been linked to in this thread. Why don’t you read the thing?