I am at my summer location in central Texas. There is not much to do because of the Covid-19 constraints, so I have been going up to Temple most days to watch trains.
I have seen some very long BNSF grain trains, or at least I think they are grain cars, nearly every day. They are headed to or from Galveston, I believe. It is hard to imagine trucks carrying grain competitively from the upper midwestern grain belt to places like Galveston for shipment overseas.
I am aware that a significant amount of grain goes by barrage, but how does that work if the grain and the shipping port are not along a major waterway?
Europe is not an example the US wants to copy when it comes to RR’s. Their nationalization of rail service resulted in the passenger side totaly dominating and freight rail reduced to a distant afterthought. So of course rail freight traffice fell off to practically nothing. It has rebounded some, often due to freight service being spun-off in some countries to independent operators. The US is different in that Passenger rail service in the US only meaningly impacts some very populated areas and corridors between them. Goverment supported High Speed Rail won’t happen in the US as the US federal government is now $25 Trillion in debt, soon to be $28 Trillion or more. And that’s just the Federal existing debt. The estimated future “real debt” the US faces (includes known but unfunded future entitlements under existing laws) is over $50 Trillion–and more if you factor in projected state and local entitlement deficits.
In regards to the comment that truck sizes and weight will definitely increase along with volume, all I can say is that would result in most of the current highway infrastructure being pounded to pieces far beyond what it is today. It would cost about $5 Trillion to get it right today and up to $10 Trillion to handle what the trucking industry is proposing for the future. The only way that expense could be meaningfully reduced would be to eliminate the rules requiring union labor or “prevailing wage” laws when working on government funded contracts. Since none of that appears it will happen, eventually the deteriorating roads and bridges would require weight limits that would be no more than today, maybe even further reduced.
Maybe they do not need the kind of extreme heavy haul system that we have. Maybe their system is more light and nimble than ours and thus matches the demands of their transportation market. Indeed, it seems that our market is changing to require a system that is more like that of Europe.
Nothing gets sold cheaply! Unless corporated raiders want to turn EVERYTHING to cash NOW! Their intent is turn the property to cash - damned to any business that may be ongoing.
A problem with this approach is that in today’s railroad financial climate, what would happen after “Sell the track” would be to move the money in total to the bottom line to be harvested by the investors.
Yeah, but you have to look at this following the OP’s pessimism. What he “predicted,” remember, was that the ROWs would be abandoned (more precisely, converted to trails, not even ‘busway’ equivalents for route-separated autonomous electric platooning in directional running). That’s a potload of opportunity cost even if “sold” at pennies on the dollar, ignoring all the communications and colocated pipeline and service rights. It would not be difficult to see companies similar to Hutchinson Whampoa acquiring routes much like ‘spectrum’, followed by strategic spinoff of the rail assets to iron-ocean or similar operating companies… which could then laser-focus effectively on best profitability for open infrastructure without pesky common-carrier responsibilities. Any retained operating services… which, again, the OP thinks would be hopelessly unprofitable by that point… would be additional revenue, perhaps operating the way communications companies exploited dark fiber and perceived excess bandwidth in the good old OC-3 days of optical backbone networks.
Someone is sure to bring up Network Rail, Hatfield, and The Permanent Way at some point. Let 'em. We might get wretchedness but not that kind, and we have lots of examples of what to avoid and why to educate the stockholders and investors with…
Rail ROWs are too narrow to be useful carriageways. Sure, they could be sold off and used as utility corridors, but if trains aren’t running on them, for our purposes they are as good as abandoned.
Carload is dying and this presents a huge problem. The majority of rail revenues and volumes come from carload. Intermodal accounts for a much smaller share of revenue and tonnage handled by railroads. When carload dies, so too will the majority of freight rail. It is true that railroads are the only declining mode of transport in a growing economy. It is sad, but they aren’t really relevant to the economy anymore.
Didn’t you get the memo? Carload died a long time ago. It was replaced by unit trains. Unit trains- you know, the ones you don’t want to talk about because they can’t be replaced by fleets of driverless elctric trucks that don’t exist yet.
I can agree with you on this point. Pessimism is the only accurate outlook on anything as far as you are concerned. So, are all you guys at the trucking association PR firms still working from home?
No one said they want it to be a copycat system like ours. They would like to run longer trians with a heavier axle load, and the ability to run DS…They’ve been testing these scenarios out for that very reason…