You can’t read any recent railroad history without coming accros the decline of industry in the rustbelt of the Northeast. It’s always given, that the industry moved south and southwest- to the sunbelt.
Did the loss of railroad business in the Northeast coincide with an equal growth of railroad business in the South and Southeast?
To an extent, yes. Certainly the movement of Industry sparked an increase in coal-fired powerplants in the Southeast. Also the new Auto Assembly plants being built by non-American Automakers have been in the South and Southeast, and they have caused a traffic increase. But a lot of the heavy industry that left the Rust Belt went overseas rather than South.
The rail industry growth I’ve seen in central Texas recently is largely due to increased traffic with Mexico, and the increase in transporting ‘bulk materials’. Most of the trains I see here carry chemicals, plastic pellets, coal, autos/auto parts, grain and aggregate (we seem to grow a lot of rocks here in the hill country.) Most everything seems to go in a hopper or a gon. There is a fair amount of intermodal, but probably not as much as on the transcons between California and Chicago.
It’s a very complicated picture.
Some industry moved south
Some industry moved overseas or to Mexico
Some industry moved to where the people moved
Some industry of new types appeared
Some industry located new in the South because that’s where the raw materials were, particularly petrochemicals and paper
Some industry vanished because no one needed it any longer.
Most people focus only on items 1 and 2 because they can be associated with scurrilous villains. But items 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 are much more important.
If you look at steel consumption per capita in the U.S, it has steadily declined in the last 60 years from about 1,000 lbs. per person per year in 1950 to 800 lbs. per person per year at present. Meanwhile, population has grown in the South while stagnating in the Northeast and Great Lakes States. So right there a lot of steel-making capacity in the Northeast and Great Lakes states had to go away because no one needed it any more.
It’s even more difficult to relate the change in industrial output locations to changes in rail traffic locations because it can’t be isolated from the concurrent changes in rail vs. truck market share, distribution methods, consumption habits, and global trade patterns, not to mention very substantial changes in railroad organization, technological, labor, and operational practices. Suffice it to say that when it was all done, the Northeast and Great Lakes regions had more track miles of main track (single and multiple)
The auto plants in San Antonio come to mind…built new facilities and less labor cost.
Much of the indusrial growth in the south has taken place in non-rail served industrial parks. In addition the “just in time” delivery of goods to factories made RR growth harder, as against the flexibility of captive truck fleets.
I’ll add one thing. For decades the government regulated freight rates were discriminatory against the south. This was done to protect northern industries from southern competitiion.
Some of you may have attended the old “Intemodal Expo” in Atlanta sponsered by the Georgia Freight Bureau. (Talk intermodal all day, party all night!) Now, just what was the Georgia Freight Bureau?
It was an organization originally formed to fight the discrimination.
The specific example given at the Expo was the manufacture of stoves. A stove manufactured in New York/New England had a lower freight rate going south than a stove manufactured in Georgia had going north. This “Protected” the northern folks at the expense of the southern folks. It artificially inhibited industrial development in the south and kept the southern people poor.
The advent of trucking broke this up. A southern manufacturer could use his own trucks to move the stoves north and avoid the discriminatory rate structure. The southern railroads had to also fight to get out from under the regulatory burden that kept them serving undeveloped areas. .
The Southern Basing-Point System was more insidious than that, it was basically a system to ensure that rich people in the South stayed rich and the poor stayed poor, by guaranteeing lower rail rates to large merchants in large Southern cities than small merchants in small cities, large landowners instead of small landowners, and status quo economic power against the spread of industrialization which might have brought with it unions, immigrants, a middle-class, etc. That it benefitted northern manufacturers was a byproduct. I would argue that what changed the system was not so much an epiphany of economic egalitarianism than the desire of northern manufacturers to relocate into the South and obtain lower labor costs, right-to-work laws, etc.
Wow - I just realized I channeled William Safire – remember his “nattering nabobs of negativism” speech for Spiro Agnew?
RWM
Oh My Lord! You channel William Safire too?
What I’ve found to work when that happens is to sip a double shot of bourbon while reading the Bible. He’s repelled by neither, but taken together they seem to mellow him out.
Once again, you and I agree on the premise, but disagree on the details.
You’re right about the rigging of the rate structure as being “insidious”, but I don’t see the benefits to southern merchants in keeping their potential customers poor. I mean poor people don’t buy a lot of stuff. People with money buy stuff. If’n I were a merchant I’d want a customer base with some money in their pockets. And, I believe people who had had a lot of experience avoiding a US Navy blockade could get the stuff in if they wanted to. Of course, there are a lot of weird people out there and sometimes those weird people get political power. That may well have been the case and some weird well-to-do folks may h
Southern business men for many years went with a low wage strategy as a way to attract manufacturing plants from the North. It was peonage at its most extreme. This started to change with the Research Triangle in NC and manufactures that needed a more educated workforce. People with an education were more mobile and could head for Michigan and Ohio to find jobs bending metal.
Revisionism. Try channeling McPherson to understand the Civil War.
In terms of the discriminatory rail rates, the primary beneficiaries were northeastern railroads as the originating carrier. The ICC was primarily created because of pressure from the Grange movement (midwestern). Concerning retailing, well into the 20th century, Southern merchants in the larger cities dominated retailing by also being wholesalers for the small town small store owners.
[quote user=“greyhounds”]
Oh My Lord! You channel William Safire too?
What I’ve found to work when that happens is to sip a double shot of bourbon while reading the Bible. He’s repelled by neither, but taken together they seem to mellow him out.
Once again, you and I agree on the premise, but disagree on the details.
You’re right about the rigging of the rate structure as being “insidious”, but I don’t see the benefits to southern merchants in keeping their potential customers poor. I mean poor people don’t buy a lot of stuff. People with money buy stuff. If’n I were a merchant I’d want a customer base with some money in their pockets. And, I believe people who had had a lot of experience avoiding a US Navy blockade could get the stuff in if they wanted to. Of course, there are a lot of weird people out there and sometimes those weird people get political power. That may well have been the case and some weird well-to
Who pushed for the uniform system (Docket 28300) that we wound up with by the early 1950s for everything east of the Rockies?
This makes sense. I have no doubt that you are correct.in that certain people of the South were advantaged by the discriminatory rate structure. That they were able to use the US Government to protect their wealth and priviledge at the expense of people with less political power is not surprising.
A landowner using the tenant (sharecrop) system certainly didn’t want a new factory around that would offer other opportunities to people he needed as low wage field hands.
The discriminatory railroad rate structure obviously benefited several groups including Southern land owners, Northern industrialists, and Northern wage earners. I don’t think it’s important as to how much went to each group and who benefited the most.
The main point I was trying to make by bringing this up is that economic development in the “Sunbelt” was artificially stunted. And it was.
And I fully agree with your point.
There are a lot of different visions for what America should look like. Some people think it’s supposed to be a winner-take-all, the Devil Take the Hindmost. Others think it should have equal outcomes for everyone no matter what they put in. Regulation of railroads as the ICC construed it tried to provide both goals simultaneously. The clever and amoral people were quite good at gaming the regulatory process to provide self-benefit, while the noble idealists thought that if we just wrote another 1,000 lines of CFRs, we could fix all the problems in the last 1,000 lines of CFRs.
RWM