TOP OFFICIALS SAY OIL COULD REACH 200 PLUS BARRELL IF OIL TRAFFIC IS DISRUPTED IF EITHER ISRAEL OR IRAN ATTACK EACH OTHER…WHAT EFFECT TO TRANSPORTATION AND OUR ECONOMY WILL THIS HAVE? CAN RRS HANDLE IT?
Where do you get these numbers???
Who are the “top officials”, and if you know why not quote them?
Initially, and into the not-so-long-term, I’d have to think the answer would be “Yes, they can handle it.” Freight traffic, including intermodal, is down so much right now, that most railroads have ample route capacity to take what trucks might lose due to increased fuel cost. Railroads would have to pull a lot of furloughed people back, and upgrade the service status of a number of routes that have been dropped to local service only (Stampede Pass, upper Feather River Canyon, etc.). Passenger service, however, might be a hit-or-miss scenario. In the major commute areas, more people will leave their autos in the garage or at the station and switch to rail. However, a large, long-term hike in the price of oil would eventually cripple what little remains of the American economy, leaving many folks with no job to commute to anyway.
I really like what the railroads are doing now, which is expanding capacity for the future.
If this happens I think the railroads could handle it. They survived WW1, and WW2.
Justin: The Federal Government took control (temporary nationalized) the railroads for the duration of World War I since there was tons of congestion caused by inefficient operations at ports and points of interchange.
After the railroads were released back to their respective owners (and paid what the average of their operating revenue was for the last three years before the war - multiplied by how long the war was), then they obtained that efficiency and worked great during World War II.
A nationalization today, under any increase in traffic, is both unnecessary and impossible in the current political environment.
Well, Bubba, I honestly think that if a war breaks out in the near east, you need not worry about railroad abilities to handle (increased) traffic. If such a conflict could be contained in the region then my guess would be that this wouldn’t create a lot of additional traffic for your rr, if worse comes to bad you wouldn’t need any railroads anymore. I might sound very pessimistic, sorry, but I believe that such a conflict would have been already startet if not all the relevant parties were well enough aware of the danger of braking the hell loose.
Justin and Tyler (and others) -
If you’re a Trains subscriber and have access to the current TrainsExpress PDF from several back issues, take a look at the first page (pg. 40) of the “Epoch of Electrification” article by A. C. Kalmbach from the April 1946 issues of Trains. Much of the page is devoted to the differences between WW I and WW II, summarized as follows from the 2nd paragraph:
“It was the Pennsylvania Railroad electrification which more than anything else kept the government from taking over the railroads in this war as it did in the last. One might even say that if the Pennsylvania’s eastern lines had not been electrified we might have lost the war.”
What is in those quotes is not only from that article, but is quoted there as being stated in response to a question during an interview by an “eminent railroad electrification engineer”, but who was not further identified. However, from my reading of Mike Bezilla’s book on the PRR’s electrification, I believe it was likely J. V. B. Duer, PRR’s Chief Electrical Engineer (or a similar title).
- Paul North.
I take it you believe that?
RWM
No, the railroads probably can’t handle that. As a result, we’ll probably all just die slow, painful, miserable deaths. We’ll either die from the cold, as there will be no heat, or we’ll starve because the food can’t be delivered. It will be just awful. Even cable TV will cease to function.
As one final act of compassion, the US Government will finally make H1N1 flu vaccinations available to the wretched surviving few.
The Pennsylvania’s electrification is the reason the government decides not to take over the railroads during WWII and as a result the war is not lost? I’d give equal weight to my birth being 10 months and three days before the attack on Pearl Harbor.
One thing that I think is not well know is that WWI was also used as an excuse by the government to grab the telephone system and the fledgling radio broadcasting concept. (You can’t really call radio an “Industry” in 1918) AT&T was nationalized and the Navy took over all radio transmitters. (I don’t know, maybe there were 4 or 5 private radio transmitters in 1918? I don’t know about the radio thing.)
But the telephone system was well established by then. The government could control what people sent through the US Mail, but telephone communication was not government controlled. They sure tried to fix that. Think about it. You couldn’t send a letter or make a phone call outside of government control?
The government created the problems (what else is new?) that led to their take over of the railroads. They starved the railroads for capital in the years prior to the war with their idiotic rate regulation. This meant the railroads couldn’t add needed capacity. (Sound Familiar?)
Then the government folks shipped anything and everything to east coast ports to go to the war despite the fac
If you’re referring to me and the PRR quote above - actually, no - I don’t. The article really reads more like a ‘puff piece’, and my first reaction after reading that portion was that I’d finally gotten to the source of the seeming mantra among the Trains staff - mainly the late DPM, and colleagues and contemporaries - about how great the PRR electrification was to the war effort. EDIT: To be fair, the context of the answer was not the PRR’s role in the war, but in response to the question of ‘‘Was the electrification successful ?’’ There are too many anecdotal stories by Al M. Rung, William Moedinger, [:-,] John G. Kneiling - who once wrote something like ‘‘Someday some uninhibited type will write the true story of wartime transport and give the PRR its due’’ - and others, to merely dismiss the electrification as not being a very important factor, but the whole subject is too complex and intertwined to be explained away as simply as crediting the electrification for all of it, either. Nevertheless, that page has value because it is close to a contemporaneous account by observers and a participant - albeit anonymous - and the only explanation that I’ve seen which extends beyond a mere conclusory assertion, for more than a single sentence.
That explanation is essentially the same as stated by greyhounds above. But if you think about it, it’s a non sequitur
As they did - and had to do - with the steel mills during the Korean War, too.
- PDN.
Would you cite your source, both for the numbers stated and the names of “Top officials”?
Trust me, if Israel and Iran get in a toe to toe hard line shooting match, then Amtrak ridership and Walmart’s container delivery are the last things you really need to worry about.
Remember, Tommy Turtle says “Duck and Tuck, and don’t look at the flash”…
Long time ago - like late 1960s - I saw a ‘Civil Defense’ type sign in one of the stores - EDIT: actually, the hobby shop, as I recall - in a large shopping center in Horsham, PA [Philadelphia northern suburb] that adjoined the southern boundary of what was then the Willow Grove Naval Air Station that read something like the following [‘sanitized’ ever so slightly here]: [swg]
DIRECTIONS IN CASE OF NUCLEAR ATTACK:
- Go to a safe interior room with no windows.
If Israel and Iran get into a shooting match, Iran’s leader is enough of a loony tune to let loose with nuclear weapons; Israel would retaliate in kind, and that would be the end of civilization as we know it because it could quickly escalate into WW-3.
You are way of topic but I don’t get your logic…you believe that the Russians and/or the Chinese would launch on the United States in that situation?
This post makes me think of the enormous surge in traffic during WW2 which was accomplished with friction bearings, steam locomotives with shorter ranges, little, if any radio communication,pen to paper instead of computers,a larger proportionate share of traffic by rail and large troop movements to boot. They fared extraordinarily well with crews and equipment in exhaustion mode. It would be pathetic if we couldn’t match this with all the progress in technology…Would it surprise me if we could not? It would but in this day and age of even the simplest task seeming to be lodged in self created complexities…perhaps not. Amtrak? It’s best to leave that as a no comment.
How about we just look at the first part of the question, leave the cause to forums that specialize in international politics and military actions to obsess over, and assume the reaction really is what is posited – a very large increase in demand for intermodal freight and passenger rail. Given that premise, the answer to the intermodal 2X growth question is “maybe” and the answer to the Amtrak 10X growth question is “no.”
The largest constraint on intermodal capacity is terminals. It’s not possible to rapidly double their throughput or build new ones in a hurry unless we want to overturn a lot of constitutional law. In some lanes a 30 percent capacity increase is probably reasonable.
The largest constraint on Amtrak capacity is terminals, equipment, and personnel. It’s not possible to even double capacity without a great deal of expansion or creation of terminal capacity, and the equipment doesn’t exist.
RWM
My sense is that this is a good time to move on to other topics. Thanks for the reasoned responses above, but we don’t want to go much further on this one.
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