A lot of years have passd since I left Penn State with a B S in Business Logistics back in 1972, but the imbalaces out there in the real world, and the questions they raise, are panfully familiar.
It was a time when the accelerated completion of the Interstate Highway System was pulling what little time-sensitive or high-value freight remained off the Eastern trunk line railroads fast, and the flooding from Hurricane Agnes that June did a lot to finish the job. So I gave up early on a rail career and sidelined into trucking, starting out with the suburban-Philadelphia-based Jones Motor Company. Jones had begun life as a local "cartage" firm near the turn of the (20th) century,, but had not operated west of Pittsburgh until 1960. Interestingly, the capital to transform it into a sizeable regional carrier came from the Alllegany Corporation, a multi-faceted transportation holding company, with some very deep (and unlikely) roots.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alleghany_Corporation
By the time I came on board, Jones was ranked as the nation's 18th-largest trucker by
Commercial Car Journal. it operated from the eastern Seaboard inland as far as the Mississppi, but didn't go south of the Ohio except for a fray into the Shenandah Valley (I-81) and all of North Carolina, The motor carriers of the day operated under regulation very similar to that for railroads. You could only serve communities into which you (or a predecessor) had been granted authority b the Interstae Commerce Commission, presumably baxk in the Thirties. And most of the major players had gaps in their authoity .... Jones was weak in Southern Ohio and shut out of all of Indiana, Branch couldn't serve Chicagoland, and Cooper-Jarrett had no rights into Detroit.
The two big players who got to most of the places that counted were Yellow Freight and Roadway Express, and they still depended heavily on locals to fill in some of the gaps. My fellow Penn Staters of a certain age might recall, for example, that Lewistown-Based Noerr and Altoona's Ward were the only playrers in Happy Valley before 1978. The thnking at Roadway and Yellow at the time was that a long haul was the quickest path to profitability. So a lot of the competitors began to shed their own short hauls. Jones had gained entry into Chicago, Detroit and Cleveland by acquiring a successful company based in Niles, Ohio, but within a few years, had cast the short-haul opportunities asde, and was reportedly trying, with Alleghany financing, to go coast-to-coast via a meger with Texas -based TIME-DC. Ironically, when the economy tightened in 1974, it decided to go after the short-haul business again.
One of the stories I wiill never forget happened one night when the "office snoop" (not me!) found a copy of a memo to the sales department. It seemed that one of the "sales lanes" the company was pursuin was Philadelphia-Cleveland, and a few days before, a local manufactuere had favored us with a small-but-hot pallet of freight just when a near-truckload for Clevelansd turned up. We ran the two together, and neeless to say, the shipper was delighted. But now the sales rep had to explain that the unstable nature of the busines just wouldn't allow such a perfomance on a daily basis.
My tenure with Jones ended when a recession set in during the winter of 1974-75. A few years later, the deregulation phenomemon was to bankrupt about 3/4 of those "Top 100" truckers listed in
CCJ back in the red-hot early Seventies. (The auction of the operating rights of bankrupt Associated Transport drew a "who's who" from just about the entire industry, but most of those present were to find their own heads on the blok within a few years.) Irregular-route, specific-commodity operations like Schneider and Werner were to become dominant, and Roadway and Yellow were fated to merge, then reorganize iin the light of the new realities. And one of the biggest success stories, J B Hunt, was to structure mosty of it's operation around rail-domionant line-hauls. When I worked in a DHL package hub frm a year in 2008, the process had gotten even more exotic. Truckload carriers were, for example, running solid shipments iinto UPS, FedEx or DHL hubs, and letting thefolks in brown (or blue, or yellow) take care of the delivery.
And as a final note, i think it should be recognized that "picking freight" ... taking it away from another carrier ... wasn't really that hard.
the challenge lay in handling the stuff profitably. Santa Fe gave up on its passenger-speed freight
Super C after a last fling with the Post Office, and Conrail tried a New York-Buffalo overnight RoadRailer service called the
Empire Sate Express that never quite panned out.
Oh, the more it changes, the more it stays the same;
and the hand just rearranges the players in the game.
Al Stewart, "The Eyes of Nostradamus"
Not to mention, Jimmy Carter deregulated the railroads in 1980. 