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  • Should we reform the USRA?

  • For topics on Class I and II passenger and freight operations more general in nature and not specifically related to a specific railroad with its own forum.
For topics on Class I and II passenger and freight operations more general in nature and not specifically related to a specific railroad with its own forum.

Moderator: Jeff Smith

 #1538056  by Wash
 
There's been a lot of conversation on this and other websites about how to "fix" Amtrak (and to a lesser extent freight rail as well). The answer always seems to come around to plowing a frightening amount of money into the rail network. Problem is, as a lot of states (cough Illinois cough cough Michigan) have learned over the past couple of years, right now there just isn't an efficient way to do that.

Things get even worse once we zoom out to the national scale. We badly need large-scale investment in rail infrastructure if we're going to make sure that the American rail system can handle everything that climate change is going to throw at it over the next 50 years or so, and we need it even more if we want to shift passengers and freight back onto the rails to try and make climate change a little less bad. We know what needs to be done; just think about all the "obvious" fixes we on this board have discussed over the years. The problem is that there's not an organization with either the financial resources or national focus necessary to make change happen quickly, efficiently, or effectively.

We in the US have faced this problem before. The demands of mobilization for WWI ground the rail network to a halt. As a result, the US government formed the United States Railroad Administration, which temporarily nationalized the railroads, allowing the federal government to quickly and efficiently plow millions of dollars into the rail network. Also, since the organization was able to focus on the American rail netowk as a whole it was able to make decisions about investment and traffic routing that made sense on a national scale but that no private railroad in competition with another private railroad would ever have been able to make (all trains enjoying equal trackage rights into cities, for instance).Once the war ended, the USRA was dissolved, and most of America's railroads have stayed mostly private ever since.

My question is, why don't we, facing a similar (if quieter) crisis on our rails as we did in 1917, reform the USRA? Even if we didn't, the threat of nationalization might be a useful bargaining chip in persuading private railroads to go along with state and federal projects. Needless to say, the provisions in place in the original USRA legislation that mandated the government return tracks and rolling stock to the private railroads in an equal or better condition than when then were 'borrowed' would still be in place.

Thoughts?
 #1538062  by electricron
 
Wash wrote: Mon Mar 30, 2020 4:29 am There's been a lot of conversation on this and other websites about how to "fix" Amtrak (and to a lesser extent freight rail as well). The answer always seems to come around to plowing a frightening amount of money into the rail network. Problem is, as a lot of states (cough Illinois cough cough Michigan) have learned over the past couple of years, right now there just isn't an efficient way to do that.

Things get even worse once we zoom out to the national scale. We badly need large-scale investment in rail infrastructure if we're going to make sure that the American rail system can handle everything that climate change is going to throw at it over the next 50 years or so, and we need it even more if we want to shift passengers and freight back onto the rails to try and make climate change a little less bad. We know what needs to be done; just think about all the "obvious" fixes we on this board have discussed over the years. The problem is that there's not an organization with either the financial resources or national focus necessary to make change happen quickly, efficiently, or effectively.

We in the US have faced this problem before. The demands of mobilization for WWI ground the rail network to a halt. As a result, the US government formed the United States Railroad Administration, which temporarily nationalized the railroads, allowing the federal government to quickly and efficiently plow millions of dollars into the rail network. Also, since the organization was able to focus on the American rail netowk as a whole it was able to make decisions about investment and traffic routing that made sense on a national scale but that no private railroad in competition with another private railroad would ever have been able to make (all trains enjoying equal trackage rights into cities, for instance).Once the war ended, the USRA was dissolved, and most of America's railroads have stayed mostly private ever since.

My question is, why don't we, facing a similar (if quieter) crisis on our rails as we did in 1917, reform the USRA? Even if we didn't, the threat of nationalization might be a useful bargaining chip in persuading private railroads to go along with state and federal projects. Needless to say, the provisions in place in the original USRA legislation that mandated the government return tracks and rolling stock to the private railroads in an equal or better condition than when then were 'borrowed' would still be in place.

Thoughts?
There is a reason why the US government did not repeat nationalization of the railroads during WW2 like they did in WW1, it did not work as well as the nationalization pundits promised. And that was when the trucking competition was stuck using dirt roads, which by WW2 were mostly paved. Railroads during WW1 could deliver priority goods from the Pacific to the Atlantic in about a week, immediately after that war around 1920 or so it took an Army convoy, which Eisenhower participated, over 60 days to cross the country from sea to shiny sea. The National Defense Highway Act of the 1950s which Eisenhower promoted has taken any national emergency excuses away for the government to nationalize the railroads again forever. Railroads no longer stand alone as the means to move goods across the country. So it isn't ever going to happen again.
 #1538069  by eolesen
 
You'd have a better argument using the wartime footing to take action like you're suggesting vs. climate change.

There's a somewhat flawed argument that says we *need* to shift people away from private car ownership and air travel and onto trains because of climate change, and I personally think that's naive. This country is far too dispersed, something that is proving to be a benefit to fly-over states with regard to the ongoing COVID spread, and also a detriment in the urban states where the spread is far more difficult to prevent.

Even if you could build an separate passenger only rail network in the US, you wouldn't see people giving up their cars voluntarily nor could it handle the volume. In a non-quarantine world, over 2M people get on airplanes in the US alone, and people aren't going to trade 4 hours coast-to-coast voluntarily for >24H on a high speed train that would need to average 150 mph including mountains (by comparison, it takes over 24 hours by Shinkansen and connecting rail to traverse the length of Japan, which is about 60% the distance between New York and San Francisco or Los Angeles).

And that's without steps that the airline and aircraft industry have and would take voluntarily. The maligned 737 Max reduced fuel and emissions by 20% over aircraft used ten years ago, and the 787 reduces by 30% compared to widebody aircraft used 10 years ago. There will be further improvements there (bio fuels with lower CO2 and fuel cell technology for shorter range aircraft).

Sure, the Chinese have done a dedicated high speed rail network on a larger scale, but they also are an authoritarian form of government who tells their people what to do with everything from reproduction to property ownership. And, the Chinese are by far the worst offender globally when it comes to climate change. They didn't do rail because of climate -- they did it because they have huge concentrated population densities (which again, given the experience and impact of the latest pandemic, may ultimately prove to be their downfall).

----------------------------------

Even if you shift the argument over to a wartime footing, private industry has been shown to be responsive with little exception, and nationalization hasn't been necessary except as a negotiating tactic.

Look at how Amazon, UPS, FedEx have mobilized quickly and voluntarily to take over brick and mortar retail shopping and the supply chain. There are these things called aircraft, which apparently work even better than trains to move high priority products quickly, and right now, around 3,000 of them are able to be used on little notice and without complaint by private industry.

Even the roads are able to handle a lot more traffic right now because people aren't traveling anywhere to the degree they were 30 days ago, and presumably won't for the next 30 days.

No, there's no pressing need for nationalization. And I don't think that the general population of the US would agree to the steps needed to force the issue.
 #1538070  by Gilbert B Norman
 
Nationalization of the Class I industry, now comprised of only seven investor owned "players", has been a rallying cry of the passenger train advocacy community. Nothing set forth here alters this thought to me.
 #1538091  by Tadman
 
The only time nationalization has really helped passenger trains has been after failed privatization, and its worth briefly exploring that. In one of my other favorite countries for railroading, Argentina, the privatization went tragically and literally off the rails. It's a bad example of crony capitalism. Passenger franchises were awarded to governmental pals (IE large donors) as were freight franchises. The FRA-like agency was mailing it in. ROW sunk into the mud (literally, many mains had grass up to the railhead) and there were some really bad crashed. In 2012 50 people were killed in a wreck at Once, the third-largest downtown station (think LaSalle Street in Chicago) when a string of EMU's crashed into the bumper with 1000 aboard.

But any idea executed horribly wrong is bound to fail and it's hard to justify an idea with bad data. I'm pretty critical of the FRA, but the Argentine FRA is far worse for not being there.

In the USA, in our immediate pre-Covid economic times, the railroads have trimmed back. Even pre-PSR, they were motived by one thing: profit.

Whatever it cost to build a new higher-speed railroad, paying market rates for passenger trains (IE without the Amtrak discount) would go a long way to alleviating a lot of problems and still cost much less. Think about it - take the cost to build and maintain a good railroad. It's physically impossible for that to be cheaper than paying market rate for 1 of 25 track slots on that railroad.

I think that would go a long way to creating better cooperation and timekeeping. JB Hunt and UPS run pretty fast trains across the US, and they don't need a special railroad.
 #1538132  by Tadman
 
Why nationalize the track when (a) it's constitutionally illegal; (b) we only need 1/20th of it?

That's like buying a gymnasium just so you can win a basketball game. How about buy a membership, good shoes, and play really hard?
 #1538141  by mtuandrew
 
The stadium example is interesting:

-sometimes the team (or a consortium of teams) owns the stadium, sometimes another team, sometimes an individual or group of investors, sometimes a municipality or government authority, and sometimes a school depending on the level and the specific contract

-the team owns every piece of equipment that isn’t bolted down, and may have sole or joint rights to some of the things that are bolted down (parking, box seats, naming rights) when they don’t hold the deed

-when the team owns the stadium, the land where it sits is often owned by the government or a third party corporation

-regardless of ownership, the government has almost certainly invested heavily in infrastructure and often the stadium itself

-when the stadium starts to show its age, teams are likely to demand a new one (or major improvements) in lieu of picking up and moving to a new market

-there’s a governing body for each sport that tells teams when and where they can operate, and shares the profit (or academic credentials) between them

In other words, stadiums are already a bizarre mish-mash of owner-operated, lessee-operated, operated by one party on behalf of a third party, and a million other owner-operator-tenant schemes. It might actually be in most of those parties’ best interest for a nationwide agency to either own or manage all those facilities, to regulate them therewith, and to facilitate profit-sharing and joint use where the need arises.
 #1538157  by R36 Combine Coach
 
I'd prefer a model on the 2nd USRA (1970s), determining which lines are essential, planning forward for future and providing subsidy/stimulus for critical areas, including major corridors, while also focusing on "essential" service to smaller and rural communities.
 #1538159  by BandA
 
I don't think the federal government has the knowledge or the vision to take over and run the railroads. Although there is a crying need for freight & Amtrak/passenger to work together in a way that just isn't happening under the current system. We also need to somehow prevent the private freights from abusing their remaining monopoly & pricing power. I think we will continue to see creeping "state-ization" of the railway systems rather than a nationalization.
 #1538164  by bdawe
 
BandA wrote: Mon Mar 30, 2020 9:05 pm I don't think the federal government has the knowledge or the vision to take over and run the railroads. Although there is a crying need for freight & Amtrak/passenger to work together in a way that just isn't happening under the current system. We also need to somehow prevent the private freights from abusing their remaining monopoly & pricing power. I think we will continue to see creeping "state-ization" of the railway systems rather than a nationalization.
The nice thing about taking over the railroads is that you then employ a great many people who have the knowledge to run the railroads.

Sadly, vision is lacking both in government and in the railroads for how to address future needs in a world where we need fewer goods and fewer people in trucks and cars and more on the rails. I suspect that it's easier to get that vision into government than it is to get it into the railroads, and that vision then comes packaged with the key ingredient of access to capital
 #1538171  by eolesen
 
David Benton wrote: Mon Mar 30, 2020 2:46 pm Nationalize the track, and make it open access. Then you'll get some real competition, rather than the duopoly at best, most shippers are offered.
Maybe other governments can take property without paying fair market value for the seizure, but that doesn't happen here. With 140,000 miles of track in the US, you're talking a minimum of 100 Billion @ 750K per track mile. Ain't gonna happen. Ever.
 #1538187  by Alex M
 
This reminds me of the last time nationalization of the rail network was brought up was when Penn Central went belly up in 1970. Prior to that the AAR put out a white paper called ASTRO for America's sound transportation review organization. It said that to merely to acquire the fixed assets of the railroads would be around 60 billion dollars. This was 1970 dollars. The creation of Amtrak, Conrail and deregulation of the rail industry put to rest the desire to nationalize the business.
 #1538190  by Tadman
 
R36 Combine Coach wrote: Mon Mar 30, 2020 8:39 pm I'd prefer a model on the 2nd USRA (1970s), determining which lines are essential, planning forward for future and providing subsidy/stimulus for critical areas, including major corridors, while also focusing on "essential" service to smaller and rural communities.
This is a little more reasonable. Provided they don't go overboard like they did in the 1970's. I think we can all agree that trackage was over-abandoned and that led to predicaments like the Cardinal's Indianapolis leg, as well as the nearby Norfolk Southern Chicago line. If you're not from Chicago, one thing that you might have missed is that for most of the length of the problematic NS, it is in fact two former mains side-by-side. PRR and NYC. Both were multi-track. What this means is that where there might be a choke-point, like the Calumet river bridge, there are actually two more empty bridges in place with room for four more tracks plus a space for a fourth bridge with another two tracks where there was once the fourth bridge.