Downfall of a Poster Child

The Erie Canal helped to develope Upstate New York. But, I'm not going to suggest it really did that much to develope the MidWest. And I'm going to suggest that railroads did more to develope Upstate New York than the Erie Canal.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erie_Canal
The Erie Canal was first proposed in 1807, it was under construction from 1817 to 1825 and officially opened on October 26, 1825.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Central_Railroad
Albany industrialist and Mohawk Valley Railroad owner Erastus Corning got the above railroads together into one system, and on March 17, 1853, they agreed to merge. The merger was approved by the state legislature on April 2, and ten of the remaining companies merged to form the New York Central Railroad on May 17, 1853. The following companies were consolidated into this system; (1) Albany and Schenectady Railroad, (2) Utica and Schenectady Railroad, (3) Syracuse and Utica Railroad, (4) Rochester and Syracuse Railroad, (5) Buffalo and Rochester Railroad, (6) Schenectady and Troy Railroad, (7) Lockport and Niagara Falls Railroad, (8) Buffalo and Lockport Railroad, (9) Mohawk Valley Railroad, and (10) Syracuse and Utica Direct Railroad.

The Utica and Schenectady Railroad was chartered April 29, 1833; as the railroad paralleled the Erie Canal it was prohibited from carrying freight. Revenue service began August 2, 1836, extending the line of the Albany and Schenectady Railroad west from Schenectady along the north side of the Mohawk River, opposite the Erie Canal, to Utica. On May 7, 1844 the railroad was authorized to carry freight with some restrictions, and on May 12, 1847 the ban was fully dropped, but the company still had to pay the equivalent in canal tolls to the state.
The Syracuse and Utica Railroad was chartered May 1, 1836, and similarly had to pay the state for any freight displaced from the canal. The full line opened July 3, 1839, extending the line further to Syracuse via Rome (and further to Auburn via the already-opened Auburn and Syracuse Railroad).
When the Auburn and Rochester Railroad opened in 1841, there was no connection at Rochester to the Tonawanda Railroad, but with that exception there was now an all-rail line between Buffalo and Albany. On March 19, 1844, the Tonawanda Railroad was authorized to build the connection, and it opened later that year. The Albany and Schenectady Railroad bought all the baggage, mail and emigrant cars of the other railroads between Albany and Buffalo on February 17, 1848, and began operating through cars.

The Erie Canal operated without competition for just 11 years (1825 to 1836). Within 19 years, it had competition over its entire route. The railroad competition survived even though they had to pay the Canal tolls for the displaced freight. Sounds like even back then in the early 1800s, the Erie Canal was subsidized while the railroads weren't. Therefore in hindsight. we could argue whether the Erie Canal was worth the initial cost of construction or not.

What we do know is that the railroads replaced it quickly without any government funds. In fact, the government hindered railroad development by making them help pay off the Canal. Therefore, not every infrastructure project may be worth subsidy. It's up to us to look ahead and really reflect upon which is best....

elctricron wrote:

Therefore in hindsight. we could argue whether the Erie Canal was worth the initial cost of construction or not.

I think any serious course in Tansportation Economics would dispell any doubt on that issue. The Erie Canal (at the time) made economically possible the movement of goods by water between a highly successful coastwise shipping business and the entire Great Lakes, as far west as Duluth and Chicago. That meant that grain could move a relatively short distance on land to ports like Toledo and Sandusky. Same for lumber floated downriver from inland points during the spring freshet (snowmelt).

The growth of the volume of the canal's business upon completion dwarfed even the rosiest predictions. What's more, the Erie's success spawned feeder canals that, within twenty years, extended a similar advantage to most of New York State, New Jesey, Pennsylvania and Ohio. The concurrent development of steamboats on the Ohio, Mississipi and Tennesse led to a complimentary network in much of the South.

The key factor in setting all this off was a reduction of tenfold or more in the transportation costs; the Erie just happened to inherit the role of "turnkey", and while I wouldn't expect the success of a "true" California HSR to have as great an effect, it does represent the most logcal opportunity for the concept to either prove itself. Or not.

All this eventually became moot, of course, when railroading matured as a technology, and it says something very unflattering about the use of government influence that the canal's backers sought to preserve their monopoly by seeking access to the state's power to coerce (sound familiar?). And it's also worth noting that its successor, the New York State Barge Canal, has degenerated into an economic "basket case" operated mostly for pleasure watercraft, hopelessly overburdened with pension liabilities, and most recently, merged with the agency managing the New York Thruway to reduce overhead.

2nd trick op wrote: All this eventually became moot, of course, when railroading matured as a technology, and it says something very unflattering about the use of government influence that the canal's backers sought to preserve their monopoly by seeking access to the state's power to coerce (sound familiar?)

Yeah, sounds like the New Haven under Mellen/Morgan!

Well, the world is quite the complicated place huh? I have always considered myself conservative. But I also think that absolute cut-throat capitalism creates some rich and lots of poor. With not much middle class in between. I sympathise with the Ludwig Von Mises viewpoints, but how do they address the reality of these ideal US factories with their high productivity being boxed up and shipped to China for $1 a day wages and no environmental regulations? There are many, many countries in the world with the problem of lack of employment. There simply aren't jobs for the entire population. I'm not seeing how the Ludwig Von Mises model creates a potential job for everyone. A government that "tweaks" capitalism to better encourage a broad job market comes out ahead, because the guy "who through no fault of his own barely made it out of high school" can find work that allows him a decent house and a depenable car.

I'm a mechanical engineer, and because of that I look at things from an Engineering perspective. And you know what? I'm not the only one. http://www.neweconomics.org/blog/2010/1 ... -economics

For example; Compare the growth of the U.S. to energy resources. Is America great because of it's government and people, or it it great because we were given vast resorces of land, raw materials, minerals, and high BTU fuel for the taking? I think it's both. But with a big share coming from that second column.

I think an electrified rail infrastructure will eventually become a necessity in the U.S., as well as all 1st world nations. And it will be driven by economics, physics, and thermodynamics. All the enthusiasm in the world will not change the physics that require a tremendous amount of energy to be expended to move a 900,000 lb metal airplane through the air at 500 mph. You can do that cheap if you can get high energy liquid fuel cheap. No more; Peak oil is here. Fuel prices will perpetually climb. And airline business models will cease to work. Flying will be only for the wealthy. By the same token, a battery will NEVER hold as much fuel as a gallon of gasoline. A 20 year old Yugo performs better than a new $50,000 Chevy Volt. The only transportation technology that can efficiently use the electrical grid is rail under cantinary. And when gas costs $8 a gallon, coal will still be cheap. I think it would be best if we could figure out how to build one system that moves both people and goods. As true HIGH SPEED rail is extremely expensive. 8 hours averaging 90 mph can take you along ways. And if its the 1/3 of the cost of a plane ticket, it will be the majority choice.

Thanks to Mike in Neb for calling our attention to some very sound reasoning in favor of a rail-based infrastucture. However, I have to add the observation that most of those points assume our decisions wil be based on foresight and simple economic logic. One need only watch a few minutes of a commercial TV broadcast to get the point that those qualities carry very little weight on Madison Avenue.

In the last few years of his life, business journalist Malcolm Forbes took a particular interest in the fate of the industries and individual enterprises which dominated socitey many years before. He created a "Forbes 100" of 1917 (year of the magazine's founding), and the fate of those firms -- a small percentage bankrupt, the majority merged, but relatively few intact seventy years on, particularly when the basic nature of the business was factored in.

I have to digress, at this point, from passenger traffic into freight service, both to illustrate my point and to demonstrate the conflict between the two.

It's been forty years since I got my BS in what was then called "Business Logistics" or "Physical Distribution" and is now often categorized as "Supply Chain Management". I'm also old enough to remember, though only as a child, the days of "ubiquitous railroading" with a freight agency and "team track" in any community of consequence .... a time when most major roads operated warehousing subsidiaries in the central cities they served, and New York harbor was dotted with small yards served by car floats and "fireless cookers".

In the years between when I began Junior High and finished college, almost all of that network either disappeared or was put under great stress. Less-than-CarLoad shipments vanished, and even the concept of separable cars was questioned in the wake of the unit train. The vast majority of high-value and perishable shipments deserted the rails as well.

But the root cause involved a lot more than simple inefficiency of a rail network hard-pressed to adapt; Increasingly, technology simply favored the highway. Cement, for example, which used to move by rail for distances as short as 75 miles, was lost within a period of a few years. And those expensive, congested, tax- and crime-prone central warehouses were abandoned in favor of "distribution centers" within a five-hour haul by truck. Your local convenience stores, restaurants and pharmacies get small daily shipments. Only the supermarkets and "big boxes" can command a full highway trailerload, though the need to combine shipments may mandate a fair-sized vehicle.

The first mumblings of the phrase "energy crisis" appeared in the mass media within two years of my graduation. even before the pavement cured on the last missing links in the Interstate Highway System, Not suprisingly, the auto industry began going "global" during the same period.

So it appears we're about to turn another page. While I'm now convinced that the highway freight industry will have little trouble adapting to LP gas power, and while no legislation can undo an upwardly mobilr socety's love affair with the automobile, alternative power sources do not appear to be as readily adfaptable to the personal highway vehicle at present. And the likeliehood remains for an increasing scarcity of the abundant-but-still-finite liquid fuel which will continue to be the only option for air transport.

So we are likley to continue to be impelled toward smaller and smaller cars which, in turn, argues for the developemnt of rail passnger services for considerably longer distances, provided that the population density is also there. The demonstrated fact that the highway mastodons do not contribute the full cost of the damge they do, and the possibility of greater safety concerns, and the pressures concentrating more of our people within the large cities and the corridors between them, might one day drive more of our distribution facilitries back within the cities as well.

It boils down to two points:

(1) Nothing is permanent, except change.

(2) Real change is driven by the wants of the many at the bottom of the pyramid, rather than imposed by the few at the top.

and it also boils down to the fact that around 70% of the population in 2 polls want hsr .

"and it also boils down to the fact that around 70% of the population in 2 polls want hsr ."

And probably 90% of the population wants an end to starvation, world peace, etc. What people want and what people can get are two different things. "There is no such thing as a free lunch." Yesterday I was browsing the internet reading high speed rail information, and looked up "Longest high speed rail line." It's in China, is something like 1200 km long, and cost $33 billion dollars. And there was an article in a Chinese newspaper that it was money that shouldn't have been spent and wasn't going to be economically sustainable. So that debate goes on even there.

A high speed rail system would be the coolest thing since sliced bread. But the U.S. is not even within an order of magnitude of being able to create one. The government is to decentralized, life, society, and the economy is completely structured around the automobile. (And somewhat on air travel.) And we subsidize those two infrastructures because of that. A lot of that subsidy is hidden so people "think" it's self sufficient. (i.e. "roads pay for themselves".)

What's going to create it? Drastic change and cost. For the U.S. to go in this direction, we have to have the wind at our backs, pushing us along. An example would be U.P. looking at electrifying a route. (Like they did in the 80's.) Then the wind is changing direction.

David Benton wrote:and it also boils down to the fact that around 70% of the population in 2 polls want hsr .

Would they pay?
(The 2011 revolution may turn on the non-paying world corporations).

george matthews wrote:

David Benton wrote:and it also boils down to the fact that around 70% of the population in 2 polls want hsr .

Would they pay?
(The 2011 revolution may turn on the non-paying world corporations).

Let's hope!

MikeinNeb wrote: A high speed rail system would be the coolest thing since sliced bread. But the U.S. is not even within an order of magnitude of being able to create one. The government is to decentralized, life, society, and the economy is completely structured around the automobile. (And somewhat on air travel.) And we subsidize those two infrastructures because of that. A lot of that subsidy is hidden so people "think" it's self sufficient. (i.e. "roads pay for themselves".)

I respectfully disagree. You could have made similar statements about the Interstate Highway System in the 1940s. A pipe-dream at almost 47,000 miles. To this day it remains the largest public works project in the history of the world.

The tide is changing. Oh we won't get everything we want all at once. But, remember, the interstates were decreed in 1954 but that last traffic light in Idaho didn't come down until the 1980s and I-90 wasn't finished until the 21st century.

The last light was on I-90; I-95 is the one that's not yet complete (north of Philly). There are of course still a few lights like on I-70 in Breezewood, PA, just as there are grade crossings on the NEC.

To return to the original point, one of my reasons for arguing for uniting the HSR advocacy around a pilot project in California, rather than Florida or any other state, is that it not only has a population better suited to innovative technologies, but the current infrastrucure is running up against its limits in some areas, and the limitations inherent in the successful, but highly-constrained NEC -- that is, use of an aging predecessor's right of way and the necessity for compatibility -- could be bypassed in favor of a new, dedicated "spine line" for which the feeders, albeit reflecting an earlier technology, are already in place. That new main stem should also face less NIMBY opposition and would, hopefully, cost a lot less, on a per-mile basis, than the expensive approaches to the cities, which can be developed if and when the benefits are more directly recognized.

I'm still not about to offer any apologies for the skepticism that comes with a naturally conservative outlook. But the example provided by the Erie Canal, now nearly two centuries ago, convinces me that some degree of public sector partcipation is unavoidable. That objection is more easily overcome if the inital foray is clearly designated as a limited experiment, and possible alternative uses for, or alternative benefits from that experiment are explained in advance. The recent strategy, depicitng HSR as a panacea that has to be forced upon the ignorant bumpkins, has clearly backfired.