Bits and pieces and looking back

Railroading and passenger railroading in America are modern, vital, and expanding industries that generate their shares of the news every single day of the week. Some weeks, even that much news just doesn’t interest me as much as it needs to for me to generate six hundred words or so for a blog post.

On those weeks, I like to take a look back at what might have been, and comment on some other looks back that I have been reading. One of these is in the July issue of Trains by Brian Solomon. My last comments on his column weren’t particularly positive, but in this one, he described some of the problems that have made British railroads what they are today and made me take a hard look at what we in America have been doing to ours.

Neither the American nor the British system are what they could have been had different decisions been made. For instance: What if the Staggers Act had been passed in the early 1960s instead of in 1980?

For one thing, Penn Central or some variant of a merger of Eastern roads may have been a success instead of a catastrophic failure, resulting in Conrail. In similar fashion, more robust freight traffic, or more profitable, might have allowed the private railroads to absorb more of the losses from passenger traffic. In reality, there may not have been any losses. Funny how a good bottom line stimulates innovation and creativity. American passenger rail could look completely different. How different?

I have no doubt that redundant services would have had to be shed eventually, but wouldn’t a deregulated rail industry have allowed that to take place sooner and at the behest of the railroads? Then, too, a level of state and federal subsidy equal to what Amtrak has received lo these forty-six years in addition to innovation and capital investment from the railroads could just have resulted in a more robust system with fewer routes but more actual arrivals and departures.

Would the passenger rail experience have been different for the average traveler? I think so. With more robust competition from rail, the airlines may never have had to develop the irksome fare optimization algorithms. Think of it! We may still have had a transportation environment where the fare from point A to point B with comparable class and level of accommodation, is the same no matter what day you travel or how early or late you reserve.

How different would freight rail be? Consolidation into two to six Class I railroads seems to have been a politically foregone conclusion, almost from the second decade of the 20th century. I would venture, however, that deregulation in the early 1960s could have greatly increased the capital expenditures of those two to six Class Is and may have even resulted in something like Positive Train Control and/or other interchangeable signaling system (as a tool to optimize physical plant efficiency) before the end of that now seventeen-years-gone century.

Would we have more jobs in railroading? I think so. Had the railroads continued providing a higher level of passenger service, there would be more operating jobs, more maintenance jobs, more clerical and sales jobs, and more high-tech jobs. There would be more jobs in railroad supply, and more American railroad suppliers. Companies like Pullman and Budd might still be viable. There would necessarily be fewer railroad jobs than there were in, say, 1960, but more than today.

Deregulation back then may have even pleased the environmentalists, who, in their never-ending quest to see diesel engines that don’t emit (anything), never quite acknowledge that rail is still the most fuel-efficient form of transportation when measured per ton-mile, bar none. There may have been more money in the railroads’ pockets for things like electrification of freight routes, a subject which environmentalists love no matter what the source of the electricity. And don’t forget the possibility that, in the quest for fuel efficiency, the railroads themselves may have pushed much earlier for low-emissions diesels.

My conclusion, having lived and observed railroading through the entire era: America is too often short-sighted when it comes to available solutions to seemingly intractable problems. Federal and state governments do not solve problems by reducing regulations, but rather by doing everything possible to cement control over enterprises that serve the public good. Today, that means we have a permanent political faction opposed to any kind of deregulation. This faction believes deregulation means an open invitation to business to step all over so-called poor people in a quest for unlimited profit.

Did Staggers deregulation allow the railroads to become profitable, in some cases terrifically so? Yes. It also gave birth to a robust logistics system that keeps consumer prices down through its ability to transport huge amounts of goods at relatively low prices compared to other systems. It also provided a national, in fact a North American, transportation network that can compete globally, a concept (globalization) that the same political faction (opposed to deregulation) dearly loves.

That’s my what-if for the week. I’ll be taking a week off and posting again, if possible, on June 27. Happy first day of summer, everyone.

©2017 – C. A. Turek – mistertrains@gmail.com

(Charles A. Turek is a writer and novelist based in Albuquerque, NM. After four decades working in areas of the insurance industry related to transportation, he now writes on all aspects of American railroading. Charles is a political conservative but believes in public funding of passenger rail as a part of the federal government’s constitutionally conservative obligation to provide for defense and public infrastructure so that private enterprise may flourish.)