[listenhillary]

If we had any brains, we wouldn’t have abandond our rail lines. We should have built more.

[-YYZ-]

“If we had any brains, we wouldn’t have abandond our rail lines. We should have built more.”

Yeah, but it was good for business for the public to subsidize their shipping costs, not to say eliminate warehousing, by moving everything on to the highways. Ask just about anyone who has done an analysis of the costs and they’ll tell you, even with all the fuel taxes that they pay, that the trucking industry doesn’t pay for the costs it imposes on the public (in wear and tear to the roads, and congestion requiring more road capacity).

[Alberta's Child]

Our rail lines weren't abandoned for lack of overall "need" . . . they were abandoned because the consolidation of the railroad industry made many of those lines redundant and unnecessary. The freight railroad industry carries more traffic today than ever before -- even as the number of track-miles has decreased. Railroads compete effectively with the trucking industry in really just two key types of markets: (1) the movement of very heavy loads that are not conducive to being carried in large quanitities by truck (chemicals, coal, aggregates, grain, etc.); and (2) the movement of intermodal containers over long distances (generally more than 500 miles) on routes that can accommodate fast train service.

Item #2 is particularly important, because it explains why so many route-miles have been abandoned over the years. Very few railroad lines can accommodate the type of train speed and time requirements that are needed for this kind of rail service to compete with trains, so the railroad industry has concentrated most of their service on those few lines even as it has abandoned many others.

The reality is that freight movement in the U.S. is highly efficient from a transportation mode standpoint. The trucking industry carries very few loads that could easily be accommodated on trains, and vice versa.