RedImperator wrote:HemlockGrey wrote:And let's not forget the crippling restrictions on the railroads leftover from the robber baron days. Every railroad in the Northeast went bankrupt in large part because they legally couldn't lower their rates to compete with trucks.
If that were lifted, would there be any hope of a revived railroad industry without government subsidies to get it started?
Unknown. By the time it was lifted, those railroads had already been reoganized into Conrail, which needed heaps and piles of Federal money in the early years to restore the infrastructure and rolling stock it had inherited from its predacessors (which had been allowed to go to shit because those railroads couldn't afford to operate, let alone conduct maintenence). Though it's interesting to note, as soon as the feds finally lifted those restrictions, Conrail went into the black and stayed there for about 20 years, until CSX and Norfolk Southern bought it out and split its assets.
To clarify, since it's obvious I shouldn't be posting at 7:30 AM:
Conrail was formed out of virtually every railroad in the Northeast, including the Reading, the Jersey Central, and PennCentral (itself formed out of the Pennsylvania Railroad, the New York Central, and the New Haven Railroad). It consolidated all those separate management structures into one corporation, shed dozens of unprofitable subsidiaries like hotels and insurance companies, and was allowed to dump off all those roads' intracity passenger operations (which were bleeding money) onto Amtrak. Later it was allowed to sell its commuter rail operations, also losing money, to state and municipal agencies. Conrail had virtually no competition in its home territory, the Northeast, and was a major player in the upper midwest. Despite all of this, and despite the fact that the money to rebuild its rolling stock and infrastructure came directly from the United States treasury, didn't make a dime in profit off operations from 1976 to 1980, the years it was operating under Federal price controls.
In 1980, those controls were lifted. By June of 81, Congress stopped Federal funding of the railroad. By the end of FY 1981, it had turned its first profit, and turned a profit every year until it was dissolved by CSX and Norfolk Southern in 1999.
So, yeah, the Feds did a real swell job screwing the railroads into the ground, as evidenced by how they performed once price controls were lifted. At the same time all that was going on, trucking companies were enjoying taxpayer funded infrastructure and Federal policy that ensured steady access to cheap fuel (which benefitted trucks more than trains because trucks are far less efficient per unit of cargo per mile). The railroads were also hobbled by much stricter labor rules (when the Southern Railroad dieselized in the 1950s, the union successfully fought to preserve the fireman's position on every locomotive, despite the fact that a fireman's job is to shovel coal into the boiler). These rules, too, were loosened, and railroads became more competitive because of them.
Of course, it's largely too late to restore the railroads to their former glory, and to a certain extent that would be impossible no matter what the government did unless it chose to artificially hobble trucks as it once did trains. American society is organized around interstate trucking carrying a large percentage of the cargo from distribution point to manufacturing and retail locations. The only outfits that recieve raw materials directly by rail anymore that I can think of off the top of my head are chemical plants, oil refineries, and coal fired power plants. What railroads do now is haul cargo to distribution centers. When I was in Wyoming, several times a day I would see mile-long Union Pacific autocarrier trains, hauling brand new cars from West Coast ports to points east, where they'd be unloaded at distribution lots and reloaded onto trucks to be hauled to dealerships.
Shep belongs to the long-discredited 1950s school of thought that maintained a nuclear war's consequences could be mitigated through social planning?
