Alternatively, nationalize the rail lines and make UP pay for access. Privatization of critical infrastructure, historically, leads to poor outcomes with profits getting siphoned off in the process.
Rail workers aren’t getting sick days and trains are longer (leading to delays) because of investors squeezing rail infra and those who operate it. Why allow it to continue? The whole “privatizing profits socializing losses and externalities” is getting old, no?
You don't even need to nationalize it. It makes perfect sense for the federal government, or even a large state like California, to simply buy it on the open market, as a hostile takeover. The UPRR is dirt cheap compared to how much it is costing society for the UPRR to exist. We're talking low tens of billions. If the Obama administration had funded a takeover of the UPRR ten years ago it would have slashed the future costs of the Calif. High Speed Rail project.
In a pretty straight-forward way. All their insane demands about how far everything has to be from their rights of way in California's Central Valley is bloating up the cost of the passenger rail project. Ordinary road crossings, instead of having normal dimensions, are all 26 feet above the tops of the rails and have 100 foot clear spans. The "intrusion barrier"—a huge wall between adjacent freight and passenger tracks—is unprecedented anywhere in the world, even in places with shared corridors like France, Germany, and Sweden, and it costs an absolute fortune. Imagine a wall hundreds of miles long and strong enough to deflect a train.
That's on top of the other things that UPRR does, like preventing any semblance of reasonable service between the Bay Area and Sacramento.
My proposal is quite simple. Spin off virtually all of the UPRR into a new operating company with the same name and almost all of the capital assets, but retain the rights of way under Not A Bunch Of Dicks Track Corporation.
> Government support, most especially the detailing of officers from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers – the nation's only repository of civil engineering expertise – was crucial in assisting private enterprise in building nearly all the country's railroads. Army Engineer officers surveyed and selected routes, planned, designed, and constructed rights-of-way, track, and structures, and introduced the Army's system of reports and accountability to the railroad companies. More than one in ten of the 1,058 graduates from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point between 1802 and 1866 became corporate presidents, chief engineers, treasurers, superintendents and general managers of railroad companies. Among the Army officers who thus assisted the building and managing of the first American railroads were Stephen Harriman Long, George Washington Whistler, and Herman Haupt.
> State governments granted charters that created the business corporation and gave a limited right of eminent domain, allowing the railroad to buy needed land, even if the owner objected.
Currently the US trades dollars for real goods. One of the major uses of those dollars, since we don't export nearly enough goods to run balanced trade, is to buy US assets. Do you think that maybe our trade partners will stop accepting those dollars if we start nationalizing companies? At that point, doesn't it seem like maybe the USD will crumble?
Nah, never happens. Where will they go? The yuan? The euro? The ruble? Dysfunctional emerging markets? Being a global reserve currency is as, if not more powerful than, a DoD branch. Lot of capital available to burn, pun intended. Investors still invest in Greece and Italy, for example, and they’ve done far worse economically speaking.
Important to keep in mind this exposure is graded on a curve. You don’t have to be the fastest when the bear is chasing you, just faster than your slowest friend.
Reading my earlier comment, it's too black and white. It'd be another straw. Is it the one that breaks the back? I have no idea. But I don't think it's wise to start nationalizing companies.
If trust in foreign currency holdings declines (say, if we decide to unilaterally cancel other countries' holdings in our currency when we want to punish them), then I'd assume that creditor nations would start looking at replacing some or all of their US treasuries holdings with real assets that carry less counterparty risk. If we start nationalizing onshored assets, then the field of suitable assets starts narrowing a whole lot to portable things like commodities.
We should work very hard to maintain a reputation as a trustworthy counterparty if we want to be able to continue running large deficits.
You should make a case for this, rather than asking other people to make a case against it. We flooded the world with dollars after 2008 and still couldn't manage to get our inflation over 2% until a year or two ago.
I'm just trying to get you all to think a bit about effects before suggesting something as radical (for the US) as nationalizing a company. I think it's fairly obvious that going from being a very business/investor friendly country to one that nationalizes a major company for delaying passengers is going to shake confidence in foreign creditors to the US.
Public land given to them for free with the expectation that they'll maintain their ROW in proper working order and adhere to a certain social contract.
Because the federal government already ordered freight carriers to prioritize Amtrak. This has been on the books for nearly fifty years; over a decade ago deliverables were defined to establish target metrics for this. Sunset Ltd. has not been meeting these requirements and Amtrak is asking for this to be investigated. The rules are already in place.
Since Amtrak is a quasi-public corporation, asking Amtrak to pay commercial lines for preference is equivalent to directing public funds into private pockets for the use of federally-subsidized rails. That's a recipe for grift.
If the rules already in place can be freely ignored by private companies, there's no way Amtrak can ever be taken seriously as a transportation solution. Since it's already policy that it should be a serious contender, it makes sense to enforce the rules trying to further that goal.
> Why doesn't Amtrak simply pay UP adequately to get priority? UP is prioritizing freight because it pays better. Fix that.
Is it really that simple?
Freight trains are _long_, Amtrak passenger trains are relatively short. It's far easier to sideline an Amtrak train to let a multi-mile-long freight train pass than it is to sideline that same freight train for Amtrak to pass.
It's not my area of expertise at all, but I assume there aren't huge quantities of such long parallel rails scattered throughout the network for freight trains to move over and wait.
61 tons of freight per American each year
94 tons of freight per mile for each passenger-mile on rail
1/3 of all export goods move by rail
1.7 trillion ton-miles of freight
40% of US long distance freight by volume uses rail
So you have a problem in that increasing the costs to freight will affect all Americans in making them pay more for goods, whereas it will only benefit those passengers using rail. So politically, this is a tough sell. I think you need to put down dedicated track for passenger rail if you want it to be prioritized in our existing rail system, as it's currently a rounding error compared to freight.
That said, I think you will find that there are transportation corridors where there is the political will to fund laying down dedicated track for passenger rail. The way to think about it is that rail maybe costs $X per mile of track, but provides 100000X benefit for freight, and maybe 10x benefit for passenger traffic, so while you would never prioritize passenger traffic over freight, or even treat them equally, it still makes sense to build dedicated tracks for passenger rail.
These numbers are similarly misleading. Read up on induced demand. Rail passengers in the US are small in number because passenger rail sucks. If it were improved, ridership would go up.
You don't know how much ridership would go up, or if it would go up enough to cover the cost of paying extra for the 94 tons of rail freight to be delayed when you prioritize your one additional passenger.
That's problem -- yes, if you spent $X demand would go up, but would it go up enough to justify spending the $X or not? Merely observing that demand would increase in response to a higher quality of service is not an argument, it's just a truism that doesn't provide any new information.
That is why I said elsewhere on this thread that passenger rail needs its own dedicated track. Because the rail we have is so valuable to freight that it's not plausible that passengers or the general public would be willing to pay the price necessary to deprioritize freight. That price is enormous, but it's much more than the price of building out new dedicated rail just for passengers. Go back and redo your argument from the point of view of whether the increased demand would justify building out new track. If that's not the case, there's no hope of it being large enough to justify reducing the focus on freight. I think, in a few places, it is enough to justify laying down dedicated track. But not in all places.
The interesting part is that freight companies are intentionally running trains longer than the sidings. Amtrak trains are legally supposed to have priority, but they made it physically impossible for freight trains to pull over.
Yep. Amtrak runs the longest passenger train in the world in the Auto Train, traveling the Virginia to Orlando route. It's usually about 45 cars long, while a UP freight train can be 100 cars or more.
I agree that the freight companies need to invest in their tracks and right-of-way if they want to ship more. They need to double-track, electrify, and upgrade bridges & tunnels to handle double-stack container cars. India's dedicated freight corridors are a good example.
1) The federal government gave railroads massive amounts of land completely free of charge.
2) The federal government applied some regulations, including around transporting passengers. The automobile and plane hadn't been invented yet, so it wasn't that oppressive to railroads. Passengers were making them money.
3) The world changed and passenger service became massively unprofitable. Amtrak was formed to keep the trains running without the private railroads having to bear the losses. All Amtrak asked for was a few hours a day of clearance to run their trains.
4) Fast forward to today, and the railroads aren't complying with their obligations, that were granted in exchange for immense value.
A handout and a bailout later, and you want the taxpayers to give the railroads even more money?
(These original benefactors still exist today. Union Pacific was around when this was all happening. The "N" in BNSF is one of the original benefactors as well. It's pretty amazing to see companies around 160 years after their formation. Pretty generous government grants throughout their history didn't hurt.)
1. It’s not like the delays are minor. On the line from Portland to Seattle, it’s common for the train be delayed for multiple hours by freight. In what world can a transit service be considered a viable option when even boarding is 2 hours late? Freight is having a really massive negative impact.
2. Massive amounts of land is surprisingly even an understatement! Union Pacific railroad alone was given 12 MILLION acres in this grant: https://www.loc.gov/item/75690778/.
This is all TIL for me. That pink strip in your map is wild. So these guys got 10 square miles per 1 mile of track. And then they went and leased that land to towns and businesses! All those Western movies finally make sense.
Why 10 miles? We always get treated to 'wild west' stories but it sounds like Washington DC was pretty wild itself. Many steaks were consumed and cigars chomped. Here's your land grant.
Not completely free of charge. The deal was that they had to carry the US mail at a rate that was beneficial to the US government and less than beneficial to the railroads. That added up over a few decades. The railroads bought themselves out of that part of the deal during World War II, when the government was eager to take short-term money even if it was long-term a bad idea.
I've seen one set of calculations that the railroads lost quite a bit of money on the deal. It's been decades since I saw it, though, so I can't give you specifics.
Between usurious property tax at the state level, and the machinations of the former ICC, whatever value that the Railroads got for that land has largely if not completely paid back in public goods. Furthermore those landholdings are largely long gone too.
Consider how long railroads were required to offer service that was unprofitable, underutilized, or forced to price itself in an uncompetitive way - all in the name of the public good.
While I think both BNSF and UP (as well as CSX and NS) have an obligation to make sure Amtrak can run on time an under a reasonable schedule. Also, if the railroads dont like it, the alternative is being forced to resume operating the passenger trains they were operating in 1971, and continue to operate that or a similar network in scale and size for at least 10 years without subsidy.
The interesting thing about Amtrak is, if USPS had continued to route first class mail by train, Amtrak might not exist, it was the removal of the indirect subsidy - which turned passenger trains from a break even proposition, which helped generate goodwill for the company to a solid money loser - at a time when the railroads were least able to afford such things. So in exchange the feds agreed to directly subsidize passenger rail via Amtrak, and the railroads were removed of obligation to run passenger trains. This is the obligation at question in this case.
In any case, I dont think they owe the public something anymore because of those land grants. The debt to us from that has been long paid off.
