Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern merging under 85 billion deal
Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern merging under 85 billion deal
www.bloomberg.com
Bloomberg - Are you a robot?
Hooray rail monopolies!
15 comments
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It should be a monopoly… owned by the US.
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This is the only way
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I think the rails should be owned by the US, but they could be operators on those rails. Like in the UK, or how our airlines work
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In my dreams, regulators would require UP and NS to divest older or redundant ROW so that publicly-owned transit systems can repurpose them for passenger rail services. Even so much as a single-track minor branch line could be reinvigorated with high-floor DMUs while maintaining freight access in the off-hours, such as with SMART in San Francisco area. And in the long run, electrification without UP's typical objections to overhead wires could enable performant EMUs like with CalTrain.
But like I said, all this is only "in my dreams"...
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Fully agree. In a civilized modern country the government would own the rails (because, I mean obviously it would) and operators would put out timetables and requests for trains - all managed by the government. Just like the UK and most other countries, the government is in charge of maintaining the rails, keeping them safe, and expansion, while the operators do what they do best - they manage their schedules and try to squeeze the most profit out of it.
It's a win-win, private industry doesn't have to worry about safety or maintenance beyond their own vehicles, they work with the government on scheduling, and passenger rail would get a resurgence because adding new train lines and stops would just be a matter of starting a new operator.
If you thought of a new commuter line that you think would benefit a region, it wouldn't be trying to convince Amtrak to do it - you could literally raise the money and start your own operator, lease some vehicles, and then literally just start running your train line operated on government tracks. Just as the semis do on the interstate system, just like airlines do.
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In a civilized modern country the government would own the rails
I agree with the sentiment, but also have to mention some implementation quirks that should be addressed along the way.
Just like the UK
I personally find the UK to be something of mixed bag. Yes, they do have Network Rail managing the fixed infrastructure for the national rail system, but they've bungled the working model with a half-hearted attempt at semi-privati(s)ation with franchise operators for different rail segments. And while that problem has flared and simmered since the 80s, attempts to fully open the network for any operator (aka open access) runs into the age-old problem of too much demand.
Open access -- which should absolutely be a starting point of any regulated monopoly, government owned or not -- comes with the challenge where if every train operator wants to run their own London to Edinburgh service, then very quickly, the East Coast Main Line and West Coast Main Line are going to be booked up, leaving scant capacity for local service. Obviously, a high-speed corridor between Scotland and England would solve that particular issue, but the central challenge remains one of finding balance: local vs long-distance express, minimum train speeds, freight capacity, first-class vs economy vs sleepers. Open-access is open like a door, but even the widest doors enter to a limited space.
The proper balance is a matter of policy, rather than technical merit, so I'm not entirely sold on the notion that it should be the infrastructure manager (eg Network Rail) making those decisions. Such decisions would have major consequences, and so I think properly belong to public policy makers (eg lawmakers or regulatory agencies). But for technical decisions like loading gauge or max axle loads, those are almost exclusively for the infra manager to adopt, but with public consultation with operators and the public. After all, we wouldn't want adoption of obsolete or unusable standards on the national system.
they work with the government on scheduling
I think this is implied, but I'll state it for clarity: operators should have to make a showing to the regulator that their services operate "in the public's interest" before being granted access to the national rails. And even when granted access, operators must conform to the infra manager's technical requirements for uniform operation.
In the USA, this is almost identical to the process of setting up a television broadcast: radio spectrum is a limited commodity, and so it must be used in furtherance of public interest. In practice, this isn't a very high standard, but it does prevent waste such as having one's own private TV channel. So too would it be wasteful to schedule a "corporate train" service for the exclusive use of select personnel while still physically occupying the rails despite carrying zero passengers.
Basically, there's much to be fixed in the USA, but the UK model could also use some work too, towards a principled model that maximizes the public investment.
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In the USA our wildest dreams are maybe having a sort of crappy version of the technology we already had up and running in the 1890s.
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In all fairness, we do have a few objectively nicer things, like level-boarding for wheelchairs and strollers into LRT carriages, and pantographs rather than trolley poles.
But we did lose 100+ MPH operation in the 30s, when the 79 MPH track limits came into being for most railroads.
So in total, if that's all we've progressed after a century, then yeah, we haven't gone very far.
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Two of the worst rail carriers in the world merging into an even bigger one with even more tracks for them to not maintain. What could go wrong?
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How much of a bribe to they have to pay to chump before it's approved?
15 comments
More monopolies. Yay I guess....
Oh, I guarantee there's gonna be a metric fuckton more of this going on under Trump. MAGA: Making Americans Grovel Again.
The CEO that handled the merger more or less said "we thought the political climate was in our favor" so