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Freight railroads generally have operated the same way for more than a century: They wait for cargo and leave when customers are ready. Now railroads want to run more like commercial airlines, where departure times are set. Factories, farms, mines or mills need to be ready or miss their trips.
Called "precision-scheduled railroading," or PSR, this new concept is cascading through the industry. Under pressure from Wall Street to improve performance, Norfolk Southern and other large U.S. freight carriers, including Union Pacific Corp. and Kansas City Southern, are trying to revamp their networks to use fewer trains and hold them to tighter schedules. The moves have sparked a stock rally that has added tens of billions of dollars to railroad values in the past six months as investors anticipate lower costs and higher profits.
Calling all Railroad Tycoons...
(Score: 4, Informative) by AndyTheAbsurd on Friday April 05 2019, @12:01PM (8 children)
This is great news for Amtrak - which has to share rails with freight trains, and is often slow and late because the rails ahead are blocked by freight traffic.
Make American trains great again!
Please note my username before responding. You may have been trolled.
(Score: 1, Disagree) by khallow on Friday April 05 2019, @12:56PM (5 children)
Or we could just not run Amtrak on that rail and ease the congestion a little.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Thexalon on Friday April 05 2019, @01:41PM (4 children)
Are you proposing making cuts to Amtrak, or building a new rail for passenger trains?
If you're talking about eliminating just Amtrak's long-distance routes which run more heavily on freight rails, that's still something that would affect millions of passengers and quite a few cities. It's not a minor thing.
If you're talking about building new rails for the passenger trains, that would make sense only if you were trying to make a high-speed rail network similar to what other modern countries already have. But that's precisely the sort of government spending you've decried in the past, so somehow I don't think that's your goal.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0, Troll) by khallow on Friday April 05 2019, @01:47PM (3 children)
I am. It also adversely affects hundreds of millions of taxpayers. But then again, if one just cut back on minor things, one wouldn't have much of a positive influence on the US's future. One has to go after the major things as well.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by DannyB on Friday April 05 2019, @02:22PM (2 children)
Maybe do both:
Run Amtrak on that rail. Ease congestion by adding more scheduling to freight.
Make Amtrak be closer to or eventually completely self sufficient without subsidies. That is always a good thing.
Now, subsidizing something like Amtrak isn't necessarily a bad thing. Such things can be done in the national interest. We pay for public education with taxes to everyone's benefit. Since it is a democracy, things can be changed through democratic process.
Now if we could just get rid of corruption so that public policy could be the REAL thing that congress and the legislative branch focuses on, instead of tribalism or helping the super rich.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Friday April 05 2019, @04:00PM (1 child)
A major pillar of the economy would crumble and the roof just might cave in.
Take it in stages, squeeze it out slowly, no shocks to the system.
I personally like the idea of squeezing out corruption through systematic increases in transparency, you know like requiring elected officials to reveal their tax returns, things like that. Keep moving transparency forward and the corrupt will increasingly find it harder to compete and survive.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday April 05 2019, @11:54PM
Not happening though, is it? My take is that things will keep getting worse until someone radically adjusts things. Then the trend will resume. Way too many people more concerned about us not spending enough in public funds than on what we're supposed to be spending it on.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by canopic jug on Friday April 05 2019, @01:03PM (1 child)
I thought that was mainly because half the tracks had been pulled up so the transport became half duplex as it were instead of full duplex. That might not matter on certain stretches of track but in very busy areas it creates lots of problems. We're looking at just over 80 years since the conspirators Firestone and GM bought up the light rail [wikipedia.org] around the US and pulled it up. They, or their backers, have been trying to get the last of the passenger rail for decades and it was quite a while back that they pulled up about half the remaining tracks.
This change in rules to force freight to stick to a schedule is a shift away from that and towards the right direction, at least as far as passenger rail goes. However, there is still the issue of the missing tracks. Instead there is a push towards self-driving cars. Self-driving cars will make congestion worse [businessinsider.com], but the backers know that and want that, anything to distract from rail. However, the over population issues and climate change makes mass transit an essential activity to resume.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Friday April 05 2019, @02:24PM
There are so many bad analogies to choose from, let's start with: the Barbarians have invaded and Rome is burning, so we should focus on better acoustics in the amphitheater so more people can hear Nero play better.
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