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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: 3, Insightful) by VLM on Saturday April 06 2019, @01:57PM
The US has one of the most efficient and profitable rail infrastructures in the world ... for cargo. Not for passengers.
The Euros have slightly more intelligent prop tax and financial systems but that's a large scale problem. They also suffer horribly from legal regulatory problems where most countries are only a couple rail hours in length.
It really does boil down to X makes a windfall profit off NIMBY opposition to oil pipelines, leading to Y and Z scrambling with BS to try to boost their earnings. There is a need for rail cargo in ... Wyoming for example, and the financial markets will freeze out a RR operating in Wyoming if they can make 10x higher profit in a different oil sands country. It doesn't matter if the Wyoming business model is rational or not, money flows to highest return so the WY RR has to BS like crazy to stay in business at a financial market level. Its one of the biggest problems with "bigger is always better" financial regulation. So the canadian RR has tank cars full of oil sands profit, and as a result everyone else in the industry has to attention whore about how they "empower their employees" and similar BS.