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America's Rail Industry needs to serve Main Street, not Wall Street. Must-See panel discussion [1]

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Date: 2023-03-06

What rail could do for America - IF we break the grip of Wall Street hedge funds on the industry.

The devastating Norfolk Southern derailment in East Palestine, OH is still in the news and not in a good way. To add insult to injury, Norfolk Southern just had another derailment in Ohio — although this time there was no hazardous trainloads involved. (Or so they say.)

Cleaning up East Palestine will take years — and there will always be questions. When even Texas won’t take your hazardous waste, you’ve got a real problem. Worse, Norfolk Southern doesn’t seem to be taking the matter seriously, not when the people doing the cleanup are getting sick and are not being given protective gear. Safety is not the priority it should be at the major railroads — profits are, as this leaked audio about Union Pacific operations shows.

I posted about the situation back on February 28, 2023: What you are NOT hearing about a solution for the East Palestine Rail Disaster and the Rail Industry

Nationalization AKA Public Ownership Unless you follow rail industry news sources, are tuned into labor efforts, or progressive news links, odds are you haven't heard that there is a growing sentiment that the best long-term answer for what ails the rail industry is for the government to step in, because the railroads are too important to leave to the mercy of hedge funds. (Recent example here.) There is a lot of conventional wisdom that this is something we simply do not do in America. The government has never and does not have a role in operating railroads — except when it does. Numerous commuter lines come to mind for example — but there is more than a little precedent.

Saving the Rail Industry from Itself

As promised, there is now a video available through Solutionary Rail which brings together people from rail unions, environmental justice groups, and any people who want something better out of the rail industry. The video can be seen at the link below — it’s a little over an hour long.

This is information you are not going to get elsewhere, these are people who need to be heard. It’s vital to building the America we need to survive in the 21st Century.

The rail industry in America has been seeing record profits — at the cost of employees, rail customers, trackside communities, safety, and the public interest in general. Four big railroads dominate rail traffic in this country: CSX, Norfolk Southern east of the Mississippi, and Union Pacific and BNSF to the west. What looks like a national rail network on a map is a set of regional rail monopolies in practice.

Railroads are energy efficient, needing only a third the energy to move tonnage compared to trucks on highways. A mode-shift to move as much traffic from trucks to rail as possible would see huge cuts in fossil fuel emissions and better air quality — but it’s not happening. Electrifying rail corridors with renewable energy from wind and solar would really take a huge cut out of emissions, but again it’s not happening. Instead of moving to tackle climate issues, the Big Four railroads mentioned above funded climate denial for years.

Railroads are being managed to meet Wall Street expectations; when the Hedge Funds say jump the railroads ask “How high?” (The CEO under fire is now gone.) Note that hedge funds are not calling for more safety, more reliable service, a work force big enough to cope with disruption. What they want is higher returns. Period.

The management fad driving the decline of America’s railroads is something called Precision Scheduled Railroading. In theory it should enable railroads to provide better service while boosting revenue. It practice it has a lot to do with why we nearly had a national rail strike and why East Palestine is now a Superfund site. The fact that railroads have been largely deregulated and enjoy what is effectively a transportation monopoly has not been good for anyone — except the railroads and Wall Street.

Imagine you are someone who wants to move something by rail. This analogy will give you an idea of what we’re up against.

Imagine you run a take-out restaurant, but you have to use a delivery service to get food to your customers; there’s no pick-up option. The delivery service has a monopoly on the roads it uses, operates at its convenience, not yours or your customers, and is unreliable to boot. It doesn’t have enough drivers, and it’s using bigger and bigger trucks at the expense of safety to maximize its profit/cost ratio. It doesn’t really care about you or your customers because it has all the business it wants and is making record profits. Too bad if you don’t like it. It’s the only game in town.

Rail operated in the public interest would:

Cut greenhouse gas emissions

Have significant health benefits.

Create good jobs

Make America more competitive

Make rail safer

Revitalize trackside communities

Make America’s supply chains more resilient

This is only a partial list — the Solutionary Rail concept would give us faster, better trains for both passengers and freight, get carbon out of transportation by running on clean power from wind and solar, and give us the backbone for a national super grid to make clean power available from coast to coast.

So how do we do this? My previous post discussed several ways to proceed with nationalization. In These Times discusses it in detail. Railroad Workers United have issued a resolution in support. United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers of America make their case. Common Dreams builds on the example of East Palestine to urge it as well.

Things are getting to a breaking point. There is a growing urgency to do something about the railroads and an economic system that is detrimental to the public interest. America’s railroads are too important to leave to the mercies of hedge funds. The time for change is now — rail can’t wait and neither can America.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/3/6/2156435/-America-s-Rail-Industry-needs-to-serve-Main-Street-not-Wall-Street-Must-See-panel-discussion

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