WATCHING WASHINGTON, RAILWAY AGE FEBRUARY 2022 ISSUE: Were a Jeopardy quiz show answer “infrastructure investment” and “transparency,” the question would be, “What can be done to ease supply chain congestion?” To understand its magnitude, imagine Arnold Schwarzenegger struggling to fit into Danny DeVito’s wardrobe.
In a sense, New Jersey Transit will never be the same after the end of February. That’s when Joyce J. Zuczek, Secretary to the agency’s Board of Directors, will retire after more than 45 years’ service at NJT and its predecessor, the Commuter Operating Agency (COA) within the New Jersey Department of Transportation (NJDOT).
While I do not have hard facts on what the long-term impact on COVID-19 will be on downtown office workers, we know the long-term trends are unfavorable. Consolidation of firms has reduced
Jay Roman in a recent Railway Age article (STB’s Annual Rail Rate Index Study: A Deeper Dive – Railway Age) alleged the new STB rate study was flawed because it did not
Years before Guns N’ Roses released “Welcome to the Jungle,” they set off on an adventure along the West Coast toward Seattle that would later become known as “The Hell Tour.” Their elected mode of transportation, a 1977 Oldsmobile with a U-Haul trailer, broke down and sent them hitchhiking for 40-plus hours, carrying only their guitars. They missed several shows and played on borrowed amps when they finally arrived.
Railways, passenger and freight, need to think and behave differently to survive and prosper. Headlines like this one from a McKinsey & Company January 2022 article by Jordan Bar Am, Nina Engels, Sebastian Gatzer, Jacqueline Lang and Frank Sänger of the company’s Consumer Packaged Goods Practice drive the point home: “How to prepare for a sustainable future along the value chain.”
Over the past year and a half, I have been interviewing many of the people and companies that are in the business of trying to improve what is normally called “track and trace” and condition reporting of railway cargo and railway rolling stock equipment. Today, it’s called “telematics.”
Decision Day draws closer in the tussle between Amtrak and potential host railroads CSX and Norfolk Southern (NS) before the Surface Transportation Board (STB) over whether or not there will be passenger trains running between New Orleans and Mobile in the near future.
Americans were horrified last week to see scenes of empty packages from stolen cargo strewn along miles of railroad tracks in Los Angeles, as if we were a third world country.
The newly released STB Annual Rail Rate Index Study (Study) summarizes trends in freight rail rates between 1985 and 2019. The Study shows that inflation-adjusted Real Rail Rates have decreased 27% over the past 34 years. Because Real rail rates are lower now than in 1985, the STB Study may be read by some to imply that current rail rates are reasonable in relation to what they have been historically. Unfortunately, this is not an accurate conclusion, because the historical trend in rates provides an incomplete picture of the change in cost of shipping freight by rail.
