John D. Rockefeller IV, the Democratic Senator from West Virginia and chair of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, has made many efforts to impose new regulations on the railroads
Norfolk Southern’s 30th Anniversary Year was helped along by a blow-out Annual Short Line meeting in Roanoke, Va. More than 200 members of the short line community attended, representing most of the 250 short lines that have direct connections with NS, along with another 140 NS names, including President and CEO Wick Moorman, Chief Operating Officer Mark Manion, and Chief Commercial Officer Don Seale. And I came away feeling a change in the air.
Just over eight years ago I cooked up a new concept in rail transit that I called Rapid Streetcar. Since then, it’s been attracting a lot of interest within the public transportation industry (although a lot of would-be “experts” using it as a buzzword don’t always get it quite right).
The Highspeed 2012 Congress, co-hosted by the American Public Transportation Association and the International Railway Union in Philadelphia from July 10 to 13, offered a smorgasbord of knowledge about high speed rail around the world. Now that I’ve had a chance to digest many of the ideas, information, and opinions that were presented during the Congress, two contrasting dimensions of America’s struggle to make HSR work stand out in my mind.
Over the last six months or so as I’ve made my rounds visiting short lines, regional railroads, and Class I’s from the locomotive cab to the executive suite, I’ve found a refreshing sense of renewed purpose. I’m seeing a real desire to find the right combination of professionalism, accommodation, and consistency that will build a sustainable and profitable enterprise.
After a half-century, America’s celebrated cooperative model of transportation research has gained a railroad focus.
Pennsylvania’s Lycoming Valley Railroad will be the beneficiary of a new industry track construction project near Muncy, Pa. The project involves building 2,300 feet of new track and restoring another 1,800 feet of existing track.
Big D, here I come! On June 2, some colleagues and I will be rumbling (literally) into Dallas to attend selected events in and around the 2012 Rail Transit Conference of the American Public Transportation Association (APTA).
Last month I wrote about how paper and other single-carload commodities were down year-over-year, and the impact that trend is having on Class II and III railroads in particular. One reason these downturns hit the smaller roads the hardest is because they do not have unit train volumes to offset short-term losses in single-car shipments. Another is the unevenness of service quality and consistency that too often occurs in single-car shipment lanes. Happily, such does not have to be the case.
It’s been a hard climb, but Austin’s relatively small MetroRail transit service—built and operated since March 2010 by Capital Metro—is finally starting to prove its worth.
