The U.S. Senate on June 19, 2015 passed S.808, the Surface Transportation Board Reauthorization Act of 2015, which would authorize appropriations for STB programs, establish the STB as a government agency independent of the Department of Transportation, and authorize other key changes in the agency’s operations.
Testifying at a June 10, 2015 Surface Transportation Board hearing on the shipment of grain by rail, representatives from the Association of American Railroads legal and economic policy departments said that calls to create new grain-specific regulations are “simply unjustified.”
For more than three decades, railroad regulators have used the same method to determine which shippers are captive; and, if so, to determine a remedy to limit railroad market power and assure rates charged captive shippers are reasonable.
The Surface Transportation Board has announced the speakers for the Board’s June 10, 2015 public hearing, Rail Transportation of Grain, Rate Regulation Review, Docket No. EP 665 (Sub-No. 1), to explore the issue of making the Board’s rate-case process “more accessible to railroad shippers of grain.”
Poor Mr. Dooley—Calvin, that is, president of the American Chemistry Council and not the fictional Mr. Dooley created during the late 19th century by humorist Finley Peter Dunne. The latter gained library space in Teddy Roosevelt’s White House; the former seemed to hoist himself by his own petard—Shakespeare speak (“Hamlet”) for the bomb maker managing to blow himself up with his own device.
Successful baseball pitchers learn to throw first-pitch strikes and stay aggressive in the strike zone when their team is in the lead. Life imitates baseball, meaning railroad spokespersons will serve their industry well over the next 10 weeks if they similarly perform—first before a congressional subcommittee examining 35 years of partial economic deregulation under the Staggers Rail Act, and then the Surface Transportation Board (STB) as it considers shipper entreaties that the railroads’ improved financial condition warrants tightening of the strike zone.
Freedom from excessive regulation helped transform the freight railroads into the most cost effective of all transportation modes. There’s no reason to change that.
Paint former Surface Transportation Board (STB) Chairman Dan Elliott a darling of the National Industrial Transportation League (NITL), a shipper organization asking the STB to require—through so-called open access—that two Class I railroads be available to compete for freight carloads even if the tracks of only one railroad serve a shipper’s facility.
Former Surface Transportation Board (STB) Chairman Dan Elliott, whose renomination to a second five-year term has been on ice since November, will have a Senate Commerce Committee confirmation hearing May 6, but will remain estranged from the agency unless and until the entire Senate acts favorably on the renomination.