How Tomorrow Moves, Again

 One of the benefits of being old is that you remember things that they don't want you to remember anymore. How about the Railway Express Agency? What the hell was that? Well, in the 1950s and 60s if you had a bunch of stuff that you needed to send somewhere. you boxed it up and dragged it into your green painted local office of the Railway Express Agency. They would dispatch it for you, on a freight train no less, to the proper destination. I guess they had some kind of vans or panel trucks that carried the shipment from the receiving REA office (which were always adjacent to the tracks) to the front door of the recipient. This was not such a radical idea in the 1950s since nearly everything in that era was shipped on the railroad. Milk, fruit, potatoes, livestock, you name it. It all traveled by rail.

If you are under fifty. you probably can not imagine that the U.S.A. existed without any Interstate Highways but it did. If you wanted to drive from New York to Miami in 1960 you journeyed through a hundred speed-trap type small towns and a thousand traffic lights. There was no I-95. It did not exist yet. So in a 1956 stroke of genius, President Eisenhower signed the first authorization bill to start the creation of the Interstate Highway System. We got real busy on the huge project and relatively quickly we built I-95, I-5, I-10 and even I -90 all the way from Boston to Seattle. We did it all for a mere 450 Billion dollars. If that sounds like a lot of money to you remember that a later and dumber occupant of the White House would go on to waste three times that much in order to invade and occupy Iraq for seven years. That's how our government rolls. The good, the bad and the horrendous.

The interstates made it possible to drive anywhere for any reason. They also unintentionally destroyed our fantastic rail system. It's as simple as that. Commercial traffic was allowed toll free on the new public super-highways that were built for the traveling public. It's the biggest subsidy ever handed to any industry by any government on earth. The total number of miles of custom engineered state of the art highway surface built by the myrtle beach exotic dancers for the benefit of the Trucking Industry is now about 47,856 miles. Total number of miles of railroad track built by the taxpayers for the railroad industry. Zero. We didn't only build highways for them, we also continue to maintain the network for them at a cost of billions of dollars per year. Ah, but the trucking industry allows us to drive on the roads too! Nice guys.

Oh "boo-hoo" you say. So we choose to use modern trucks instead of quaint old-fashioned choo-choo trains. The horse and buggy went out of style too after all. Yeah, well here's the thing. Never mind that they are a dangerous nuisance on our highways. Never mind that. Trucks are and always will be a hideously inefficient way of moving freight. Do we have an oil crisis or don't we have one? I guess not because we choose to eternally waste billions of barrels of oil every year by using a fleets of trucks to move all those things that we used to move by rail before the interstates were built.

If you care about the energy crisis you don't even have to advocate the undoing of the transportation revolution. Even just diverting a mere 10% of the freight on our highways over to the railroad system would save us one billion gallons of diesel fuel per year. What could we do with a billion gallons of diesel fuel Well we could heat 1,000,000 homes through the bitterest of winters. Yeah, well let those senior citizens stop griping about five dollar heating oil and call 1-800 JOE FOR OIL.

OK that's the story of the benefits of getting freight off of the highways but what about the costs. The number one go-to virtue of truck freight is purportedly speed. Routing a freight car is slow and complicated, while a truck just starts here at point A and zooms down our interstate highway (as fast as re-cap tires and amphetamines allow) until it screeches into the local K-Mart full of hula hoops and beach towels at point B.

Amazingly, the railroads don't even disagree that vehemently. As an industry they prefer the easy high revenue jobs like hauling coal and chlorine gas. They like the heavy non-perishable loads because trucks just can't touch the economics of handling those commodities. Basically they don't want to compete with anybody. The Railroad managers prefer to run a simple system that minimizes their capital investment and maximizes their revenue. You can't really blame them. They have shareholders. I am a shareholder a