What makes railroads different than the trucks on highways and aircraft in air lanes?
Very simply, railroads are the only mode of transportation that owns its own right of way. The airlines don’t. The steamship lines don’t. And the trucks don’t. This is capital-intensive business. There are not a lot of alternative uses for the rails, as someone once said, other than long and narrow motels for railroad right of way. Give us some measure of the productivity issues in railroading? I have been struck by the productivity gains in the industry. I am recalling from data released by the Association of American Railroads. The statement was, I believe, that the railroads experienced the greatest productivity gains in history when they went from the 100-mile day for crews, five-man crews, low-horsepower locomotives and small cars [compared with] what we have today to largely two-man crews and high-horsepower locomotives. When I got into the business in 1970, there were about 1 million people in it. But today, the railroads are handling more gross ton-miles annually than they ever
