Re: (erielack) Re: Meadville Line news!

[Kevin DeGroff <"kdegroff_@_starpower.net">]

The positive sign about New York's economy is now that Mario
is out of office, the industrial fleeing has subsided a little.  In fact,
under Pataki there seems to have been some gains in attracting
new industry to the state.  The latest being the new NUCOR steel
mill being built in Chemung, east of Elmira.  There also was a couple
of rather large Distribution Centers being built near Middletown,
also accessed via the Southern Tier Line.  I also think there was
a big Walmart distribution center being built in the Fonda area,
just to name a few.

I now live in Maryland, and see commercials on TV down
here solicitng business to New York State.  I NEVER saw
an influx of new business to the degree we see today in the
20 years I lived in NY State.

I believe that the situation that has befallen the Meadville Line
is truly the high point of previous defective state politics.  It
really is the product of a defective social spending and tax policy
over the last 15-20 years when the state was ruled by Cuomo
and his gang.  It amazes me how far the turnaround has come
in such a short time.  I'm sure that most of the new business
moving in is also getting tax relief, so I don't see how a revival
of the line thru the use of tax breaks is anything outside of
current policy.

Fourty years ago the really big drain on the health of the industry
was over-regulation.  Since the early 1990's, the bigger problem
(and bigger threat) has been the declining quantity of roads being led
by a smaller band of railroad officials growing increasingly stupid
every day.

I'm not looking at the ICC, since I don't think its holding the
smoking gun that killed the Meadville line.  In fact, the Staggers
Act tamed the ICC's powers quite a bit, giving railroads alot
more discretionary power over line use and traffic patterns.
The ICC was neutralized long before CR shelved the line.  The
only action that would have resulted from getting rid of the ICC
earlier would have been the wholesale abandonment of the EL or
the LV or the PRR or the ? long before 1960.  Chris' comments
the other week generally concluded that NYC-CHI was overbuilt,
which sounds pretty accurate.  Consequently, the ICC's existance
only altered the timetable of the decline, not so much the outcome.

The bonehead announcement on BNSF+CN coming at such a bad
time of indistry instability and low stock prices (making the roads
vulnerable to takeover) is a pretty unfortunate sign that re-reg is
getting closer.  I think Krebs is a good example of egos producing
results that endanger the industry.  The need for oversight has
apparently returned to the railroads again, since current management
appears to be unable to think responsibly nowadays.  Transplant
Krebs or Goode or Harrison back to the 1870s, and you'll
understand why the ICC was founded in the first place.

I read a legal brief that stated BNSF was fined $10 million for
inappropriately initiating a lawsuit regarding the destruction of
property (locomotives) against the family of a worker who was
killed in a head-on wreck while on duty.  The Krebs camp
served the family with papers on their way to the funeral home.
They sued the family in an attempt to dissuade them from
going after the railroad.  The judge nailed them for it. Its the
type of behavior you would never see from the EL in 1975,
even during the roads desperate final survival years.

These actions are signs of the Robber Baron era all over again.
The only difference was the Robber Barons of old left something
tangible in their wake. A new railroad.  A new power plant.  A
new steel mill.  Today, they leave nothing but debt.  They act like
asses.  Railroad builders like Walter Rich and Ed Burkhardt, the
only positive development signs in the industry, are bought off or
fired. Trust me, they are bringing on re-reg all by themselves.

Don't get me wrong, I think re-reg is no solution and would be
a devastating setback to the generation of capital.  I just don't
believe current railroad management policy is on the right social
or ethical track.

We have a real serious intellegence defecit within the leadership
ranks of the remaining roads.

There are no visionaries or statesmen in this industry.




"Blake D. Tatar" wrote:

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