Chapter 3

Rupert Falls

On our hour-long trip up the somewhat shoddy track, at a maximum of 30mph, Frank started in on his briefing of Ms. Roberts.

'Barbara, may I call you Barbara?' 'Of course, Mr. Frank. Lead on.'

'My railroad has taken over many of the tracks in this state, either by directed service or because the state had bought up many abandoned lines and was looking for someone to take them over and make them operative again. 'Directed service' is where the state or the Feds decide a rail line is too important to local commerce to lay fallow, so they tell a railroad to take them over, sort of like eminent domain. Often they provide subsidies for operation, but not always. Railroads are not like other forms of commercial transportation. We pay property tax, and maintain our lines out of our own budgets. Highways and airlines, on the contrary, get pretty good payments from the Feds or the state to pay for their right of way, upgrades, etc. Look at the FAA, and how much they spend on airports, traffic controllers and the like, to keep airplanes flying. We pay all those costs of travel navigation and maintenance of transportation corridors on our own. What we need is a better partnership with the Feds on those infrastructure costs. If we're asked to improve, for instance, passenger service in some areas, then the Feds need to step in to pay for at least a good portion of those costs. If we are forced to take over 'directed service' on a rail line that has 10mph speed restrictions because of track conditions and are required to upgrade to, say, a minimum of 25mph, which is a whole lot of bucks to do but we're expected to pay for it, do you see my point? And that gets us nowhere near the 50mph or 60mph needed to support decent freight or passenger service. Do you know it takes as much as four million dollars a mile to get railroads up to those standards from where we're being asked to start from? And we're being asked, and sometimes demanded, to do it. That's socialism, not capitalism. And railroads are a capitalism business. Have you ever read Ayn Rand, 'Atlas Shrugged?' It's a great novel about the struggle of trying to maintain a capitalist railroad network in what has become a socialist environment. Now I'm not a great fan of Rand, but I am I great fan of railroads, and I think she captured some of our biggest challenges in this book. Well worth reading. Though it's a long book. She seemed to take great pleasure in overwriting. Don't know if you'd have time in your current campaign to give it the attention due, but put it on your book list, wlll you?