Railway: Best Guarantor of Societal & Commercial Cohesion
Inculcated as we are with the notion of rubber tire mobility, any suggestion of another standard for transport is simply shunned. From the Civil War until the VietNam era, US transport mode mix included a very comprehensive matrix of railway connection. The US railway network included 1000's of branch rail lines assuring most every community had a rail haul option along with trucking service. As trucking offered long haul along with door-to-door, and inventory tax prompted "Just-In-Time" to eliminate local rail-served warehousing and on-site retail goods inventory, the branch rail line was removed. Commitment to trucks up and down the supply chain was a natural step with easy and cheap oil flow.
US budgets were flush to the point of supporting very large military forces, naval and air force presence in the Middle east and other originators of imported oil. In 1956, the Suez Crisis (prompting military expansions to oil patch arena) and Ike's Interstate Defense Highway Act set the stage for the transportation methodologies we see today. Railways were merged as demanded in Barriger's "Super Railroads" book. But take away the easy and cheap oil...
Will US corporate leaders, policymakers and strategic planners have needed prescience and circumspection (nerve and skill) to confess to the body politic of needed rethinking of railway mode's part in the Oil Interregnum solution set? We truly are in a period of shifting away from Oil's undisputed reign as king of the economy, and transport is the most vulnerable element in the necessary changes in the way we do things. Or more to the point, we are vulnerable to gridlock and famine if we count on trucks and cars to somehow maintain distribution and mobility status quo as motor fuel limits and surging pump price gang up on our economy.
The solutions are not anything of a complicated nature. Rebuild dormant rail branch lines, beginning with the agricultural and manufacturing node corridors most affected in a trucking crisis. Add to the inventory of rail line enhancements with a steady growth of rail mode employment, including reformed US Railroad Operating & Maintenance Battalions. US military standing down from overseas locations fit right into this new tasking. Training is expedited by bringing military personnel into US Regional Short Line Railroad Association member companies across the USA. Actual operating railroad companies assume responsibility of specific dormant rail corridor and take over operation as lines come back to operating condition.
After years of batting around the Peak Oil potato, it is now well chopped, diced, mashed and hashed. Served up with a resounding Middle East meltdown, Peak Oil is most nutritious with a strong helping of railways: Second Dimension Surface Transport Logistics Platform... In medical lingo, trains would be referred to as "Parallel Bar Therapy"?
