Would love to see that train pull up to your grocery store.
I believe that's why he retained the comment 40-50 miles, so that locally the stores were serviced by day jobs. Using rail for long haul transport.
The state of Wisconsin owns the rail the Wisconsin Southern runs on and subsidizes the maintenance, in doing so they take a huge portion of truck traffic off the road. If you think about it it takes 6 trucks to move one hopper car worth of material. So not only are you reducing truck traffic but truck emissions and road breakdown. They still use trucks to get the product out of the fields but they can eliminate the trucks moving it to port of call. There is no one perfect system they need to work together.
The thing that bothers me is that Rail aside from a few state subsidized carriers, are owned by companies. Those companies own the track the terminals and the vehicles. They pay taxes on the land the system runs on, to include depot's and freight terminals.
Now think of your favorite trucking company or even better UPS or FedEx. They don't pay tax on the road's they use, those roads are state run or government subsidized. Nor do they pay tax on the land the airport sits on. They are free to build a thriving business not having to pay property tax or Mx cost on the system they rely on.
In 1947 the New York Central RR paid over $6M in property taxes in the state of New York, I doubt FedEx pays close to that in for it's entire system of facilities.
This country's infrastructure is failing because the the people are making decisions without all the right information. I hate hippies, the free love movement was before my time but is definitively not my way. However the freedom of information act was something they got right. Educate yourselves it can only make things better.
opcorn:
