Would this require some type of government intervention? Not trying to be an ass, just honestly curious?
That is actually a very good question. It almost certainly would and that is why I consider it unlikely to happen in the foreseeable future, short of a true upheaval in the transport industry. The fact that most of the railroad operating companies in North America own their own track infrastructure and zealously guard their routes against intrusion from competitors makes anything like that difficult unless the companies completely bug out of various local areas.
That said, a significant amount of the track ROW in Wisconsin is now owned by the State of Wisconsin's government - all of it is track that was abandoned and sold off by their various private operating companies. Which lines are they? The public trails and most of the trackage now operated by Wisconsin Southern (WSOR), along with a couple of smaller shortlines (they all operate the track under contract from the state).
Why am I pondering this? The base railroad track infrastructure is of vital importance to the economic health of Canada, the USA and their localities, far, far transcending the importance of their individual operating companies. Over the years, I have seen way too many locally and regionally important rail lines being abandoned, not due to any lack of economic reasons for their existence, but simply for the short-term gain of preventing fierce rivals from using them to improve their situations - essentially a real-life Rail Baron game. 'Open access' would eliminate that.
There is also the ongoing problem of various potential customers wanting to use rail, but not being able to because for whatever reason, the railroad companies are not interested. For example, during the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s, Wisconsin Central ran a daily intermodal train between Chicago and Green Bay - it was highly popular with local and regional trucking companies and those trains were looooooong - often to the point of having to be split into two sections. In late 2001, WC was taken over by Canadian National and within a couple of weeks of that takeover, CN dropped that service because even though it was operating at a profit, it was not profitable
enough for CN's beancounters. It is a case where even I would have been open to the idea of the State of Wisconsin subsidizing it because of the hundreds of trucks that it took off of US 41 and I-43 every day. Under 'open access', the trucking companies could, if they wanted to, hire their own crews, lease or buy their own locomotives and flatcars and run those trains by themselves, not needing to try to hire the only railroad company in town to do that.
Also, many larger railroads are not interested in potential customers unless they'll be handling several cars per day, not wanting to bother with someone who might only ship or receive a car or two per month. This is a major problem here in NE Wisconsin with real economic drag potentials. Allowing other operating companies access to an area to handle such customers will be a huge relief for that problem.
How to best achieve that? One analogy happened here in eastern Wisconsin about ten years ago and is working out very well - high-energy power lines. Until about 2000, the various high-energy power transmission lines were owned and operated by the various local electric utilities. Due to the inefficiencies of that setup, at that time, they banded together and formed a separate company (
American Transmission Company - 'ATC') to acquire and operate their transmission lines, to be operated on an open-access common carrier basis with each utility feeding power into and drawing power from that system as they needed. Since then, ATC has been busy upgrading and improving their system, with many more upgrades and new lines in various stages of planning. They just opened a new 345KV line between Duluth, MN and Wausau, WI about two or three years ago.
Perhaps every railroad company on the continent, regardless of size, could be required to divide themselves into completely separate track infrastructure (to own, maintain and dispatch the track) and operating (to run the trains) companies, with the dispatchers being required to work in as non-discriminatory of a manner as possible (like the air traffic controllers do).
Am I whistling 'Dixie' here? Likely, but I'm looking into the future, not the past.
Mike
