In responding to a post on Facebook, I found it getting rather long, so I have put it here instead. The post was sharing an article from the Globe and Mail arguing that the answer to so many trucks - and the recent truckers’ blockades, was more rail transport.
If significant expansion of rails was an answer, and there was any chance of reasonable profit, then ask yourself, since CN/CP are private, why hasn't this already happened? Moving freight by rail is profitable for these companies, otherwise they'd no longer be in business. They already expand as markets make such expansion feasible. But there must also always be trucking - you can't have rails going to every corner of every city and into every factory, nor can one build rails instantly when changes occur in the market - whereas one can quickly change trucks routes.
If it is not profitable to expand faster than they currently already do, again ask why. In some cases it is because, even given the freedom to do so, it is simply not viable. But In many cases you'll find it is already because of government regulations and restrictions - including sanctioning rejection by environmental and indigenous interests that don't want trains going where they need to go.
As a confounding factor, is the government rejecting and blocking pipeline after pipeline (due to the same interests as above, as well as Chairman Trudeau's desire to destroy the oil industry) to allow oil to flow both within Canada and to ports for export. This alone accounts for a very large fraction of both more trains and more long-haul trucks clogging our roads - government has made it impossible to transport needed oil any other way, But that increase in rail and road traffic is artificial and far more expensive in both dollars, in pollution, and in accidents and deaths.
So if it is not profitable, whether for legitimate market reasons or due to existing government interference, then the only way to expand the rail network is by government stepping in and funding it with more taxes and more inflation, which means government will decide where the rails go, who gets such service and who doesn't and at what costs. But of course that will require contracts to private companies to actually build anything. Do you know what happens when government offers $billions to anyone promising to build things?
Just need to go back and visit rail transportation ~160 years ago to find out.
At that time, it was government’s great desire to unite the east and west coasts with an intercontinental rail network. If the market - i.e. capitalism - was left to its own devices, this would have eventually happened anyway, but politically it just wasn’t going to happen fast enough. So government dangled money as bait and sure enough caught some big fish making big promises for that money.
The scheme gave birth to many new railways in the USA that included the Central Pacific and Union Pacific, who eventually completed the first transcontinental link in 1869. This was hailed as a great achievement. What is always ignored though is the enormous level of corruption and expense this created.
Since companies were offered money for every mile of track built, there are many on record who took the money in return for shoddy track that went literally from nowhere to nowhere else and never ran a train.
In the cases of those companies most have heard of and who did in fact run trains and transported goods; not only were they paid per mile built, but they were handed what are in fact the only proper definition of “monopolies”. They were guaranteed by government law to be the only rail line allowed within a very wide corridor of their own intercontinental track. The results? Building the shoddiest track possible, and as many miles of it, in order collect as much free money as possible. In practically all cases the track had to be rebuilt later, and in many cases routes through the mountains were made far longer than they needed to be. It also resulted in the various companies fighting and sabotaging each other in an effort to beat the other for the government cash. Once in operation, because these were monopolies in the true sense, they really could charge the highest prices possible to customers since those customers had no other option - no competitors could offer better rates or better service.
The leaders of these companies became known collectively as “Robber Barons” but they could not have become that but for the government creating the conditions for it.
And now there is call for government to once again spearhead the expansion of rail lines. Be careful what you wish for.
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