On Wed, 10 Aug 2005 21:34:46 -0700, Scott en Aztl‡n
While I'm all for rail shipping, it's a pity that so many of the larger warehouses and distribution centers are nowadays located nowhere NEAR an active rail line. Proximity to freeways became more of a consideration ever since about 1974, the year it's generally agreed that enough of a critical mbutt of the Interstate system was completed that industry no longer felt it had to rely on the railroads.
What we might see more of, though, is "piggybacking", or TOFC (trailer on flat car) and COFC (container on flat car). Some trains support double-stack containers. Then there's the RoadRailers (Triple Crown service).
Of course, it didn't help that the railroads willfully gutted so much of their own infrastructure over the last 25 years. True, much of what was abandoned was money-losing trackage, but in later years they arguably went a little overboard. And forget about rebuilding once a line has been abandoned. Witness the NIMBY problems one RR company is facing to rebuild a short line through Union County, NJ, and that was never even officially abandoned. Sometimes the railroad companies quickly sold chunks of right-of-way to eager developers to butture that it would never be used again for transportation.
