Canadian Railroads > Promote Rail service

I have a question, particular to Canada, USA may be different..... With all this talk about global warming, cutting carbon emissions, high taxes, etc.... Why don't we as a society promote more freight rail service for our "non-essential" goods? For example, I see massive warehouses popping up all over (Amazon being one of them) with 50-100 tractor trailers backed in but no rail service anywhere near. I get it there are super fast shipments and next day delivery, but for those products still taking weeks or more for delivery, shouldnt we look at utilizing more rail?? Political???  Just my opinion....
Corey

Class I's don't want the business. They have been chasing it off their systems since the 1960's. 

Potential business?? Give tax rebates for building the infrastructure of the greener form of logistics and some national shortline could buy in?? Maybe i'm in dreamland! 
Corey

So doing business with Amazon is a little like making a deal with the devil.  You can have as much freight as you want, as long as you're the cheapest on a given lane with meticulous on-time performance.  The second somebody underbids you by a penny, the algorithm will move as much freight as it can to the new vendor.  For railroads that would be risking large capital investment (track, switches & signalling, equipment, etc.) to compete against an industry with publicly-owned, taxpayer-funded infrastructure (ie, roads) with no guarantee of long term returns and a performance level that railroads haven't wanted to play at in years.  And you'd be competing for volume based on price, so it's a race to the bottom.

I say this as someone who has personally worked on the integration between Amazon and a large shipping company that they used to use while they were building out their own.  We got to the point where the Amazon packages weren't even paying their own way, were clogging up our network for our higher revenue customers, and all the time those savings were helping Amazon build out their own parcel network to compete with us.  So we cut them off, at least domestically.  So I've got personal knowledge of the warehouse to customer space, and some insight into the inter-warehouse and supplier-to-warehouse lanes.  Some days I think the only way to make money as a supplier to Amazon is to not play at all.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/28/21 15:03 by NDHolmes.