Opinion: Memo to Railroads: Give Up War on Trucking

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Editor’s note: This view from Oregon would resonate in many states.

Feuds, viewed from the sidelines, can draw laughter or tears or just yawns. This comfortable detachment, however, can quickly vanish when the scrap begins to inflict on the spectators what the military likes to call collateral damage.

Just such a fight is simmering behind the scenes again as the 1999 session of the Oregon legislature rolls on.

Quite simply, the railroad industry in session after session spends heavily to defeat highway legislation that might be helpful to the motor carriers. Between sessions, the railroads have been known to pour money into initiative petitions that would be destructive to the truckers.

What’s curious about the grudge driving this strategy is that the passion is almost entirely on one side. Anyone looking for truckers to spend money to sabotage railroads is chasing elves.

To understand this one-way hatred, you have to look back two or three generations — to a time when important land freight movements were almost the sole domain of the rail companies. Not until the 1930s did Fortune magazine even deign to acknowledge trucking as an industry, and not until after World War II did the railroads begin noticing their freight was seriously eroding.

With this recognition came a vast crusade by the railroads to turn back the clock.

A strange crusade it was. Instead of improving service to earn the loyalty of their shippers, the railroads mounted legislative and public relations campaigns to demonize the highway carriers. Instead of trying to find ways to maximize the rails’ own strengths, many if not most of the railroads adopted an us-or-them strategy.

In the early 1970s, I participated in a vain effort to end this silliness. A task force of the American Trucking Associations initiated a number of meetings with railroad officials to persuade them that we could both benefit by moving highway trailers over longer distances by rail, and jointly selling our combination services to shippers.

This wasn’t a novel idea. By then, the Southern Pacific — not known as particularly customer- oriented — had already begin fast nightly service hauling loaded highway trailers from Los Angeles to the Pacific Northwest and other rail lines were doing the same in other corridors.

But our industrywide overtures were largely rebuffed by rail officials still harboring resentment over truckers’ invasion of “their” business. Instead of welcoming the chance to haul truck lines’ trailers, a number of railroads started their own truck lines.

Happily, in terms of commerce, that futile period is pretty much behind us. Unhappily, in terms of politics, the old grudge still survives. The absurdity of this one-sided feud can be seen by a look at the physical and economic facts of today’s transport life:

There’s no way truck lines can compete with rails in long-distance hauling of bulk commodities such as ore, coal, oil, chemicals, grain or forest products, or of oversize loads such as machinery or pipe.

Conversely, there’s no way railroads can compete with trucks in hauling most consumer goods such as perishables, clothing, computers, periodicals or almost anything else that is time-sensitive.

True, there’s still some overlap. Douglas fir lumber can move from some Oregon mills to certain parts of the California market either way. Same for a 100,000-pound shipment of Alpo from the cannery to Fred Meyer. But the closer you look, the clearer it becomes that each mode, rail and truck, has to a large degree succeeded to a share of the transportation market dictated by a time-vs.-cost equation, one determined by factors entirely beyond the sales blandishments of either carrier.

And yet, in the political arena, the railroads continue to try to disadvantage the highway carriers. The only obvious beneficiaries are the lobbyists, politicians hungering for campaign contributions, and whatever media are chosen to carry hate-trucks ads.

You and I can’t do much about the feuds that rend the Balkans, Central Africa, the Mideast or Ireland, but we can send a message to our legislators here in Oregon: It’s time to ignore the railroads’ hillbilly sniping at the truck lines. Why should our senators and representatives do what railroads salespeople can’t: Turn back the clock.

For the full story, see the April 5 print edition of Transport Topics. Subscribe today.