FROM THE EDITOR, RAILWAY AGE NOVEMBER 2024 ISSUE: This month, we once again dive head-first into boxcars. See the “Point/Counterpoint” piece where we continue to facilitate the debate. My thanks to TTX Company Vice President, Fleet Bill Sheehan and Railway Supply Institute President Patricia Long, who at the behest of Railway Age Financial Editor David Nahass agreed to disagree. Just like politics, eh? I wish!
We’ve taken this debate to the edge of the so-called “boxcar cliff.” There are two schools of thought here. One says the cliff overlooks a yawning chasm, ready to consume old, rusty boxcars—kind of like Dante’s Inferno (from his 14th century Divine Comedy). Here, the bottom of Hell is a pit with a lake of ice. Embedded in the middle is Satan, in whose three mouths are three arch-traitors—Judas, Brutus and Cassius (not Clay, mind you). I’ll leave it to your imagination to decide what rail industry organizations would take the place of those whose noggins are being masticated by Mephistopheles, Beelzebub, Beetlejuice (not Michael Keaton), Lucifer, the Car-Hire Carcharodon Carcharias, the Demurrage Devil, the Monster Truck—whatever you want to call him. I’ve got a few suggestions, but I’ll keep them close to my vest.
Patty Long’s description is a little less scary: “Private boxcar investors predominantly lease railcars to railroads in return for car-hire payments that the cars earn when other railroads use them throughout the rail network. Unfortunately, the complex rules that govern the car-hire system unfairly favors railroad users, which suppresses car-hire rates below effective market levels.”
The other school of thought says the boxcar cliff is like one of those rear-projection screens once used in Hollywood movies to give the appearance of something real—like a hobo fighting with a railroad policeman in front of an open boxcar door on a moving freight train. Eventually, the traveling transient gets tossed out (usually on a bridge). It’s an illusion, moviegoers! It looks like a cliff, but it’s really not.
“The overheated rhetoric by some about a looming ‘boxcar cliff’ is misguided,” says Bill Sheehan. “Rail industry participants—railroads, railcar leasing companies and others—have continued to invest in boxcars, renewing the fleet with modern, efficient equipment. Thanks to a well-functioning market, the fleet is handling current demand and positioned to support long-term growth.” Don’t worry, be happy!
So which is it? Dante’s Inferno, Boxcar Hell, swallowing and digesting assets and demurrage dollars with steel-dissolving acid, taking carload growth with it? Or is it Billy Joel’s Keeping the Faith, where “the good ol’ days weren’t always good, and tomorrow ain’t as bad as it seems”?
Perhaps reality is somewhere in between. Maybe we’re actually in Dante’s Purgatorio, where repentant souls go to cleanse themselves. Purgatory’s guardian is Cato (the Institute? Nah!), the personification of free will. The gatekeeper is an angelic figure, a representative of Ecclesiastical Authority.
Definitely not the STB!
