Sustainability without Subsidy: Public Case for Vertically Integrated Rail Oligopolies for Freight
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Maintaining rail freight networks without subsidy is an important transportation policy concern. Today’s vertically integrated rail oligopolies (VIROs) in the United States, Canada, and Mexico have enabled rail freight to be commercially self-sustaining. A combination of favorable geography involving a choice of railroads for most longer hauls and commercial freedom for railroads to set prices without prior regulatory approval have helped create a situation in which North American freight railroads are self-sustaining without government subsidies. This research examines the development of VIROs in the United States, Canada, and Mexico today. A largely hands-off policy, combined with a willingness to allow railroads to accumulate enough money to maintain their physical plants to high standards, have led to today’s major freight railroad duopolies in the eastern and western United States, Canada, and Mexico. Despite some complaints from shipper interests, today’s VIROs are largely stable (with the possible exception of broader policy changes in Mexico). Lawmakers and regulators should ensure that any future mergers do not adversely affect the performance of what has thus far been a largely satisfactory model.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".