Do railroads have a bright new intermodal future?

Over at Washington Monthly magazine, Phillip Longman says they do, but it’s going to take a lot of money.

That said, he seems a bit behind the curve, in several ways.

First, a fair amount of his reportage is confined to the East Coast. Doesn’t cover stuff coming from China, then intermodaled on trains out of Long Beach of L.A. Or the growing possibility of being intermodaled, rather than trucked, across the border from Mexico.

As I told Steve Benen in comment to his Washington Monthly blog post touting this, a lot of cargo already IS delivered a fair amount of its destination (after it hits a US port from China) by freight rail.

That's why a major California developer has pushed for south Dallas/Dallas County (where I live) to be designated an official inland port, with his plans for a massive transportation hub development, and why similar pushes are on in places like Kansas City.

Has Longman never seen a 500-car UPac train rolling across the desert from Long Beach to Dallas or wherever?

This sounds like the most uninformed Washington Monthly article since the idiotic auto bailout article you ran a month ago.

It’s also “interesting” that, no, Longman DOESN’T seem aware of what I mentioned.

Nor does Longman mention management issues at lines like the aforementioned Union Pacific which won’t even invest minimal amounts of money in line improvements, additional locomotives, etc.

The only way to do what he wants, IMO, is to do what he opposes — nationalize railroads.

Anyway, read the article for yourself and see if Longman is up to snuff.