Molson Hart

Cheap efficient trucking is the most often cited cause of the decline of cargo rail transit in the United States, but after studying cargo rail, I believe that trucking is only a piece of the puzzle. 1/n

If you go back 70 years most goods travelled by rail. It is greatly more efficient to have a single large engine and single driver move 100s of railcars than it is to have 100 engines and 100 truck drivers do the same. This remains true to this day. 2/n

However, where we make things has changed. We've gone from a manufacturing nation to a net-importing consumer nation. Most, with a few exceptions, of what we buy today is made in Asia. Largely it arrives in intermodal containers. 3/n

So basically, even though it's many times more efficient to have goods sent directly to a warehouse by 100% train, you can't. You need a truck to bring the container from the warehouse to the train terminal and then you need another when it reaches the destination terminal 6/n