Blogger watching rail stocks

This interested party has shouted frustration with the train as it continues to complicate traffic in The Gap and sustains the risk of spills in downtown Rapid City.

There is an abandoned right of way that used to connect Sioux Falls and Rapid City with passenger service: it mostly parallels I-90, one of the largest carbon-based fuel black holes in the cosmos.

Minnesota Public Radio has been following fast-tracking development of light rail. Amtrak is reporting 300% ridership increases in some markets.

CSX is an underwriter of NPR: it's a railroad making money.

Richard Piersol at the Lincoln JournalStar:

Berkshire Hathaway's recent discovery that it owned a couple of short-line railroads in Iowa and Oregon has led to questions about the legality of its acquisition of BNSF Railway. Sen. John D. "Jay" Rockefeller IV, a West Virginia Democrat who is chairman of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation committee, wrote a letter to the federal Surface Transportation Board essentially backing an organization of captive shippers, Citizens United for Rail Equity, which says Berkshire's ownership of the short-line railroads in Council Bluffs, Iowa, and Oregon meant it needed STB approval before it bought BNSF.

Yes, there is railroad real estate connecting Santa Fe with Rapid City: a set of rusty, maybe-active tracks in the historic rail bed now owned by Canadian Pacific terminates on BNSF's holdings at Dakota Junction, Nebraska.

The speed limit on Nebraska 71 is 60 miles per hour on the 75 miles of bone-dry high prairie grassland between Crawford and Scottsbluff: it's potentially deadly during a blizzard.

US18/US85 between Hot Springs and Lusk, Wyoming is no better; besides, I-25, especially through the Denver metro, sucks at biblical proportions: so does flying through DIA with its likelihood of a strip search.

Construction on the estimated half-billion dollar Heartland Expressway connecting Rapid City with I-80 in Nebraska or Wyoming (nobody knows) is glacial if not completely stalled while traffic between the Black Hills and Denver continues to increase as does the volume between Denver and Santa Fe. Amtrak goes over (sometimes under) Raton Pass. The New Mexico RailRunner connects Santa Fe with ABQ and the Southwest Chief.

Moving coal is hardly sustainable: why not move more humans by making more commutes and seasonal migrations ground-based?

Imagine a time when portions or all track is elevated for wildlife egress through a future corridor between the Canadian River in New Mexico and an Amtrak station near the Missouri River in North Dakota then on to the Yukon River in Alaska intersecting with a tunnel under the Bering Strait connecting South and North America to Russia.

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Here are the percentages of return on investment for several railroads.

Update, Amtrak ridership is funding subject of legislature: Indiana Public Media.