Wheeling and Dealing
by Bob Tuzik • July 16, 2004
Understanding the expense side of
financing railway and engineering-maintenance operations may not appear on
the face of it to
relate to the wheel/rail interface.
But a discussion led by Mike Franke, Amtrak's senior director of planning
and business development, at this year's Rail/Wheel Interface Seminar sponsored
by Advanced Rail Management and Interface Journal,
showed that wheeling and dealing on the nation's railways are inextricably
linked.
Financial analysts historically have looked at railroads
by examining their operating ratios, along with fuel costs
and carloads by commodity, said Norm Carlson, chairman
of Carlson Consulting International, LLC, and former worldwide managing director
of the transportation industry practice of Arthur Andersen.
After the meltdown in the 1990s, analysts began to look at other
performance measures such as average train speed, average terminal
dwell time and average
number of freight cars on line. While the measurement categories are the same
from road to road, each property is judged individually. "The average train
speed on one railroad may not be the same on another," Carlson said. "So
we look at the standard for a given property and show the deviation."
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