Railroads have been using wayside inspection technologies for many years to improve the safety and efficiency of operations. There has been a recent proliferation of new, more sophisticated, but also more costly inspection systems that are capable of detecting a wide range of subtle defects before a problem has actually occurred. This new class of “predictive” wayside detection systems, as comp...

Following the U.S. Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990, electric utilities dramatically increased their utilization of low-sulfur coal from the Powder River Basin (PRB). Recent studies indicate that railroads hauling PRB coal exercise a substantial degree of market power and that relative price changes in the mining and transportation sectors were contributing factors to the observed pattern of in...

The public and private interest hypotheses penneate contemporary regulatory analyses. Both theories are used to explain the inception of the first major federal regulatory agency, the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC). According to the public and private interest hypotheses, the regulations promulgated by the ICC benefited either railroads or shippers. This paper presents an alternative view...

We examine the determinants of aggregate corporate capital structure using a novel dataset of accounting and market information that spans most publicly traded firms over the last century. We show that the stability of nonfinancial aggregate leverage over this period reflects two opposing forces. First, regulated sectors, such as railroads, delevered and contracted in size. Second, unregulated ...

The rivers of the Front Range are dammed and diverted to provide water to the surrounding regions, and they are constricted by roads and railroads, stocked with fish, polluted by mining wastes and urban runoff. Yet many of the people who visit the Front Range for short periods perceive the landscape to be a nearly pristine wilderness because they are unaware of the historical impacts of human a...

Broken rails are the leading cause of major accidents on U.S. railroads and frequently cause delays. A multivariate statistical model was developed to improve the prediction of broken-rail incidences (i.e., service failures).Improving the prediction of conditions that cause broken rails can assist railroads in allocating inspection, detection, and preventive resources more efficiently, to enhan...

The Great Lakes Geographer, Vol. 8, No. 1, 2001 1 The area selected for this research includes five western Indiana counties located in the lower Wabash Valley (Figure 1). American settlement began in that area in 1811, and a system of towns soon emerged in which merchants were actively engaged in the river trade to New Orleans. The profits from that trade were used in part to develop a complex...