Posted: Monday, November 19, 2007 12:00 am
Congressman Peter DeFazio was upset last week because the Central Oregon and Pacific Railroad wants the public to help pay for rebuilding three tunnels on the Coos Bay branch line from Eugene to the coast. He has a point, but the railroad has one too.
DeFazio has a point because the railroad's parent company, RailAmerica, reportedly has been bought by a so-called hedge fund based in Florida. If the hedge fund managers think short lines are such a good investment, why do they need public subsidies to repair their lines?
On the other hand, public subsidies to companies operating struggling shortline railroads are nothing new.
In about 2000 the Legislative Emergency Board released $500,000 to upgrade the Mill City Branch of the Albany & Eastern Railroad and the Bailey Branch of the Portland & Western (at that time still called the Willamette & Pacific).
It wasn't enough to fix the Bailey Branch for good, and the track has been shut down, but on the Mill City Branch trains were still running at last report, even if one slips off the tracks now and then.
More recently, in 2005, Congress authorized federal spending to the tune of about $8 million to replace the wooden trestle on the Toledo Branch out of Albany, a vital link in the rail system that's been built up by the Portland & Western. The money for the trestle project was to be made available over several years, so construction has not yet begun, though earlier this year the railroad said the project was in the engineering phase.
It is hard not to see a parallel between these western Oregon railroad improvements projects and the situation on the Coos Bay line and its deteriorating tunnels.
In the early 1990s the Central Oregon & Pacific leased that line from the Southern Pacific, which has since been bought by the Union Pacific. Yes, the Southern Pacific should have done a better job on maintenance. But whatever it did wasn't enough, and now the tunnels are no longer safe.
Does the public, through the state and federal governments, have a responsibility to help fix private railroads? Maybe not, but if we want those branch lines to stick around, the public may not have a choice but to participate in the cost of repairs.
On another part of the same front, the public has been paying - through state motor vehicle fees and federal gas taxes - for replacing or upgrading a number of old bridges on I-5. The reason was that without those fixes, freight-carrying trucks could no longer use this route.
We're also raising a number of freeway overpasses at public expense so that bigger manufactured homes can safely pass under them.
The public owns the highways, unlike the railroads, on which the rail companies pay property taxes. DeFazio now advocates having the public seize the Coos Bay line. How that would make repairing the tunnels and maintaining the line cost any less is hard to see.
Keeping up the transportation infrastructure for commerce is a traditional government job. And if we do it for trucks, there's no reason not to do so for trains. (hh)