United Airlines,

in trouble on a variety of fronts, has fired its president and hired a railroad guy.

Railroad guys have been freight guys for a century, indeed it was the freight guys who ruined rail passenger service in the US. And who could blame them? it’s really a pain in the neck to have the cargo expecting to be warm in the winter, fed at regular intervals, delivered on time, talked to politely…passengers are even more trouble than livestock!  We’re supposed to put an string of hopper cars full of nice docile coal on a siding for a handful of passengers? Get serious; we’ve got a railroad to run here.

What could possibly go wrong?

Comments

  1. J_Michael_Neal says

    It really is difficult to run both freight and passenger rail services on the same tracks. They are different kinds of trains and they have different scheduling issues and different travel patterns. Europe, with great passenger rail service, ships about a tenth of much of its freight by rail as the U.S. does. Instead, freight is hauled by truck. Given the wear that truck traffic puts on roads, if you can only do one of them, the U.S. made the right choice and Europe the wrong one.

    • yogibeaty says

      It's true, but the origins of scheduling issues are that they were done manually, as was switching etc. With current control and switching technology, it doesn't look like a technical problem, but a political and financial one. Since in teh US, most rail lines are owned by freight companies, who have tremendous political power, changing the infrastructure seems unlikely. But it is possible to run both if you want to. Certainly at a better rate than currently, even if it's not optimal (for some value of optimal.)

    • PeterdET says

      Wikipedia says rail share of freight is 42% compared to 18% in the EU. So no, not a tenth. How much US rail freight is coal and similar?

    • KatjaRBC says

      In terms of ton-miles per capita for trucks, the difference between the US and Europe isn't actually that big; some European countries may do better, some do worse. The US uses rail a lot more because distances are longer. Freight rail doesn't become cost-effective until after a couple hundred miles or so.

      The problem is that trucks are flexible and cheap even with a sky-high gas tax, road tolls in all the major countries, and (in some countries) bans on driving at nights or on weekends. It's also not really about the wear that truck traffic puts on roads, but the carbon footprint. Fixing roads is relatively cheap (by nation state standards), and since Madrid is the capital of civil engineering in Europe, this is effectively a bit of stimulus for the Spanish economy. But trucks have a much higher carbon footprint than rail does. Ironically, more rigorous emission standards have also lowered the variable costs of operating trucks.

  2. rmhitchens45 says

    You make a good, somewhat droll point. However, the real question is, can the new fellow manage his way out of a paper bag? Reminds me of working in the business jet realm, many years ago. My company, a business jet broker (buying & selling corporate jets) hired a sales force mainly from non-aviation businesses. A lot of ex-IBM big ticket computer hardware salesmen. They had the sales skill set to get the job done, selling & leasing multi-million dollar pieces of business equipment. No doubt the new guy at United has a lot to learn, but he's accustomed to moving large pieces of equipment from here to there, with all the attendant scheduling issues.

  3. RhodesKen says

    From the article: "Given the complexity of the airline business, it is virtually unprecedented for a major carrier to pick an outsider as its chief."

    My goodness, that airline business must be REALLY complicated. Fortunately for IBM, the computer business must be a lot simpler, so when they brought in that Gerstner fellow from RJR Nabisco, he seemed to do OK.

  4. paulwallich says

    More interesting to me: whom does he know? If bribing public officials is a significant part of the job of CEO, whom is the new guy going to set up a personal flight (or other perks) for, and to what purpose?

  5. JamesWimberley says

    What could possibly go wrong?
    Nothing! United are already looking for a different upstanding governor to cosy up to, like Rick Scott or Bobby Jindal.

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