[AnimalMuppet]

Unfair? How is that unfair? If I built the track, then I own the track, and I decide what runs on the track. Anybody else thinking they have the right to run on it can get lost. A private railroad line is not an open-access situation. They'll carry your railroad car, but they'll do it in their train. Any argument otherwise is an argument against private ownership, which I view extremely skeptically.

(It's a little different in the case of commuter rail, where there's a contractual arrangement.)

[stouset]

You are willfully ignoring the reality that building a competing rail network that services the same area is wildly impractical given the land requirements.

This is the same argument behind having multiple providers to share one set of power lines, telephone cables, etc. Duplicate copies of physical infrastructure are pointless, wasteful, and unlikely to occur in practice, so there’s rarely competitive pressure.

[CGMthrowaway]

We did it with subways in NYC, why not with rail lines over farmland?

[harimau777]

How much government funding went, directly or indirectly, into building the track? What sort of deals where put in place to facilitate building them? Where did all that land come from? What sort of special rights (e.g. the ability to build level crossings) have railways been granted?

[lokar]

How did you get the land for the track?

[AnimalMuppet]

By buying it. Even the land-grant railroads bought the land, in the form of carrying the US mail at reduced rates for the next 80 years. (During World War 2, when the government was desperate for money, they let the railroads buy themselves out of the reduced mail rates. So it worked out to payments for 80 years with a balloon payment at the end.)

[harimau777]

Things get complicated with a common good like land. It's not particularly just that just because someone purchased some natural resource a hundred years ago people who weren't even born at the time are screwed. Presumably every generation should have a say in how society operates.