If you take away the infrastructure from a railroad, there isn't much left...
(I know, the analogy isn't perfect. Still, I would guess that 90% of a railroad's capital is tied up in track, right of way, signaling, and similar stuff, and only 10% in engines and cars. Saying "let's nationalize the infrasturcture" means nationalizing almost all of the railroad company. Hence my comment that "there's not much left". Your distinction between nationalizing all the company and nationalizing "just the infrastructure" is not much of a difference.)
According to http://www.bnsf.com/about-bnsf/financial-information/form-10...
BNSF has about 85% of their revenue in the tracks and 15% in the trains so your guess isn't far off.
Can you comment on competition for a given route in the current railroad model? I assume railroads control who uses their tracks so they can prevent competitors from serving those routes, is that the case and how does that not constitute some form of monopoly?
Edit: Thank you for the clarification, I had no idea how much railroads had tied up in the infrastructure. It seems that much of the value of a railroad is on the ability to serve certain routes without competition which in hindsight is pretty obvious.
Now take the route from Flagstaff, Arizona, to Los Angeles. BNSF is the only one who serves that route, because they're the only railroad that has tracks to Flagstaff. So BNSF has a monopoly on railroad service to Flagstaff.
But the fact is, there's not enough railroad traffic that originates in Flagstaff to make it economically worthwhile to have two different rail lines.
And in fact, this kind of "monopoly" has always been an issue with rail service. If you have a factory in Chicago, there were something like 18 different railroads that served Chicago back in the day, but only one of them had a track to your door. So you only had one choice for your factory, even though there were 18 railroads in town.
On the other hand: That railroad had a monopoly on your rail service because they built a track to your door (at their expense), and the other 17 railroads didn't. So I have a hard time getting too upset about this kind of "monopoly" as any kind of unfairness.
The fact is, though, the main railroad competition is trucks, not other railroads. (Also barges, for low-speed bulk stuff.) And the trucks (and barges) are running on highways (and waterways) paid for with taxes (including the truck's gasoline taxes), whereas the railroads are paying for their track (and paying taxes on it).
Can you explain what the taxes are for on the rail lines?
In your example could the customer build their own small rail lines to meet up with the existing tracks of BNSF and UP both to allow them to pick who they use to haul freight between Chicago and LA? Does that happen?
I am reminded of a plant tour at a major manufacturer where they had a rail line that ran right into their factory to deliver raw materials, I wonder who owns the rails.
Do railroads have a anything similar to the meet up rooms in carrier hotels where you can move from one rail network to another?
I know they pay property taxes on the land (plus the value of what's on the land). I don't know how much that is, but it's different from a government-owned highway, which pays no taxes.
> In your example could the customer build their own small rail lines to meet up with the existing tracks of BNSF and UP both to allow them to pick who they use to haul freight between Chicago and LA? Does that happen?
There are two parts to the answer here. First, yes, sometimes shippers build a rail line to connect to an existing railroad. Sometimes shippers have their own locomotives to move cars on their track, too.
Second, connecting to two different railroads. This only works (economically) if the two railroads are close to each other. Around Chicago, say, it's easy. In Nevada, not so much. You might have to build two hundred miles of track to get a connection to a different railroad. No matter how bad the freight rates are from the railroad you've got, it's not worth it.
> Do railroads have a anything similar to the meet up rooms in carrier hotels where you can move from one rail network to another?
I'm not sure what "meet up rooms in carrier hotels" are, but yes, railroads have places where traffic moves from one railroad to another.
Pricing (hello Deutsche Bahn, 10x more expensive than buses LOL), service (thumbs up to Austria's Westbahn here), quality of the carriages (again, thumbs up to Westbahn, displacing even the DB ICE trains), WiFi...