John Eagleson: 40-year-old rail policy remains a modern transportation example

By John Eagleson

The continuing debates over how to respond to the Washington State Supreme Court striking down Initiative 976 and how to fund highway projects here in our state provide a good backdrop for discussion of a major transportation policy anniversary that was celebrated in Washington, D.C., during the run-up to the elections.

More than 40 years ago, on Oct. 14, 1980, President Jimmy Carter signed the Staggers Rail Act, major legislation that quite literally saved the U.S. freight rail network, which was falling apart due to lack of capital investment and maintenance.

Backed by majorities of Republicans and Democrats in Congress, this visionary law is still in force and rightfully credited with setting the stage for a freight rail renaissance in this country. The Staggers Act continues to provide tangible benefits in Washington, where our freight rail connections serve every industry and are a foundation for our export- intensive economy, moving some 133 million tons of freight annually.

To understand this law’s impact requires a quick history lesson. By the late 1970s, most of the U.S. freight rail network was falling apart, barely surviving under a stifling system of federal bureaucratic control that prevented railroads from earning enough capital to reinvest in the system. Numerous railroads were in bankruptcy and incapable of performing even the most basic maintenance because the government, not the railroads, decided where and when trains ran, what they carried and how much they could charge for their service.

The Staggers Act changed this by allowing railroads to make their own business decisions and to negotiate with customers over service and rates in a free market – just like other businesses.

The results have been staggering, so to speak. A once declining U.S. freight rail network is now recognized as the best in the world in terms of productivity, safety and cost – and the once cash-starved railroads have earned enough to reinvest more than $710 billion of their own money, not taxpayer funds, back into track, equipment and technologies that make rail safer, more productive and fuel efficient.

We need sensible, long-term solutions to Washington’s transportation needs.

The Staggers Act provided just such a remedy for the freight rail sector, and more than 40 years in, it is still working to the benefit of our state and the nation. That is why I joined last fall with hundreds of other state legislators, local and county officials, business groups and transportation advocates from all across the nation in signing a letter urging federal officials not to make any changes that would undermine it.

Failing to preserve the Staggers Act would not only be detrimental for the U.S. railroad network, but also unfair to the Washington businesses, small and large, that rely on rail.

When those businesses suffer, so do the local communities that surround them. Every year in Washington alone, railroads support everything from crucial farm and factory production to what finally makes it onto our store shelves, from appliances and paper products to medicines and frozen vegetables.

With solutions to highway and transit funding so difficult to agree on, I hope our federal policymakers have the wisdom to maintain the balanced, common-sense regulatory system that stabilized our freight rail network 40 years ago and still enables it to thrive today.

John Eagleson is the mayor of Sprague, Washington.