Freight Rate Quotes

Lack of harmony and cooperation between the railroad management and the workers has made it necessary for the railroads to increase their freight and passenger rates, and this, in turn, has increased the cost of life's necessities to almost unbearable proportions. Here, again, lack of cooperation between a few leads to hardship for millions of people.

Michael Ward knows. Ward loves railroads. His loves his own railroad company, CSX, which traces its origins to 1827 when the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad was formed as the nation’s first common carrier. He traces his own origins at CSX back thirty-seven years, when he took an analyst job as a newly minted Harvard Business School M.B.A., rising to become chairman, president, and CEO in 2003. And he loves the whole American freight rail industry. “Railroaders are like farmers,” Ward declares. “You heard about the farmer that won the lottery? They said to him, ‘Oh my gosh, you won the lottery; what are you going to do with all that money?’ He said, ‘I’m a farmer and I love farming, and I’m going to farm until every penny of it is gone.’ And I say railroaders are like that. When we make more money, we’re going to invest more back into the infrastructure, so we can strengthen the railroad and grow the business.” Ward may sound like a press release, but that’s exactly how he talks, and why he’s a major industry spokesman. He lavishes praise on industry performance: “While we’ve improved the profitability of the industry, we’ve also cut rates in half of what they were in 1980 for our customers, on an inflation-adjusted basis. We’re providing a more economical product to them, and it’s safer and more reliable. Over the years, as an industry, our train accident rate is down 80 percent; our personal injury rate is down 85 percent; and we’re doing this with about one-third of the workforce we had in 1980.” He calls the industry “the envy of the world.

Total Cost Analysis When the purchasing staff considers switching to a new supplier or consolidating its purchases with an existing one, it cannot evaluate the supplier based solely on its quoted price. Instead, it must also consider the total acquisition cost, which can in some cases exceed a product’s initial price. The total acquisition cost includes these items: • Material. The list price of the item being bought, less any rebates or discounts. • Freight. The cost of shipping from the supplier to the company. • Packaging. The company may specify special packaging, such as for quantities that differ from the supplier’s standards and for which the supplier charges an extra fee. • Tooling. If the supplier had to acquire special tooling in order to manufacture parts for the company, such as an injection mold, then it will charge through this cost, either as a lump sum or amortized over some predetermined unit volume. • Setup. If the setup for a production run is unusually lengthy or involves scrap, then the supplier may charge through the cost of the setup. • Warranty. If the product being purchased is to be retained by the company for a lengthy period of time, it may have to buy a warranty extension from the supplier. • Inventory. If there are long delays between when a company orders goods and when it receives them, then it must maintain a safety stock on hand to guard against stock-out conditions and support the cost of funds needed to maintain this stock. • Payment terms. If the supplier insists on rapid payment terms and the company’s own customers have longer payment terms, then the company must support the cost of funds for the period between when it pays the supplier and it is paid by its customers. • Currency used. If supplier payments are to be made in a different currency from the company’s home currency, then it must pay for a foreign exchange transaction and may also need to pay for a hedge, to guard against any unfavorable changes in the exchange rate prior to the scheduled payment date. These costs are only the ones directly associated with a product. In addition, there may be overhead costs related to dealing with a specific supplier (see “Sourcing Distance” later in the chapter), which can be allocated to all products purchased from that supplier.

The movement of cargo has a certain intrinsic value, but the cost of moving cargo is determined almost exclusively by the perception of the direction of the freight rates.

The whole thrust of the platform suggests an insight of significance today. The Alliance saw the greatest threat to freedom not in government, but in big business. It looked to government as the only viable counterweight. Among the measures it advocated were an interstate commerce law to regulate railroad freight rates and laws to curb or prohibit financial speculation in railroad stock, agricultural futures, and land, and the strict enforcement of those laws.

To ship their crops to distant markets they had to rely upon the railroads, many of which were scandalously managed for the profit of Eastern owners and manipulators and set their freight rates arbitrarily high. Hence there arose in the West a widespread and confused agitation against bankers, the gold basis of the currency, industrial monopolists, and above all the railroads: an agitation which in the eighteen-eighties had been chiefly responsible for the passage of such regulatory laws as the Interstate Commerce Act.

true love ain’t the passenger train that pulls up at the station so that you can board when it’s time. It’s the freight train that ploughs into you when you least expect it. That’s how it was for me at any rate. There’s just no getting over something like that, and if you find someone who makes you feel that way, you hold onto her forever.

and Medicaid, which would help expand coverage and bring down costs. The other thing we should be honest about is how hard it’s going to be, no matter what we do, to create significant economic opportunity in every remote area of our vast nation. In some places, the old jobs aren’t coming back, and the infrastructure and workforce needed to support big new industries aren’t there. As hard as it is, people may have to leave their hometowns and look for work elsewhere in America. We know this can have a transformative effect. In the 1990s, the Clinton administration experimented with a program called Moving to Opportunity for Fair Housing, which gave poor families in public housing vouchers to move to safer, middle-income neighborhoods where their children were surrounded every day by evidence that life can be better. Twenty years later, the children of those families have grown up to earn higher incomes and attend college at higher rates than their peers who stayed behind. And the younger the kids were when they moved, the bigger boost they received. Previous generations of Americans actually moved around the country much more than we do today. Millions of black families migrated from the rural South to the urban North. Large numbers of poor whites left Appalachia to take jobs in Midwestern factories. My own father hopped a freight train from Scranton, Pennsylvania, to Chicago in 1935, looking for work. Yet today, despite all our advances, fewer Americans are moving than ever before. One of the laid-off steelworkers I met in Kentucky told me he found a good job in Columbus, Ohio, but he was doing the 120-mile commute every week because he didn’t want to move. “People from Kentucky, they want to be in Kentucky,” another said to me. “That’s something that’s just in our DNA.” I understand that feeling. People’s identities and their support systems—extended family, friends, church congregations, and so on—are rooted in where they come from. This is painful, gut-wrenching stuff. And no politician wants to be the one to say it. I believe that after we do everything we can to help create new jobs in distressed small towns and rural areas, we also have to give people the skills and tools they need to seek opportunities beyond their hometowns—and provide a strong safety net both for those who leave and those who stay. Whether it’s updating policies to meet the changing conditions of America’s workers, or encouraging greater mobility, the bottom line is the same: we can’t spend all our time staving off decline. We need to create new opportunities, not just slow down the loss of old ones. Rather than keep trying to re-create the economy of the past, we should focus on making the jobs people actually have better and figure out how to create the good jobs of the future in fields such as clean energy, health care, construction, computer coding, and advanced manufacturing. Republicans will always be better at defending yesterday. Democrats have to be in the future business. The good news is we have

Emery Air Freight must be the most promising of the four companies in terms of future growth, if the price/earnings ratio of nearly 40 times its highest reported earnings is to be even partially justified. The past growth, of course, has been most impressive. But these figures may not be so significant for the future if we consider that they started quite small, at only $570,000 of net earnings in 1958. It often proves much more difficult to continue to grow at a high rate after volume and profits have already expanded to big totals. The most surprising aspect of Emery’s story is that its earnings and market price continued to grow apace in 1970, which was the worst year in the domestic air-passenger industry. This is a remarkable achievement indeed, but it raises the question whether future profits may not be vulnerable to adverse developments, through increased competition, pressure for new arrangements between forwarders and airlines, etc. An elaborate study might be needed before a sound judgment could be passed on these points, but the conservative investor cannot leave them out of his general reckoning.

First, the railroads had engaged in such fierce, internecine price wars that freight rates had fallen sharply.

The proliferation of rebates hastened the shift toward an integrated national economy, top-heavy with giant companies enjoying preferential freight rates.

The official chronicler of business cycles in the United States, the National Bureau of Economic Research, a not-for-profit group founded in 1920, would declare, though many months later, that a recession had set in that August. But in September, no one was aware of it. There were the odd signs of economic slowdown, especially in some of the more interest-rate-sensitive sectors - automobile sales had peaked and construction had been down all year, but most short-term indicators, for example, steel production or railroad freight car loadings, remained exceptionally strong. By the middle of the month, the market was back at its highs and Babson's forecast of a crash had been thoroughly discredited.

The ICC was therefore in keeping with the law when, to the delight of the railroads, it decided to give its sanction and imprimatur to the freight rates worked out by the railroad rate associations—in short, to use the federal government to ratify rates decided upon by private railroad cartels.

both tariff rates and domestic charges for the use of railroad freight blatantly discriminated against the South, impeding its ability to grow and compete. The rates charged for shipping goods along the nation’s railways had for decades been rigged to protect Northern markets from Southern goods.