Reconnect America

Earlier this month, I reached out to Jess Conard in the hopes of interviewing her for the Reconnect America podcast. I hardly expected that just a few days later we would be meeting face-to-face—along with my friend Beka Economopoulos, co-founder and Director of The Natural History Museum—in my cabin-studio in the woods of Vashon Island, Washington.

Jess is a resident of East Palestine, Ohio, where the 2023 derailment of a Norfolk Southern train and the subsequent decision to vent and burn over 115,000 gallons of toxic vinyl chloride caused an environmental and public health disaster whose consequences will be unfolding for decades to come

In the aftermath of the derailment, Jess dove headlong into studying the countless layers of profit-driven corner-cutting and neglect that led to and exacerbated the disaster. Earlier this year, she launched Rail Watch, an organization aimed at protecting the safety of trackside communities across North America.

Community organizing and coalition-building is of vital importance in a moment of political timidity on the part of our elected officials, regulatory rollback by executive agencies, and the entrenched captivity of railroad and other corporations to the unfettered power of financial interests. Our conversation focused not just on what happened in East Palestine, but also on how to build from the power we have to the power we need to bring about a world where communities are not endangered, but rather served by the infrastructure that passes through them.

I hope you will take a few minutes to watch the preview above—and keep an eye out for the full interview, coming soon!

With Gratitude & Solidarity,

Bill Moyer

Though the railroad industry was deregulated in 1980, the public was always supposed to retain access to rail service that it could rely upon at a competitive price.

That promise has been broken, and Wall Street is only partially to blame. A lack of clarity and specificity in the statutes that authorize the Surface Transportation Board (STB) to regulate U.S. railroads has also prevented this agency from exercising the authority it is meant to have. That is why a growing base of support is coalescing around the bipartisan Reliable Rail Service Act.

Ann Warner, the guest of today’s episode, is one of the figures at the forefront of this coalition. She serves as managing partner at Ann Warner LLC and spokesperson for the Freight Rail Customer Alliance (FRCA), an “alliance of freight rail shippers impacted by continued unrestrained freight rail market dominance over rail-dependent shippers.”

Ann’s legal expertise and her work at the FRCA make this episode a perfect follow-up to our fascinating conversation earlier this month with FRCA President Emily Regis. Whereas Emily focused more on the concrete ways in which Class I railroads take advantage of their customers—who often have no other transportation options—Ann helps us understand the legal structures that allow these abuses to continue.

In particular, Ann illuminates why the Reliable Rail Service Act is necessary to right these wrongs and begin to put U.S. railroads back in service of public interests rather than Wall Street greed.

Reconnect America is hosted by Bill Moyer, co-author of the book Solutionary Rail: A People-powered Campaign to Electrify America’s Railroads and Open Corridors to a Clean Energy Future. Check out the essays and supplemental posts that complement this podcast HERE.

Learn more, get involved and pitch in to support the work of Solutionary Rail at SolutionaryRail.org. Keep the podcast ads-free and without paywalls by making a tax-deductible donation HERE.

We recently released Episode Four of our main Reconnect America series. It explores in depth the story of the unique U.S. experiment in private ownership of the critical national infrastructure that railroads constitute, and the concessions we have made over the course of a century and a half to sustain that system. If you haven’t listened to it yet, we highly recommend you check it out.

As we prepare to continue the story into the present day with Episode Five, we are exploring the experiences of shippers who depend on railroads to move their products, by speaking with some of the folks who represent these businesses in negotiations with railroads and before the Surface Transportation Board (STB).

Emily Regis is one of these people. Emily is president of the Freight Rail Customer Alliance, an “alliance of freight rail shippers impacted by continued unrestrained freight rail market dominance over rail-dependent shippers.” Emily is also Fuel Resource Administrator for the Arizona Electric Power Cooperative and President of the National Coal Transportation Association.

Now, those familiar with Solutionary Rail will probably know that much of our work has been focused on facilitating a transition away from fossil fuels. So you might be wondering: why are we talking with someone who works on behalf of coal producers and their customers?

For one thing, as we highlighted in Episodes Two and Four of our main series, a large part of the reason why the U.S. was once able to balance the public purpose of rail transport with the need of shareholders to earn a profit is because of the principle of common carriage. Railroads once had an obligation to provide reasonable service upon reasonable request to every shipper along their lines. It was only once they were allowed to discriminate, de-market, and turn business away that the system ceased to serve the public. Coal shippers have no other option than to move their product by rail, and so they—alongside shippers of a few other rail-dependent commodities—are especially vulnerable to the railroads’ ongoing abuse of their market power.

But there is another reason why having this kind of conversation is so crucial to the Reconnect America project. One of the central pillars of the vision we’re developing here is the idea that when it comes to rail transport, fighting for the public interest is a cause that transcends partisan politics. It is not that we don’t have disagreements. But if we cannot talk with people that have different perspectives on some things, then we will never learn enough about them to find out what we have in common.

As you will hear in this conversation—which took place in early October, between Emily and Solutionary Rail Director and Reconnect America Host Bill Moyer—we do have a lot in common. And we also have a ton to learn from people like Emily. When we advocate for a rail system that better serves communities, rail customers are one of the key intermediaries in that relationship. It is their needs that have to be amplified and addressed.

The picture that Emily paints in this conversation is one of a rail system dominated by a business model that benefits only the railroads and their shareholders, at the expense of customers. It is a system that has seen cuts to service, a weaponization of surcharges, a suppression of complaints against the railroads for fear of retaliation, and a process to address these complaints that is impossibly bureaucratic and resource-consuming—and not all that helpful even when it succeeds. We discussed the dangers of the pending merger between Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern, for shippers that would be left captive to the monopoly power of a single railroad to move their freight. And we considered possible ways to re-envision how we do rail transport in this country.

Reconnect America is hosted by Bill Moyer, co-author of the book Solutionary Rail: A People-powered Campaign to Electrify America’s Railroads and Open Corridors to a Clean Energy Future. Check out the essays and supplemental posts that complement this podcast HERE.

Learn more, get involved and pitch in to support the work of Solutionary Rail at SolutionaryRail.org. Keep the podcast ads-free and without paywalls by making a tax-deductible donation HERE.

Listen and subscribe on your favorite platform: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube.

Rail systems around the world are mostly owned and operated by the public. But the U.S. has only ever flirted with public ownership, and mostly in moments where this seemed like the only way to preserve a functional railroad system. Instead, for almost a century, we pursued a model of regulating corporate railroads to fulfill their public purpose while sustaining the revenue needed to keep them afloat. Meeting both of these objectives proved to be a balancing act which took decades to achieve, by which time it was already coming undone, thanks to massive public investments in competing modes of transportation. While it lasted, however, this system fueled the rise of what was, at the time, the largest middle class ever known.

In Episodes 2 and 3, we focused on how the public responded to the partial collapse of this system in 1970 by creating Amtrak, a publicly-owned passenger railroad which relieved railroad corporations of their costly obligation to move people. We also discussed how Amtrak was nonetheless tasked with making a profit on this money-losing service, forcing it to eviscerate the nation’s passenger rail system in pursuit of that goal.

In this episode, we retrace this history from the freight rail side of things, showing how our refusal to take full public responsibility for this critical infrastructure, even when circumstances seemed to cry out for it, led us on a wild goose chase in search of another path to stability. That chase carried us through two industry-wide death spirals, two merger waves, two temporary nationalizations, and a record-shattering bankruptcy, until legislators finally decided to change the paradigm—not by taking on the cost of providing the service, but rather by sacrificing service and giving free rein to Wall Street greed, all in the name of economic efficiency.

Reconnect America is hosted by Bill Moyer, co-author of the book Solutionary Rail: A People-powered Campaign to Electrify America’s Railroads and Open Corridors to a Clean Energy Future. Check out the essays and supplemental posts that complement this podcast HERE.

Learn more, get involved and pitch in to support the work of Solutionary Rail at SolutionaryRail.org. Keep the podcast ads-free and without paywalls by making a tax-deductible donation HERE.

Recommended: Phillip Longman’s October 2024 article arguing that fixing our freight rail system is a prerequisite to re-industrializing the U.S., “Train Drain: How deregulation and private equity have gutted the U.S. freight rail system—and with it, the promise of America’s industrial renewal”

Co-written and produced by Bill Moyer and Sasha Elenko. Engineering by August Moore and Tom Stiles. Musical theme by Ken Jacobsen and additional music by Ota Prota.

Thursday’s Senate Commerce Committee confirmation hearing should have never happened. The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) nominee that appeared is meant to replace the illegally fired vice chair Alvin Brown, who is fighting his removal in the courts. Senate Democrats on the Commerce Committee had asked that the hearing not take place on the same day Chair Ted Cruz (R-TX) announced it.

But it wasn’t the NTSB nomination that dominated the questioning. It was the rising sense of alarm about whether the Surface Transportation Board (STB), an independent adjudicatory body, retains the independence to defend public, shipper, and national interests in deciding whether the Union Pacific/Norfolk Southern merger will be allowed to be consummated. Or, will this once-independent body be taking their cues from a pay-to-play White House where UP CEO Vena visits to flatter Trump and UP makes donations to the new White House Ballroom?A crisis of confidence in STB Senator Ben Ray Luján (D-NM), who sat in for Ranking member Maria Cantwell (D-WA), bookended the questioning for the Democrats, while rail champion Senator Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) hit hardest with a clear and deep understanding of the STB’s role and issues at stake. In the video above, Luján begins by asking about the controversial email leaked to, and made public by Solutionary Rail on Oct. 29 (more below). He presses the point that such politicized communications in a professional independent agency may be a violation of the Hatch Act. Then, he closes with the most important question of all: “How can the STB function effectively while subjected to political interference and coercion?”—establishing the dominant and most relevant theme of the hearing.

The excerpt below communicates the seriousness with which Senator Baldwin and others take the attacks on Surface Transportation Board independence.

Senator Baldwin and her staff confirmed the veracity of the leaked email that Solutionary Rail provided. At the confirmation hearing, the Senator confronted sitting STB Board Member Michelle Schultz, who is being nominated for a second term. Schultz had previously denied awareness of the partisan email. At the hearing she acknowledged it had been sent by STB Chair Fuchs and claimed that she hadn’t seen it until after her pre-hearing meeting with Baldwin. Her and others’ excuse for Fuchs was that the language may have been used across agencies and that he was just copying a partisan template. This excuse inflamed rather than assuaged concern that the professional staff at the STB were receiving signals of a partisan takeover.

Partisanship has no place in the STB if it is to effectively execute its role as an independent adjudicatory body. STB decisions impact the entire country. Neither railroads nor shippers nor passengers—nor the issues for which they require adjudication—are partisan in nature. And the professional staff seem to proudly transcend partisanship in the services they provide. Schultz’ fellow STB nominee Richard Kloster, facing questions from Senator Luján, appeared to have significant shortcomings in his understanding of basic STB procedures designed to protect the Board’s independence. For someone who has spent 40 years in the railroad industry, Kloster’s responses did not exactly instill confidence that he could withstand pressure from the White House. That could be by design.

Still, by comparison with Schultz, Kloster appeared almost stolid in his commitment to STB independence. When pressed by Senator Baldwin, Schultz refused to condemn the illegal firing of her “former colleague” STB Board Member Robert Primus. Senator Baldwin leaned in, asking whether board members should be removed if they do not conform to the wishes of the President. Schultz contradicted her own assertions that the STB is independent with the closing claim that she serves “at the pleasure of the President”. Senator Baldwin appeared appalled.It is clear why Board Member Schultz was so visibly uncomfortable throughout the hearing. Her responses illuminate the impossible bind of being subject to pressure from the White House while having to deny being under such pressure.

* Clearly, Congress needs to intervene so that the STB can do its job at this critical juncture.

* No one should be confirmed to the STB—nor the NTSB—until the independence of these agencies is restored and the illegally fired members reinstated.

* Congress also needs to affirm, clarify, and strengthen the authority of the Surface Transportation Board in the 2026 Surface Transportation Reauthorization.

In 2015, Senator John Thune (R-SD) championed the Surface Transportation Board Reauthorization Act to expand the Board from 3 to 5 members—and, as an affirmation of its independence from any single administration, to move it out from under the Department of Transportation. The 2026 Surface Transportation Reauthorization is a subject Solutionary Rail and the Reconnect America podcast will be covering at length. For now, help us build upon the over 400 emails sent to Congress supporting the reinstatement of Robert Primus, using the tool we’ve made available at SolutionaryRail.org/RestorePrimus. After sending emails to your members of Congress you will land at a page with spreadsheets for calling members of the relevant Senate and House committees. There’s also a link to a page for sharing whatever actions you’ve been able to take. Only together will we be able to restore and strengthen the Surface Transportation Board’s capacity to make sure US railroads serve Main Street, not just Wall Street.And now, for some transpartisan leadership, I leave you with Senator Tim Sheehy (R-MT). The only issue with this is that his question is either a test, or a misunderstanding of the STB. It doesn't speak well that neither nominee addressed this, i.e., that it is the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) that regulates all rail safety issues. That aside, Sen. Sheehy and the joint letter submitted into the record is a breath of fresh air.

Wow, we interact with a lot of activists and advocates. What’s fascinating about this conversation is that amongst all of our guests thus far—Byron Porter is uniquely industry-adjacent. He brings together history, regulatory knowledge, and experience as a rail shipper and equipment provider for the railroad industry. You are gonna learn a ton from this incredible conversation—and that knowledge is gonna be very useful in the coming Endgame fight over the biggest rail merger in history. We recorded this prior to the illegal firing of Robert Primus, so that won’t come up. The limits of a regulatory regime ill-prepared to counter the political influence that Union Pacific and the Wall Street profiteers wield is even more apparent today than when we recorded this. The Wall Street profiteers are getting ready to stuff their pockets with winnings that could cost the country its last chance to put U.S. railroads back on track. Despite not being an activist, Byron is calling for a regulatory and business model revolution, not an evolution. And whether his or some other version of that future wins out—or whether this disastrous merger gets a mere wink and a nod—depends on all of us. What we all do next matters. I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did.

Forward Together!

-Bill Moyer (host)Reconnect AmericaSolutionary Rail

Recommended pieces from Byron’s excellent Substack, The Pacific:

* “UP Triggers the Endgame”

* “We Need a New Staggers Act”

* “Paper Barriers and Feudal Warlords”

Reconnect America is hosted by Bill Moyer, co-author of the book Solutionary Rail: A People-powered Campaign to Electrify America’s Railroads and Open Corridors to a Clean Energy Future. Check out the essays and supplemental posts that complement this podcast HERE.

Learn more, get involved and pitch in to support the work of Solutionary Rail at SolutionaryRail.org. Keep the podcast ads-free and without paywalls by making a tax-deductible donation HERE.

In the coming year or so, the Surface Transportation Board will determine whether to approve or block Union Pacific’s $85-billion acquisition of Norfolk Southern. This signals an attempt by Wall Street to squeeze yet more from this critical infrastructure in order to maximize returns for shareholders.

In 2023, Surface Transportation Board (STB) member Robert Primus was the sole board member to vote against the merger of Canadian Pacific and Kansas City Southern to form Canadian Pacific Kansas City. President Trump’s recent illegal firing of board member Primus further weakens the STB and corrupts its adjudicatory mandate. The absence of a key critical voice from the Board raises the pressure on concerned workers, shippers, competing railroads, and the public to make their voices heard. Unless Primus is reinstated, the approval of this Wall Street railroad merger is a near done deal.

Railroad workers, in particular, find themselves in a difficult situation. Being divided into several different unions, workers and their union leaders are often forced to choose between accepting concessions for their own particular craft and holding out in the name of industry-wide solidarity. A UP-NS merger involves even higher stakes, as it could very well result in significant cuts to the workforce resulting from the elimination of redundancies between the newly-combined railroads.

To better understand the dilemmas faced by workers in the fight ahead, and to help us pick apart the smokescreens that UP and NS are promulgating in an effort to charm workers into submission, we got in touch with Ron Kaminkow. Ron is a longtime ally and collaborator of Solutionary Rail’s. He is also a co-founder, former general secretary, and current trustee of Railroad Workers United (RWU), a cross-union caucus of railroad workers that aims to build industry-wide solidarity to more effectively stand up to Wall Street’s railroads.

Last month, RWU, passed a resolution unequivocally opposing all future Class One railroad mergers. (Read the press release here.)

Although this conversation between Ron and Reconnect America Host Bill Moyer took place before Robert Primus was fired from the Surface Transportation Board, RWU has also released a statement condemning the move and demanding Primus’ immediate reinstatement. Solutionary Rail will be addressing this in the coming weeks as well.

Ron and Bill’s discussion ranged from this resolution and the stakes involved in the merger for workers, to the service meltdowns that Ron witnessed as a railroad worker during the last merger wave in the 1990s, to the larger question of whether the coast-to-coast transcontinental railroad that UP and NS are proposing to form might not be a better idea if it were owned and overseen by the public.

Reconnect America is hosted by Bill Moyer, co-author of the book Solutionary Rail: A People-powered Campaign to Electrify America’s Railroads and Open Corridors to a Clean Energy Future. Check out the essays and supplemental posts that complement this podcast HERE.

Learn more, get involved and pitch in to support the work of Solutionary Rail at SolutionaryRail.org. Keep the podcast ads-free and without paywalls by making a tax-deductible donation HERE.

I hope you'll take some time this Labor Day weekend to listen to my conversation with former Congressman Peter DeFazio, aka Tiger of the House (an honorific and comparison with the great Oregon Senator Wayne Morse, the Tiger of the Senate).

Serving as chair of the powerful House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee for the last four of his 36 years in Congress (and as a member for all 36), he has a priceless and practically peerless perspective on why it is so important for government to be a counterforce to the insatiable appetite of Wall Street.

Mr. DeFazio's career spanned a period when, to his dismay, the checks on big banks, controls on corporate trade, and limits on election spending all went off the rails. He saw firsthand the rise of "Precision Scheduled Railroading" and how it left service, communities, and public interests behind, as Wall Street targeted railroads as an extractable resource, not unlike the forests and communities he also fought to protect.

In 2022, alongside the late Representative Donald Payne J.R., who tragically passed away last year, DeFazio introduced H.R. 8649, the Freight Rail Shipping Fair Market Act. Solutionary Rail was honored to have provided a Rep. Payne a briefing ahead of his taking over the Railroads Pipelines and Hazardous Materials Subcommittee in 2021. Much of that was strongly reflected in the H.R. 8649. In our interview, DeFazio reveals how the lobbying power of the Class I railroads, and their ability to retaliate against their customers for trying to get better service, ultimately killed the bill.

A progressive who represented a largely rural and politically diverse district, Peter DeFazio sought to create common cause with common sense solutions, always putting communities, the environment, and long term resilience ahead of special interests.

We could learn a lot from him, and this interview is an opportunity to do so. I especially hope the rail shippers out there tune into this one. In the fights ahead, we need shippers to stand for a rail system that works for big and small shippers, urban and rural trackside communities, workers, and passengers alike. We'll be stronger if we fight shoulder to shoulder with no one left behind.

Listen and enjoy!

Reconnect America is hosted by Bill Moyer, co-author of the book Solutionary Rail: A People-powered Campaign to Electrify America’s Railroads and Open Corridors to a Clean Energy Future. Check out the essays and supplemental posts that complement this podcast HERE.

Learn more, get involved and pitch in to support the work of Solutionary Rail at SolutionaryRail.org. Keep the podcast ads-free and without paywalls by making a tax-deductible donation HERE.

Greg Regan is president of the Transportation Trades Department (TTD) of the AFL-CIO. He has been an outspoken advocate in defense of workers and shippers over the last several years, as Class I railroads have made deeps cuts to both their workforce and the quality and reliability of their service in pursuit of stock buybacks and dividends for predatory “activist investors.”

We got a chance to talk with Greg about the Union Pacific’s proposed $85-billion acquisition of Norfolk Southern, a pair of important pieces of legislation recently reintroduced in Congress, the importance of solidarity between workers across different transportation modes, and more.

This is the first in a string of interviews tackling the latest developments in the railroad industry and their implications for ongoing attempts to put rail transport back in service of public interests and solving 21st-century problems. Stay tuned for more!

Reconnect America is hosted by Bill Moyer, co-author of the book Solutionary Rail: A People-powered Campaign to Electrify America’s Railroads and Open Corridors to a Clean Energy Future. Check out the essays and supplemental posts that complement this podcast HERE.

Learn more, get involved and pitch in to support the work of Solutionary Rail at SolutionaryRail.org. Keep the podcast ads-free and without paywalls by making a tax-deductible donation HERE.

Phillip Longman is Senior Editor at Washington Monthly and Policy Director at the Open Markets Institute. He has also written for publications like Foreign Affairs, the Atlantic, and the New York Times Magazine.

Last October, Phil published the essay “Train Drain: How deregulation and private equity have gutted the U.S. freight rail system—and with it, the promise of America’s industrial renewal”. In a pair of followup pieces in January and June of this year, Phil expanded the argument to include other modes of freight and passenger transport.

Phil's thinking is deeply aligned with the vision behind Reconnect America, making this one of the most valuable conversations we have published thus far. Stay tuned to hear more from Phil in the weeks ahead.

Reconnect America is hosted by Bill Moyer, co-author of the book Solutionary Rail: A People-powered Campaign to Electrify America’s Railroads and Open Corridors to a Clean Energy Future. Check out the essays and supplemental posts that complement this podcast HERE.

Learn more, get involved and pitch in to support the work of Solutionary Rail at SolutionaryRail.org. Keep the podcast ads-free and without paywalls by making a tax-deductible donation HERE.