No, I’ve been lobbying, which is undoubtedly easier than working on the railroad, involving as it does heavy, outdoor work in all kinds of weather.
I am a
registered lobbyist for the Massachusetts Railroad Association, the trade group
for the state’s freight-hauling railroads. My colleagues at Preti Strategies
and I have had this account for almost 10 years.
It’s good
work, advocating for things such as state funding for industrial rail access
projects, which create jobs and stimulate the economy.
And it’s
good to work with the people who run the freight railroads. They know their stuff, they tell you the
truth, and they have the right touch in meetings with legislators. They never break the furniture, if you know what I mean.
I feel good
about our freight railroads. And not just because they send us a check every
month.
I feel good
about the goods they keep flowing to Massachusetts and the trucks they keep off
our roads.
It would
take about 300 trucks to haul what the typical freight train does. Our highways would be much more congested
than they already are – hard as they may be to imagine -- if we didn’t have the
11 freight railroads we have operating in the Commonwealth.
I feel good
about the energy freight railroads conserve and the greenhouse gases they keep
out of our already overheated atmosphere.
Railroads
can move one ton of cargo 476 miles on one gallon of diesel fuel. For every ton of cargo moved on rail and not
on truck, there’s a 75% reduction in greenhouse gases.
I feel good
that railroads have continually invested a lot of their own money in
maintaining and improving the critically-important-but-never-noticed rail
infrastructure of Massachusetts – tracks and bridges, ties and roadbeds, switches
and sidings, etc.
Result: Said
infrastructure is now, generally, in far better shape than our highways and bridges for
motor vehicles.
In a March 22nd op-ed piece in The Republican/MassLive (Springfield, MA), Ian Jefferies of the Association of American Railroads, noted that America’s freight railroads have collectively spent some $26 billion on upkeep and improvements in recent years.
CSX, for
example, spent close to $8 million in Massachusetts in 2015 alone.
“Freight
rail makes the tall task of fixing America’s infrastructure a little less
steep,” Jefferies correctly observed.
Here’s just
a partial list of items shipped regularly into Massachusetts by our freight
railroads: automobiles, lumber and other building materials, propane, plastics
and resins (vital to the medical instruments and high-tech industries), food
(mostly canned goods and bulk products, such as flour and edible oils),
fertilizer, petroleum products (lube oils and waxes), and animal feeds
(agriculture and horse breeding remain important to our economy).
So here’s to
you, Bay Colony and CSX, and here’s to you, East Brookfield & Spencer, and
Fore River!
Here’s to
you, oh Housatonic, and to all the rest – the Massachusetts Central,
Massachusetts Coastal, New England Central, Pan Am, Pioneer Valley and Providence
and Worcester railroads!
Without you,
our economy would rot from the inside, our highways would go into constant
gridlock, and our climate would change for the worse even sooner.
No comments:
Post a Comment