Passenger & Freight Railroads Unite 2019 is less than a week away!

  
 
The first Passenger and Freight Railroads Unite Conference at the Westin Washington, D.C. City Center is less than a week away! 
Make plans to attend and network with industry leaders!

 

Our business meeting is scheduled for a full day on March 14 and the morning on March 15.  It will begin at 8:00 on March 14 with a networking breakfast and then lunch and will adjourn at 4:30 p.m.  On March 15, the action begins at 8 with a networking breakfast and ends at noon.  

The meeting is being organized by Dan Elliott who served as Chairman of the Surface Transportation Board from 2009 to 2017 and then went into private legal practice at Conner & Winters.  Based on his experience at the Board, he came to believe that freight and passenger railroads need to talk more about how the national rail system should operate to be most efficient and effective.
The goal is to bring everyone together to talk about the best way for the rail system to operate.  In many circumstances, the freight railroads own and control the track that the passenger railroads operate on and in others, the passenger railroads have control.  These shared track scenarios lead to disagreements about who should be able to go first when they both simultaneously need to run over the same route.  It seems as if there is insufficient discussion in this town between the relevant parties.  If these parties talked to each other directly rather than past each other through the press and trade shows, maybe we could fix some of the issues that have been fought over by these railroads.

As a result, we have invited leaders from Amtrak, the freight railroads, rail commuter services, and developers of new passenger and freight lines.  A robust discussion about shared track and changing the network hopefully will lead to some solutions about how this fantastic system should operate.