Wheeling and Dealing
Understanding the expense side of financing railway and engineering-maintenance operations may not appear on the face of it to relate to the wheel/rail interface. But a discussion led by Mike Franke, Amtrak 's senior director of planning and business development, at this year's Rail/Wheel Interface Seminar sponsored by Advanced Rail Management and Interface Journal, showed that wheeling and dealing on the nation's railways are inextricably linked.

Financial analysts historically have looked at railroads by examining their operating ratios, along with fuel costs and carloads by commodity, said Norm Carlson, chairman of Carlson Consulting International, LLC, and former worldwide managing director of the transportation industry practice of Arthur Andersen.

After the meltdown in the 1990s, analysts began to look at other performance measures such as average train speed, average terminal dwell time and average number of freight cars on line. While the measurement categories are the same from road to road, each property is judged individually. "The average train speed on one railroad may not be the same on another," Carlson said. "So we look at the standard for a given property and show the deviation."

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