Tommy Denton

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Ever since the Continental Congress entrusted Benjamin Franklin in 1775 with establishing and administering a postal system, the American experience has included enterprises variously described in terms ranging from serving the larger public good to socialism.

No group fought Medicare more vigorously than the American Medical Association, citing "socialized medicine," until Lyndon Johnson bought off the docs in an act of shameless, excessive capitulation to political necessity. Now, even with the need to refine the system, woe betide the politician who would dismantle that "socialized" health care for the elderly.

Anyone who denies that the interstate highway system is other than a transparently socialist endeavor just hasn't paid attention. Because Dwight D. Eisenhower could not afford the political exposure of such truth-telling, he couched the grand plan for a nationwide transportation infrastructure as a "national defense" project.

None of this is to praise socialism or demonize market capitalism. Rather, the genius of the American experiment has been its defining characteristic of pragmatism: turning to what works, in the words of the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution, to "promote the general Welfare."

Such thoughts arise after reading yet another account of the effort by Norfolk Southern to build an intermodal railroad facility in the Roanoke vicinity. After citizen unrest emerged at the site initially proposed for Montgomery County at Elliston, the railroad has suggested an additional nine sites progressively nearer to Roanoke, all of which have one or more detrimental characteristics, from cutting off auto/truck traffic at adjoining road crossings to environmental impediments.

What torqued trousers in Elliston and its environs was the cavalier imperiousness with which NS pronounced that it alone would determine its own -- and neighbors' -- destinies, weighing foremost the service of its corporate financial well-being.

Which gets to the rub: Almost all consideration by NS has gone to its own self-interest, with an unpersuasive acknowledgment of a responsibility to the larger issue of building a comprehensively integrated transportation infrastructure to serve the national interest.

In all candor, the railroad is free by law to do pretty much as it well pleases. As an heir to the shamefully neglected rail infrastructure allowed to deteriorate in the 1970s and 1980s, NS was among the handful of companies able to sustain and consolidate what was left -- as unencumbered private property, despite the vast federal land grants that allowed the existence of railroads in the first place.

That deterioration was a complex mix of neglect and misjudgment, not least the abysmal refusal to deal constructively and creatively with railroads' colossal managerial inefficiency. One huge missing ingredient for reviving rail, though, was lack of a federal trust fund, as applied to both civil aviation and highways.

Thus, the last railroad owners left standing would be unbeholden to a public "partner" that could provide not only material support for growing and enhancing rail service -- both freight and passenger -- but also a relevant authority with the "big view" to allow realization of strategic national transportation policy. A critical public benefit would be a "partner" with sufficient financial and regulatory leverage to maintain a broader focus on public interest, convenience and necessity.

Nationalizing the railroads in the United States would be a fool's errand. But having reduced the "system" of freight rail to a shadow of its former self with four giants dominating service on the cherry-picked, most-profitable routes, and having virtually paralyzed passenger rail, Congress should not be surprised that the "new" railroads have little or no incentive to consider implications of their operations beyond their annual financial reports.

According to Fortune magazine, NS revenues since 2001 have increased 54 percent, to about $9.5 billion, as its operating expenses increased just 35 percent. Its already commendable efficiency -- in 2000, NS shipped 208 carloads per employee, compared with 270 today -- would be enhanced by a strategically located intermodal transfer facility, wherever that ideal place may be.

But as Montgomery County residents credibly argued, deciding where to put such a facility should factor in a greater range of considerations than NS' apparent insistence on unilaterally determining outcomes so much in the public interest.

Expecting all parties to cooperate in a spirit of common purpose is hardly socialist. In America, it's downright pragmatic.

Denton's column appears in the Sunday and Tuesday editions of The Roanoke Times.