Study On Railroad Industry Organization Structure

The transformation of railroad industry organization structure is a very interesting phenomenon. Although most railroads in developed nations were first built by private capital and thus formed many disconnected short lines, there was a trend to nationalize them in the 1920s due to railroads'important roles in war, politics and economy. Most nations except the United States, who returned its railroads to the private hands after the First World War, maintained the status que and integrated those short lines into a completed network. While in those colonial or half-colonial nations, railroads construction was interfered by those developed capitalism nations due to their under-developed national capital, and the property of their railroads were also controlled by them, or owned by the government.The railrods in the United Stated have grown into the largest railroads transport network in the world. Its organization structure show several distinctive characteristics: firstly, Class 1 railroads continually expanded their network through merging and acquisition among themselves; secondly, the bigger compnies combined with other transport modes, as aviation, ocean, etc., to form integrated"multimode transportation"company; thirdly, hundreds of short lines were set up providing local services for those class 1s; and fourth, some activities, such as transfer, load and unload in the transportation process, were outsourced by class 1s. At the meantime, privatization and reorganization reforms were carried out in those nations who once held and operated railroads by the government in the 1980s. Various reorganization plans came into forth and formed many man-made transport enterprises, some specialized in local transport services, some specialized in freight or passenger transportation, and some others focused their business on specific transport services, such as container transport, luggage transport, etc. Some reforms made success. For example, in the European Union characterized by"separating between transport services and infrastructure operation", saw higher efficiency of railrods in Germany, France and Sweden; In Japan, who divided its national railraids into 6 local passenger companies, saw 3 of them made profits and came into the market. However, some other reforms failed. For instance, several traffic accidents occurred in Britain after Railtrack, the company operating the railroads network, was privatized, and it turned into a company limited by gurantee later; In our nation, to establish passenger transport companies had been regarded as the breakthrough of"separating between transport services and infrastructure operation", but only proved to be unimplementable. All of these evidences show that the reorganization process cannot be arbitrary, and some rules must be followed. What are the rules behind railroads industry organization structure? What principles should be followed in railroad industry reorganization? They are the main questions we try to answer in this dissertation.