VitalRail Value Proposition

Challenges

• The rail industry, government, and the financial community, and other key stakeholder groups are not able to work together to achieve breakthroughs that produce real economic and environmental improvements.

• Community relations are piecemeal, missing the opportunity to inspire a groundswell of support for railroads.

• Railroads have a weak relationship with capital providers compared to industries with less resilience, importance, and opportunity.
• Progress in adopting new technologies across diverse actors is too slow.

• The current avenues of collaboration are inflexible, cumbersome, and loaded with secondary agendas.

• Rail development has suffered from labor-management relations that are hurtful to all sides.
• Customers, i.e., communities, landowners, developers, and shippers, are often left out of the process of positive change for rail logistics and infrastructure.
• Capital providers are poorly informed and lack a clear understanding of rail-related infrastructure, financial statements, asset values, and industry stability, resulting in undercapitalization and spotty capitalization.
• Economic development professionals are inadequately trained in rail-enabled economic development.
• There is a significant and costly disconnect between public-sector economic development and infrastructure planning, and private-sector business development and logistics.
• Public-sector transportation plans, private-sector logistics strategies, and infrastructure capitalization are project-based, not corridor, regional, and systems-based.
• Railroads operate in a legislative and regulatory environment diminished by outdated, illogical requirements.

Opportunities

• There is tremendous pent-up support for freight railroads.  When real concerns are included and addressed, the public will approve of rail service growth as a public good.
• Rail is critical to the nation’s need to drive “economic beneficiation” at the local and regional level.
• Convening leaders and change agents across all eight sectors will lead to new performance metrics for rail investment, technology adoption, and service expansion.  
• Advancing Collaborative Industrial Optimization will lead to action plans that are alive in the minds and work of the community.

Results

• The cost of change for institutions and the taxpayers will go down.
• The dialogue of change will be more transparent to all parties.
• The strategic plan for future unknowns will be based on collective intelligence rather than ad hoc speculation.
• Needed improvements will occur faster and with greater safety.
• Ongoing rail improvements will serve the needs of society while coinciding with capital practicality.