VitalRail Value Proposition

Challenges

• The rail industry, government, 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 growth capital providers compared to industries with less resilience, importance, and opportunity.
• Progress among diverse actors in adopting new technologies 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 commerce.
• 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• Railroads operate in a legislative and regulatory environment diminished by outdated, illogical requirements.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 generate action plans that are alive in the minds and work of the community.
• VitalRail’s organizers, facilitators, and constantly updated Multilogue record provides participants with a highly productive avenue for results, contribution, and satisfaction.  

Results

• The cost of change for institutions and 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 and coincide with capital practicality.
• Adopting new technologies, or those proven effective overseas, will bring innovation, safety improvements, and productivity gains to North American railroads and its users.
• Building positive relationships with shippers and other stakeholders will deliver enormous benefits and open new growth paths.
• More collaborative and positive approaches to labor management will attract thousands of new workers, offsetting retirements in a problematic hiring market.
• Railroads improved flexibility, reliability, and willingness to serve the needs of small and early-stage shippers will grow its customer base into many more high-volume shippers.
• This alignment will unleash a groundswell of support from policymakers, the financial community, and the public for freight railroads as the center of North America’s economic and environmental revitalization.

Next Steps

We need your input. As a leader or specialist will you join us in VitalRail?