STB’s Elliott Plans Three-Pronged Rail Reform Strategy

The Surface Transportation Board is poised to mount a three-pronged regulatory reform effort that could expand its activism on railroad-shipper disputes and implement some measures that are in the stalled Senate rail competition legislation.

The STB program is contained in testimony prepared for delivery by Board Chairman Daniel R. Elliott at a Sept. 15 hearing by the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee.

Elliott took office in August 2009, and the STB has held off from taking bold steps in many policy areas while the Commerce panel was trying to get its bill through Congress. But he said in his second year as STB chairman "I do not want to sit still while important issues are within my power to address."

He said the agency will review its own rules on rail-to-rail competition, also referred to at times as competitive access for shippers to a connecting rail line or an alternative route. Under existing rules, long-distance railroads lock in a cargo that originate on their line or on a connecting short line for its entire route to destination, without giving shippers the option of getting competitive rate quotes from connecting carriers for part of the transit.

For the STB to consider reviewing this issue implies that Elliott has been working with Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller, D.-W.Va., to prepare such a plan. Rockefeller and other senators on the committee in early 2009 abruptly directed the STB to halt such a review, as the committee was working on a comprehensive rail regulatory overhaul.

Now, however, with time running out for passage before the committee's bill expires this year, Rockefeller said he wants to achieve the legislative's goals either through a law or through regulation. Elliott said the STB's predecessor agency, the Interstate Commerce Commission, adopted the current rail-to-rail rules. So the STB can make some changes on its own.