If a company can just pass fines on to the consumer and not suffer badly for it, competition in their market is totally fucked.
Which, sure, is probably true in many industries, but it's not supposed to be the case that any given business can just pass extra costs to consumers. If they could, they should already have been charging higher prices.
Railroad companies basically don’t have competition. Check out a track ownership map and see how little overlap there is, if you need to use the railroad to move stuff odds are you have one choice, and when it goes further than their track, sometimes you’ll have to truck it from one rail yard to another company’s rail yard because there’s so little interaction between railroads.
Trucking between railyards may happen. It is by far not the norm, though. They interchange traffic all the time. "So little interaction" is either ignorance or propaganda.
And, you only truck things that are already in trailers or containers. You don't truck things that are in boxcars or tank cars - the cost of unloading into a trailer just to truck it to a different railroad would be insane.
And, trucks carry, what, 70% of freight in this country? That's the railroads' competition. It's not other railroads. (That said, competition between railroads is not the constraint on railroads passing the cost of fines onto their customers.)
I think you’re focusing on my mistake estimating the size of my supporting point. The existence of trucking between rail yards was meant as a surprising fact to highlight the fact that the railroad companies don’t go out of their way to maximise their level of interconnection. If they interconnected to a higher level, the sort needed for meaningful competition, then you’ll never truck between rail yards because someone would be competing for that money since loading and unloading containers costs money, any practical solution that avoids it would have margin (the loading and unloading costs plus the trucking mileage costs) to work with where some profit could be found…
And obviously the primary competitor to shipping via train is trucks, I deliberately ignored it because there’s a huge class of rail freight that can’t really use trucks (non-perishable bulk commodities like coal, potash, construction gravel for cement, bauxite and other minerals) and this is slowly becoming a larger component of their bottom line because they aren’t incentivised to compete with each other, let alone the trucking industry… they are all in their own individual races to the bottom by way of profit maximising efforts like precision scheduled railroading and a general aversion to capital spending inherent in their focus on business metrics such as the “operating ratio” which is quickly undermined by capital expenditure on things like new locomotives and rolling stock. Most of the “parallel running” (two companies can ship from A to B) rail lines where they had to compete with other companies were dumped as not productive enough long ago… (or never built back in the days when it was cheaper, or got rationalised away as part of the government restructuring on the east coast… because railroad history is a whole different subject)
HSBC leaders never went to jail for being the bank of trafficking $2bn of drugs. As in, they recognized the deed, and signed off with the DoJ a deal with no executive would be sent to prison.
Truth be told, CIA needed the drug sales to fund ISIS before it was cool, but I digress. Anyway, if you expect corporations to be held responsible in penal courts…
