The RR industry since Staggers has almost reached the point an economist once described: in any competitive and mainly unregulated business, you will end up with 2 1/2 competitors (2 big, roughly equal ones and a gaggle of others that collectively add up to 1/2 of one of the big ones). We haven't quite gotten there yet, but are close if you divide the country down the Mississippi and ignore CP/CN/KCS (which probably are most of the 1/2). That theory results in large chunks of the market that are effectively monopolies, but that's OK by those in power now (especially but by no means exclusively Repubs). I wouldn't expect any resurgence of the ICC or trust-busting soon.

On another note, has anybody noticed that except for the lack of "integral trains" the setup we have now is pretty close to what a certain Mr. Knieling promoted back in the 1960s in TRAINS? And 2-mile-long intermodals with distributed power probably come pretty close to his train idea without the inflexibility. He billed his idea (abandon everything that doesn't produce a ton of sold ton-miles to trucks, then run everything that's left in unit trains or containers) as a license to print money, and overall it seems like the RRs we have now have done that. Yes, we still have some loose-car railroading, and East Hamswitch is probably still out there somewhere (how long does it take a loose car to get across country?), but it's a small part of the picture and seems to be managed mainly by freight forwarders (alias short lines in many cases) rather than the big RRs that just run the trains. I'm pretty sure we can thank Staggers for that.

Cheers!