Railroads: further details

Chris Mayer writes about railroads in today's Daily Reckoning Australia. After describing Chinese technical feats, he looks at factors that make railways more attractive in today's America:

- Container transportation is booming as America imports more of its non-perishable goods. But fuel costs are rising. The energy-efficiency of rail is an advantage over trucking.

- The US population continues to move to the cities, where land is at a premium. Rail is more space-efficient, and less polluting than cars or planes.

So Buffett is doing his customary thing, of backing dull, dependable, comprehensible business that's going with the flow.

Looking at wider issues, maybe a highly concentrated population implies not only highly-capitalised amenities, but centralised power. How will America change as urbanisation continues? Will the internalised society (life governed by shared expectations of decent behaviour, liberty, egalitariansm) become a society of rule imposed from outside and above?

As it happens, I am reading Bill Bryson's childhood memoir of Des Moines, Iowa and the Fifties ("The life and times of the Thunderbolt Kid"), and he remembers when America had millions of small, family-owned farms and the Midwest was dotted with thriving little towns. When the farm went, what went with it?

And coming back to the resource-efficiency/sustainability arguments, I have an idea that although cities seem to be more efficient (because people are closer to each other), they are highly entropic - it takes a lot of work to stop them falling apart in all sorts of ways. Maybe the more distant future is back out on the prairies, with a return to localised production and self-government.