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We libertarians oppose antitrust laws and regulation of market power. Monopolies should only be broken up if there is evidence to suggest that these monopolies arose because of government. Governments are arguably the biggest cause of monopolies through exclusive license to provide a product, land grants, subsidies and tariffs. Libertarians not only oppose antirust but also these interventions I just mentioned. One example is the break up of Northern Securities and Co. This was a railroad company that was the result of mergers between union pacific and northern pacific railway and many others. Union and northern had significant government support, from land grants to subsidies per mile of railroad track.There are many arguments against antitrust but I will focus on just one to save time―empirical evidence.Aims of Antitrust LawsAnti-trust legislation first began in 1890 under the Sherman Anti-Trust Act followed by the Clayton Act of 1914. This began the era of government regulation of monopoly power and a crackdown on ‘uncompetitive’ practices. The end of goal of these laws is to protect consumers from evil monopolies.Case Against Anti-TrustEmpirical Evidence:The first argument against anti-trust laws is that they assume the development of a monopoly results in inefficiency and exploitation of consumers. However, the basis for anti-trust laws falls flat on its face simply when looking at historical evidence. Take for example, Standard Oil. This company was founded by John D. Rockefeller in the late 1860s and became the most demonized company in America by the 1880s, when market share rose sharply. Eventually, the Supreme Court ruled that Standard Oil must be broken up in 1911. The basis of their decision was a violation of the Sherman anti-trust act. However, while Standard Oil was seen to have engaged in anti-competitive practices as far as Sherman was concerned, none of these behaviours resulted in exploitation of consumers. Between 1870 and 1890, Standard Oil’s market share increased from 4% to 90% of the petroleum refining market. They gained this market share by either making deals with crude oil suppliers or buying them altogether, reduced rates with railroad companies and investments into R&D. The effect was that Standard Oil lit up almost every home in the U.S with Kerosene lamps. While this ‘ruthless’ behaviour was eventually interpreted as ‘anti-competitive and illegal’, the result was lower prices for consumers and lower costs for Standard Oil. In 1869, Rockefeller’s Kerosene cost 30 cents per gallon. By 1880, the price fell to 9 cents and then to 7.4 cents per gallon in 1890. By 1897, prices fell further to just 5.9 cents per gallon (source: Armentano, 1986). In addition, Standard Oil’s acquisition of refineries and integration of the production process led to reduction in costs of production. Between 1870 and 1885, the refining costs per gallon fell from 3 cents to 0.452 cents (source: L Reed, Foundation for Economic Education). This implies that the formation of the Standard Oil monopoly arose from efficiency, resulting in lower costs of production, translating into lower prices for consumers. There is further proof that Standard Oil earned its large market share. Simply look at Rockefeller’s testimony on Standard Oil’s success to the Industrial Commission:‘‘I ascribe the success of the Standard to its consistent policy to make the volume of its business large through the merits and cheapness of its products. It has spared no expense in finding, securing, and utilizing the best and cheapest methods of manufacture. It has sought for the best superintendents and workmen and paid the best wages. It has not hesitated to sacrifice old machinery and old plants for new and better ones. It has placed its manufactories at the points where they could supply markets at the least expense. It has not only sought markets for its principal products, but for all possible by-products, sparing no expense in introducing them to the public. It has not hesitated to invest millions of dollars in methods of cheapening the gathering and distribution of oils by pipe lines, special cars, tank steamers, and tank wagons. It has erected tank stations at every important railroad station to cheapen the storage and delivery of its products. It has spared no expense in forcing its products into the markets of the world among people civilized and uncivilized. It has had faith in American oil, and has brought together millions of money for the purpose of making it what it is, and holding its markets against the competition of Russia and all the many countries which are producers of oil and competitors against American oil’’(John D Rockefeller, 1899).This shows that Standard Oil earned its market share through superiority rather than ‘illegal’ behaviour. Given that the end goal of anti-trust laws is to protect consumers from monopolies, the lower prices for consumers shows that efficiency is a consequence of monopoly power. Therefore, these facts prove that anti-trust laws are unnecessary and potentially harmful. They are harmful in that preventing monopolists from gaining a 90% market share, could potentially deprive consumers of even lower prices and superior products. As a result, anti-trust laws assume that a large market share is harmful but completely ignore how these monopolies were formed. Monopolies that were formed due to government action of course need to be addressed, but this also implies that the vast majority of monopolies are not due to the free market, which the government is so keen to restrain.In fact, Standard Oil was unable to maintain is market share between 1890 and the year it was broken up. For example, by 1910, Standard Oil’s market share fell to 64%, down from 90% in 1890 (source: Armentano, 1986). This implies that free market monopolies are unlikely but, in the event, that they do form, market shares often deteriorate over time as newcomers find more efficient ways to produce a particular good. This is particularly true for Standard Oil.Another example is ALCOA or the Aluminium Corporation of America is another example. ALCOA was founded in the late 1800s and was indicted in 1937. However, it was not broken up. Like Standard Oil the company monopolized the aluminium market through economies of scale and innovation. Between 1887 and 1937, the price of aluminium ingot (the primary product for the company) fell from $5 to 22 cents per pound (source: Armentano, 1986)! This is a significant decrease in price. Some supporters of antitrust claim that ALCOA had been able to maintain its market share because of patents and legal right to produce aluminium. However, ALCOA’s patents had expired by 1906, leaving them exposed to competition that could eat up their market share. Thus, the only explanation is that ALCOA was superior to its competitors. In other words, no one wanted to compete with ALCOA.Another example is Microsoft’s monopolization of the operating systems market. As of 2018, Microsoft’s market share was 75% of the global computer operating systems market (source: Statistica). However, most people who own desktops, which use Microsoft operating system are not exploited in terms of price or quality. Over time, the operating systems produced by Microsoft have improved since Windows was first launched in 1985. The difference between Windows Vista (released in 2006) and Windows 10 (released in 2014) is huge. Notable differences include more available applications and higher processing speed. This is proof that Microsoft has maintained its market share by providing consumers with better products.What Have We Learned?·All 3 companies continued to reduce their prices.·Competition was the means to these monopolies. In other words, while these 3 companies gained more than 75% of the market, they did so because of their superiority over their competitors. Consequently, these monopolies arose because consumers rewarded these companies more than their competitors.·Antitrust laws make the mistake of assuming monopolies are bad but do not consider how these monopolies occur.

I’ll first have to start by disagreeing with a lot of other answers saying Citizens United. Progressive reactions to it have, by and large, been the sort of thing that one normally sees from conservatives (I would say that Citizens United is now more or less the equivalent for the left of what Roe v. Wade has become for the right—a windmill that will be tilted at for decades to raise money that will ultimately be spent to further other causes, all the time with secret hopes that said windmill shall always stand, because what would we do without it? Bernie Sanders got that ball rolling on the campaign trial last year)First, a lot of people seem to think that the Supreme Court created corporate personhood with that case. Uh, no. And guess what? It had recognized corporate personhood even well before—not so much in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Co. (the famous case with the headnote, about which vast conspiracy theories were spun even at the time, and now; all of them omitting the fact that the corporate personhood issue in that case had been litigated and decided at the lower court level and the Supreme Court, as it does even today, decided not to disturb)—but in Pembina Consolidated Silver Mining Co. v. Pennsylvania, 125 U.S. 181 (1886), where the opinions themselves actually discuss the issue. There the Court holds that while private corporations are indeed “persons” within the language of the Fourteenth Amendment,Under the designation of "person" there is no doubt that a private corporation is included. Such corporations are merely associations of individuals united for a special purpose and permitted to do business under a particular name and have a succession of members without dissolution.they are not covered by the Privileges and Immunities Clause as actual persons are:The state is not prohibited from discriminating in the privileges it may grant to foreign corporations as a condition of their doing business or hiring offices within its limits, provided always such discrimination does not interfere with any transaction by such corporations of interstate or foreign commerce. It is not every corporation, lawful in the state of its creation, that other states may be willing to admit within their jurisdiction, or consent that it have offices in them -- such, for example, as a corporation for lotteries. And even where the business of a foreign corporation is not unlawful in other states, the latter may wish to limit the number of such corporations or to subject their business to such control as would be in accordance with the policy governing domestic corporations of a similar character. The states may therefore require for the admission within their limits of the corporations of other states, or of any number of them, such conditions as they may choose, without acting in conflict with the concluding provision of the first section of the Fourteenth Amendment.In other words, exactly the sort of explanation the conspiracy-theory view of this says was never provided when clerk Davis had supposedly sneaked it into Santa Clara two years earlier (And that conspiracy theory, in its time, though outwardly addressing popular loathing of the railroads, was meant to serve the interests of the Southern states by reducing the Fourteenth Amendment to some mere Trojan horse of the railroad). Progressives ought to consider this when throwing this conspiracy around as if it were settled fact).And by the way, in this case, as the above quotes suggest, the corporation lost. Pembina, a Colorado corporation that (as its name suggests) mined silver in that state, was largely owned by a bunch of Philadelphia moneymen, as was not uncommon at the time. They had the corporation establish a lounge for them in Philadelphia so the investors could relax and check the news from the silverfields out West. Enough other corporations did this in Philly that the state got mad and began charging out-of-state (i.e., “foreign”) corporations a license fee of about $1 for every $4,000 in capital stock they had to maintain such facilities in Pennsylvania if they had no other operations in the state. Pembina sued, arguing it was thus denied equal protection of the laws, and as you can read above the Court (the same Court that had also heard Santa Clara, by the way) had none of that.It was only a dissenting opinion by Justice Hugo Black decades later that (ironically given that he was arguing against the concept) gave some substance to the notion that Santa Clara enshrined corporate personhood into American law (This is not, unfortunately, the first or even last time that some offhand remark by a Supreme Court Justice has created a legal monster, as historians know, and as I will discuss when we do get to my least favorite Supreme Court decision that’s still valid precedent).And even without that flawed history, progressives need to reconsider their opposition to Citizens United. All those people who think it gave corporations all the same rights as physical persons need to read the later FCC v. AT&T Inc. (562 U.S. 397), in which the respondent tries to assert that corporate personhood extends so far as allowing corporations the same privacy rights as physical persons under the Freedom of Information Act … and the Court unanimously smacks them down, with Chief Justice Roberts ending the opinion with “We trust that AT&T will not take [this] personally.”Nor was Hobby Lobby v. Burwell decided with Citizens United as controlling precedent. The petitioners argued that corporate personhood allowed Hobby Lobby to claim First Amendment religious freedom, but that was not the only argument they made, and citing that precedent from the ’30s (can’t remember what it’s called right now) that says that if the Court can decide a case potentially implicating a constitutional question in a manner that avoids the constitutional question, it should do so, the majority instead chose to travel the twists and turns of statutory interpretation of the Religious Freedom Restoration and Affordable Care acts, interpretations Justice Ginsburg rightly called out as convoluted in her dissent, to reach its decision for Hobby Lobby. Indeed, I have always read the penultimate paragraph of Hobby Lobby, noting that the Court is not taking up the First Amendment claim, as a broad hint to the organizations and interests that brought the suit in the first place that had the case had to be decided on First Amendment grounds, the result might have been otherwise, and to make sure that doesn’t happen (It would therefore be an interesting turn of events if a future Democratic Congress and President were to amend the ACA and RFRA such that Hobby Lobby or whoever would have to make the First Amendment claim).Speaking of the issues underlying that case, I also would advise progressives to be careful about getting rid of corporate personhood as a legal concept. It was one of the counterarguments to the “fetal personhood” arguments made by anti-abortionists: that the law recognizes forms of personhood that do not enjoy the full rights of physical persons. You’d have a harder time protecting abortion rights without corporate personhood.I should also add that those of us who do ground-level political work for Democratic candidates love Citizens United because it frees unions to be more active. It’s such a nice feeling for your campaign when one of the unions brings a whole bunch of its members to a phonebank or canvass session since they can now do this. Because of Citizens United, those guys and gals in the red T-shirts can talk to anyone, not just their own members. It makes union support mean something more than just a nice check.Really, the proper liberal response to Citizens United would be to work to strengthen unions. Do enough of that and you’d accomplish the near political jiu-jitsu of, someday, Republicans being the ones to call for Citizens United to be overturned (and, just as they do today, frantically reminding Democrats that this was once their cause).And lastly, I really would like to know just what was this progressive Golden Age that suddenly was brought to a crashing end in 2010. I certainly don’t remember any Gl
ückenzeit where all sorts of progressive legislative victories were achieved on a daily basis.Now, after all this, the actual answer to the question asked …For this, I think that when the OP says “precedent” s/he means a decision still in force. I would further add that this can’t just be a decision whose outcome you don’t like. It has to be one with head-scratching legal logic. And, even (ahem) better), one with negative consequences.Even better, one most people outside that particular legal subfield have never heard of.I have, and have had for a long time, one that satisfies all four:Southland Corp. v. Keating, 465 U.S. 1 (1984).I can state without reservation that this is the worst Supreme Court decision of the past 40 years. I came to this conclusion while researching and writing the linked Wikipedia article on it several years ago.On the surface, it is unremarkable. A dispute between 7–11 franchisees and the chain’s parent company reached the California Supreme Court. The issue was the company’s motions to compel arbitration in the cases per the agreements it had concluded under California law with the plaintiff franchisees. They disagreed, citing a state law passed to protect small franchise owners that prohibited such clauses from being enforced. The California Supreme Court agreed with the franchisees, after which the U.S. Supreme Court granted Southland’s cert petition.Southland argued that the Federal Arbitration Act, passed back in the 1920s, was meant to encourage the use of arbitration as widely as possible in resolving the sort of business disputes that take up a lot more of federal and state dockets than the sort of conservatives who relentlessly attack tort litigation filed by little people and the lawyers who represent them want you to realize. Yes, even cases in state courts, based on contracts executed under state law.Their justification? That one line refers, somewhat offhandedly, to “the courts of the United States”, which is taken to mean not just the federal courts but all those of the states as well.This seems rather a thin reed to hang so much on. But fortunately for Southland, and unfortunately for their franchisees, they had had help from an unexpected source: that great liberal lion of the Supreme Court, Justice William Brennan.In the previous year, the Court had heard exactly the type of commercial dispute I was referring to above, one with the weighty and alliterative title of Moses H. Cone Memorial Hospital v. Mercury Construction Corp., 460 U.S. 1 (1983). If you have some experience of this kind of dispute over construction projects and their immediate aftermath, this case makes good reading as it will probably bring back some not-so-fond memories of the sort that make the term “punch list” have more than its usual meaning.That dispute had also involved a motion to compel arbitration, filed by the respondent in federal court after the petitioner had initiated litigation in North Carolina state court against an Alabama-based contractor. The main issue was not so much arbitration as the abstention doctrine, i.e., the conditions under which federal courts can let a state court hear a case that would otherwise properly be before federal courts, which are supposed to “zealously guard” that jurisdiction generally. And, in that area, it set a small precedent, in allowing the relative process of the two actions to be among the factors considered.However, despite the state-court action being further along than Mercury’s motion in federal court to compel arbitration, the Court sided with the construction company and made the hospital arbitrate. Brennan wrote for a 6–3 majority that the district’s court’s stay was an abuse of discretion.At one point he writes of “Congress' clear intent, in the Arbitration Act, [was] to move the parties to an arbitrable dispute out of court and into arbitration as quickly and easily as possible”, with a footnote stating that one section of the Act “is a congressional declaration of a liberal federal policy favoring arbitration agreements”Later, he says, by way of this, that “Federal law in the terms of the Arbitration Act governs that issue in either state or federal court.”Neither of these dicta cite any authorities to support those confidently made claims.Remember what I said earlier about the unintended consequences of Supreme Court Justices making offhand remarks like this in their opinions? Here’s when it happened again.When the respondents in Southland, a year later, were putting together their briefs and preparing for oral argument, they naturally researched the existing case law and soon came across Brennan’s Cone Hospital dicta. This was at odds with everything they thought they knew about arbitration law, but … Brennan had said it! Maybe he knows something we don’t! Best, then, not to really challenge this much in our arguments and focus on something else.Having thus been hornswoggled into conceding on their major issue, it is not surprising that the franchisees lost their case in the Supreme Court. Chief Justice Burger, writing for a 7–2 majority, accepted Brennan’s divination of the intent of Congress in passing the Arbitration Act 60 years earlier, a finding later research has called into question. Thus armed, he held that Congress clearly could not have intended to limit its applicability to federal courts since so much litigation between businesses, as in the instant case, takes place in state courts, and it was passed as substantive law under the Commerce Clause, which allows Congress to prescribe rules state courts must follow, so as to prevent state legislatures from passing laws which would undercut arbitration agreements from being easily enforced. He returned to Brennan’s second dictum as if that settled things.Justice Stevens, concurring, agreed with O’Connor that the actual legislative history of the Act demonstrated her point of view, but that intervening developments had pushed the act into territory supported by the majority. He worried, however, that the Court’s decision was inadvertently rendering any exercise of state power in this matter, an area where he saw the states as traditionally having jurisdiction, effectively moot.Sandra Day O’ Connor wrote in her dissent, joined by Rehnquist, that she saw the Arbitration Act as clearly a procedural rule for federal courts only:Section 2, like the rest of the FAA, should have no application whatsoever in state courts. Assuming, to the contrary, that § 2 does create a federal right that the state courts must enforce, state courts should nonetheless be allowed, at least in the first instance, to fashion their own procedures for enforcing the right. Unfortunately, the Court seems to direct that the arbitration clause at issue here must be specifically enforced; apparently no other means of enforcement is permissible.OK. So, bad law. Bad law that, when 20 attorneys general from both political parties filed an amicus asking the Court to overturn it in 1995’s Allied-Bruce Terminix Cos. v. Dobson, (513 U.S. 265) the Court instead expanded its reach, in an opinion by another liberal justice, Stephen Breyer, citing language that referred to “any transaction affecting interstate commerce” which the Court took to mean Congress wanted it applied as broadly as possible. Bad law that, ironically, it has been a justice liberals loathe, Clarence Thomas, who has most fiercely resisted it over the years. Bad law that Antonin Scalia called as much when he joined Thomas in dissenting from in that 1995 case, while O’Connor writes the lamest concurrence ever, basically blaming stare decisis for her desire to continue getting along with everybody.So why should this matter to you if you’re not a lawyer or arbitrator?Because once Southland came down, large corporations, especially credit-card companies, realized they could write their consumer adhesion contracts such as to make any litigation impracticable. Congress had always imagined arbitration as something to take place between parties of relatively equal economic and legal sophistication, such as businesses, other businesses and their unions; now it was being used for consumer contracts, a use severely restricted in the European countries conservatives often point to as models of using arbitration to reduce litigation.The credit card companies changed their contracts without letting anyone know, just making it easier for dicier people to get credit, and when these people felt (or, more often, actually were) screwed and thought they could have their day in court, they found that without realizing it they had signed that away for some process where they got teleconferenced into some corporate kangaroo court somewhere, and then sued for breach of contract when they (unsurprisingly) lost. Debt mounted and while individual people might have acted irresponsibly to get there, the whole country’s economy has suffered as a result (see 2008, the Minsky trap and the private debt overhang. Not all of that was mortgages). Then it got used in cell contracts, leading to another case where the Supreme Court used it to basically cut off class-action litigation. And despite occasional resistance and second thoughts from some appellate judges, the whole process keeps advancing.All because of Southland Corp. v. Keating …

Well by railroad standards not alot but by what anyone else might consider = OMG.By the real numbers an average diesel locomotive burns 3,5–5 gallons per hour. I would guess that applies to newer classes of locomotives where a smart technology is applied whereas older locomotives like a GP38 might burn TWICE THAT.Something many do not realize is that a prime mover in a locomotive car body is NOT like one in a semi truck in the way it idles up and down in regards to fuel consumption.On a semi truck you idle UP FOR POWER GAIN because the engine/power plant is DIRECTLY CONNECTED TO THE DRIVE TRAIN ITSELF.On a locomotive this is NOT the case because the engine/power plant is DIRECTLY CONNECTED TO A ELECTRICAL GENERATING MECHANISM which could be a generator, and alternator or combination of the two.And these produce ELECTRICITY which travels through cables to ELECTRIC TRACTION MOTORS THAT ARE MOUNTED ON THE AXLES.By that, a locomotive at idle may consuming almost as much fuel as it would be in motion in many circumstances.One more thing to factor = TOTAL NUMBER OF LOCOMOTIVES INVOLVED.Union Pacific with perhaps a 7,000 locomotive fleet and maybe 1/2 on rail in active running at any given time with another 2,000 stationed at strategic points for train makeup and application.So for them it could easily be 2,000 locomotives consuming 3.5 gallons per hour for a grand total of close to 12,000 total gallons being wasted basically.CHANGES TO THE GAMESometime around 2000, whole new approaches to an old world problem began to emerge and shockingly were embraced by the railroad community who traditionally has a LONG history of alwats dragging their feet regarding certain advancements especially when they were from sources OUTSIDE THE RAILROAD COMMUNITY ITSELF.One of those of course was the advent of GENSETS where a SMALLER PRIME MOVER was connected to a mega battery pack.The prime mover could be as big as 12 cylinders but would ONLY FIRE THE CYLINDERS NEEDED AT ANY GIVEN TIME so you could be running on only 2 cylinders to keep the batteries charged or all cylinders under super heavy loads.The other advent was a theory of a DUAL ENGINE arrangement where a MICRO ENGINE would be onboard and would run with the prime mover itself shut down.These were not much bigger than some lawn mower engines and would keep the computer links all engaged and the fuel warmed.COLD FUEL IS ALMOST IMPOSSIBLE TO START WHICH WAS WHY IDLING WAS REQUIRED.One event that really pushed these developments was the sudden super surge in oil prices in the W Bush years and suddenly mega fuel purchasers LOST THEIR WHOLESALE BUYING POWER.At one point airlines were paying like .50c per gallon for kerosene which suddenly shot up to like $2.50.The railroad industry in the US saw a similar increase and it was so huge that it could have bankrupted several major companies.This was also the cause to a major push into AC TRACTION MOTORS because they have a much better adhesion as well as a MUCH GREATER CAPACITY OF CONTINUOUS LOAD and also give much better motor braking effects which all combined for a MUCH BETTER FUEL EFFICIENCY.FOR YOUR INFORMATIONFrom sources like the FRA (Federal Railroad Administration USA) and the North American Association of Railroads, I can give these items sourced from those official organizations + a few 3rd party product producers who are at ground zero in regards to designing a better fuel economy for these thirsty beasts.Wi-Tronix gives these items:As to the why, the usual operational responses include, “It’s easier to keep it idling than to shut it down and have to restart it later, restarting a locomotive takes a lot of time” or “I can’t risk the chance that it won’t start again when I need it – what if the batteries are weak, or it has a bad starter?”Choosing a very conservative 4 hours per day that each of these locomotives are idling where they could have been shutdown and not negatively impacted operations. Using an average of 3.5 gallons of fuel burned per hour idling per locomotive – some easy math shows an annual consumption of over 20 million gallons of excess idle, which is over 4% of the total annual fuel consumption for that particular Class I railroad – do we have your attention yet? If the price of diesel fuel was $2.00 per gallon, this translates to $40 Million – and that is an annual savings not a one-time savings. That is a lot of fuel and a lot of potential budget impact.The EPA specifically has been looking at SWITCHER LOCOMOTIVES due to them being regarded as “bad neighbor” pollution offenders.They estimate a number of approximately 5,000 switcher locomotives nationally that average 2500–3000 IDLE HOURS YEARLY EACH and a consumption of 60 MILLION GALLONS YEARLY all as wasted resources.The EPA findings have had the certain impact that in places like Texas and California there is a mandated requirement for GENSET locomotives at all switching locations and the numbers are to work towards 100% by a certain date.So now you can see that this is not only a COSTLY expense for railroads but also a pollution issue as well.As we speak there are 2 more advancements in play:1 = locomotive isolating programs2 = liquified natural gasThe first one of those has done much to create overall better fuel economy.It works like this:You have a train with 5 locomotives on the front and 2 more at the rear as distributed power.THE NUMBER AND SIZES OF LOCOMOTIVES ARE MATHEMATICALLY DETERMINED BY THE WEIGHT OF THE TRAIN, THE HIGHEST GRADE, AND THE STEEPEST SLOPE ALL WORKED INTO AN EQUATION.In other words how much horsepower will be required to move this train at a certain specified speed over the route + carry it over the highest point on the route + allow it to safely apply braking (with a reserve capacity) over the entire course of the route.So the train has 1–2 high point on a 200 mile route and several places where long braking applications will be required.Because of that the horsepower rating required = 7 locomotives.HOWEVER although that was required for the HIGH POINTS AND BRAKING POINTS, maybe only 5 locomotives were required for the rest.Because the locomotives are all COMPUTER CONNECTED, 2 of the locomotives will be manually disconnected (isolated) from the rest for a temporary span on the route and they power down to idle or can even be powered down completely especially if the micro engines are onboard to keep the computer systems online and the fuel warmed.On the Kansas City Southern between Kansas City and Houston are 2 places notorious for needed extra power.In the old days these would be HELPER DISTRICTS where several locomotives would ease up to the rear and push the train over the hills and/or couple on with airbrakes (+dynamic in many places) to keep the train under control on the downhill side.However these required entire crews and having rested crews available has been a thorn in the side of major railroading so it was decided to delete the helper districts so crews could be placed into the total moving train pool, and simply add more locomotives to the train itself to provide for those break back places.So the extra engines are along for the ride for maybe 80% of the entire trip so why have them running at full power?So you can see how this is a very technical application of computer technology.Next has been the advent of LIQUIFIED NATURAL GAS. Mother Earth produces METHANE as a by product of thousands of natural processes and is an endless thing.It is also mega clean burning.WAY BACK IN THE 1990’s, Burlington Northern adapted several locomotives into BI-FUEL and designed a type of FUEL CAR for the liquified natural gas to be carried in.The experiments were VERY SUCCESSFUL and was a form of throwback in essence to the great GAS TURBINES Union Pacific had a fleet of the in the 1960’s.But fuel oil was being bought for pennies on the dollar so there was no economic advantage to wholesale changing over so UP was the only railroad to ever really attempt the gas turbine reality due to their 5000hp which was ENORMOUS at that time.BNSF CEO MATT ROSE decided to try and make that railroad as fuel conscious as possible and re-opened the project circa 2004 for further study.MEANTIME DOWN IN THE DEEP SOUTH….Florida East Coast opted to go all the way and as we speak have several sets of these in operation. They are 2 engines semi permanently coupled together with a specially designed tank car in between which hauls the liquified natural gas.The locomotives can switch into FULL GAS BURNING MODE AT ANY TIME and switch back to diesel at any time. As far as I know, 1 engine can be burning diesel with the other one burning natural gas.Within the next 5 years I believe FEC will be fully adapted over to this for all mainline trains and BNSF has begun assigning locomotive sets in a similar configuration and is projected to be up to 80% by 2030.CSX AND NS are also suddenly looking at this. Liquified natural gas is LESS VOLITILE THAN DIESEL FUEL IN ACCIDENTS and is much more eco friendly.SUMMARY3 gallons or so per hour in itself my not seem so large but when you factor in the total number of engines involved and the total number of hours per year….it suddenly looms into the MULTI MILLIONS and if EPA is correct 60 million+ gallons every year.So it can be better and in the past decade has really taken a turn towards being better in earnest. Finally the rail industry at large is getting its head out of its behind and looking at practical things that really have major impacts on the ecology and economy which is all good.