Washington & Old Dominion Railroad covered the railroad's corporate history, construction, and operation. This second volume expands the coverage with a geographic focus on four locations: Rosslyn, Great Falls, Leesburg, and Purcellville. The images within offer a look at the railroad's feed and grain business, railfan-type views of equipment, and a visual record of methods used to maintain the right-of-way and place equipment back on the tracks. Additionally, this work offers a history of the conversion of the right-of-way into the very popular Washington & Old Dominion Railroad Regional Park. Learn about the history of mills and their place in the local economy. See how the Burro crane was a jack of all trades. Look under the hood and inside the cab to imagine what it was like to be an engineer on one of the railroad's Baldwin-Westinghouse electric freight locomotives.

By 1933, the Pennsylvania Railroad had been in existence for nearly ninety years. During this time, it had grown from a small line, struggling to build west from the state capital in Harrisburg, to the dominant transportation company in the United States. In Volume 2 of The Pennsylvania Railroad, Albert J. Churella continues his history of this giant of American transportation. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the Pennsylvania Railroad was the world's largest business corporation and the nation's most important railroad. By 1917, the Pennsylvania Railroad, like the nation itself, was confronting a very different world. The war that had consumed Europe since 1914 was about to engulf the United States. Amid unprecedented demand for transportation, the federal government undertook the management of the railroads, while new labor policies and new regulatory initiatives, coupled with a postwar recession, would challenge the company like never before. Only time would tell whether the years that followed would signal a new beginning for the Pennsylvania Railroad or the beginning of the end. The Pennsylvania Railroad: The Age of Limits, 1917-1933, represents an unparalleled look at the history, the personalities, and the technologies of this iconic American company in a period that marked the shift from building an empire to exploring the limits of their power.

The electricity industry, one of the largest and most vital sectors of the U.S. economy, has changed dramatically in recent years. After being heavily regulated for more than a century by authorities at all levels, deregulation is taking center stage, allowing for enormous efficiency gains. Electric Choices explores the difficult questions surrounding deregulation and urges Americans to continue the transition to a market-based model.

David Gabel and David F. Weiman The chapters in this volwne address the related problems of regulating and pricing access in network industries. Interconnection between network suppliers raises the important policy questions of how to sustain competition and realize economic efficiency. To foster rivalry in any industry, suppliers must have access to customers. But unlike in other sectors, the very organization of network industries creates major impediments to potential entrants trying to carve out a niche in the market. In traditional sectors such as gas, electric, rail, and telephone services, these barriers take the form of the large private and social costs necessary to duplicate the physical infrastructure of pipelines, wires, or tracks. Few firms can afford to finance such an undertaking, because the level of sunk costs and the very large scale economies make it extremely risky. In other newer sectors, entrants face less tangible but no less pressing constraints. In the microcomputer industry, for example, high switching costs can prevent users from experimenting with alternative, but perhaps more efficient hardware platforms or operating systems. Although gateway technologies can reduce these barriers, the installed base of an incumbent can create powerful bandwagon effects that reinforce its advantage (such as the greater availability of compatible peripherals and software applications). In the era of electronic banking, entrants into the automated teller machine· (A TM) and credit card markets face a similar problem of establishing a ubiquitous presence.

This book is based on the Telecommunications Policy Research Conference which reports on research into telecommunications policy issues. While the conference is now a respectable 23 years old, this is only the second printed edition of selected papers. A new law, the Telecommunications Act of 1996, accelerated the process of integration in the communication industry and made major revisions to the Communications Act of 1934 that increase the incentive for integration within the industry. Although the papers in this volume were written prior to the passage of the new law, their importance is merely enhanced by it. They deal with fundamental, complex policy problems that arise when previously separate segments of the telecommunications industry are integrated, rather than specific regulatory rules that are likely to be changed under the new law. With the passage of this law, the timeframe for developing appropriate policies for an integrated industry has been shortened. Changes expected to occur over a period of several years will now likely occur much more rapidly. These papers provide insights to help guide the transition in the industry. Divided into five parts, this volume: * deals with problems of transforming local exchange telephone service from a monopoly in each geographical area to an interconnected competitive network of networks, * considers the pricing problems that arise in an integrated network carrying traffic of different types across multiple service providers, * examines the problem of achieving interoperability in complex networks, * considers issues of intellectual property that arise in expected integrated networks of the future, and * discusses electronic publication of scholarly journals, copyright protection, and the applicability of copyright law in the digital age.

Proposes a new expert-led international instrument to address access to essential technical standards.