Railway reforms are rooted in the growth of competition from trucks, autos, barges and airlines. One of the first great national railway crises was the collapse of the Penn Central railroad in the U.S. in the early 1970s. There were subsequent financial train wrecks in Japan, Germany, Argentina, Mexico, Brazil and Poland, all of which eventually forced changes. Most of the significant reform efforts began in a financial crisis which threatened either shutdown or at least significant harm to the railway. Governments also discovered that railways in financial crisis invariably offer poor service. Whether weak cash flow causes, or results from, poor service may be debatable, but that they occur together is not.
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