Abstract
There is no prospect at present that railroad rates in the United States will be deregulated and left entirely to the control of market forces. Because of this there is a need for defensible regulatory rules to be adopted. The authors consider the US regulatory rules of constrained market pricing with particular reference to the pricing of final products (namely, origin to destination rail transport) and the pricing of a bottleneck. They conclude that economic efficiency, and through it the public interest, is served most effectively by rules that impose the same behaviour that market forces would impose on firms if those forces were present. (Author/publisher).