Login
or
Register
Home
»
Trains Magazine
»
Forums
»
General Discussion
»
CN Purchased BC Rail
Edit post
Edit your reply below.
Post Body
Enter your post below.
[quote]QUOTE: <i>Originally posted by CSSHEGEWISCH</i> <br /><br />Keep in mind that if land grants, both federal and state, did not exist, it is quite probable that it would have taken a lot longer for most Western railroads to be built. Also, the Great Northern Railway was built without any land grants. <br /> <br />I find it amazing to find that people still use the land-grant issue as a reason to justify the forced continuance of unprofitable services,. <br />[/quote] <br /> <br />The St. Paul & Pacific, the original predecessor to the eventual Great Northern, received land grants totalling nearly 3 million acres. This was more than enough to put the financing of the Great Northern's construction on solid footing. Without that original land grant, the Great Northern would have never existed. If building cross country railroads without any government aid was possible, then a railroad to Alaska would have been built long ago. The only reason we have railroads from the MIdwest to the Pacific Coast but not to Alaska is that the former had land grants, the latter had (has) none. <br /> <br />You also need to differentiate between the regional service responsibilities that came with the land grants and what is de facto "unprofitable" rail service. If it loses money, it is unprofitable. If it returns more in income than it costs in liabilities, it is profitable. What CN and the others are doing is setting minimum profit levels and using that yardstick to determine which lines get lopped. None of the Wisconsin or BC lines were money losers, they just didn't make enough compared to CN's other lines. <br /> <br />Railroads are utilities, make no mistake about it. Rail lines, power lines, pipelines, all are part of the nation's infrastructure network, and as such governments need to take actions to prevent that infrastructure from being canaballized and/or short circuited. And utilities are charged with providing their service to both urban and rural customers. If the electric utilities behaved like the Class I's, they'd stop service to rural customers and focus soley on urban customers, because the maintenance costs of serving rural customers are higher than those for serving denser populations. <br /> <br />This idea of railroads being just like any other business is ridiculous.
Tags (Optional)
Tags are keywords that get attached to your post. They are used to categorize your submission and make it easier to search for. To add tags to your post type a tag into the box below and click the "Add Tag" button.
Add Tag
Update Reply
Join our Community!
Our community is
FREE
to join. To participate you must either login or register for an account.
Login »
Register »
Search the Community
Newsletter Sign-Up
By signing up you may also receive occasional reader surveys and special offers from Trains magazine.Please view our
privacy policy
More great sites from Kalmbach Media
Terms Of Use
|
Privacy Policy
|
Copyright Policy