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Murphy - I'll tell you what a Walla is if you'll tell me what a Kadoka is. What I was trying to point out in my diatribe is that in the heydays railroads were more likely to reinvest a significant portion of profits made on local properties back into those local properties. Nowadays, with the megamergers and global ownership of railroad stocks, the railroads have taken profits made off local properties and redirected them to properties far from the locality. It is clearly an economic suicide pill to engage in such business practices, but that's how the current system foster's itself. It would be like the old McDonald's analogy oft used on this forum. Say you have your primary McDonald's dives within the heart of an urban area, and then you have your smaller franchises in the outlying areas. Normally, the management would return a certain amount of profit from each store back to that store to aid in upkeep, et al. But if McDonald's acted like the railroads, they'd take the profits from the outlying stores and return little if any back to those stores (only reinvesting in the centralized stores), so the outlying stores become rundown and dirty, putting off customers. Then the RR-like management would force the outlying stores to raise their prices to take care of the defered maintenance on those stores, putting off even more of those customers. Finally, the stores are either shut down due to "low profitability" or sold off to some fly by night outfit with the caveat that they must continue to use McDonald's product and price according to McDonald's operating philosophy. Luckily for that metaphorical McDonald's customer base, there is relative ease of entry into the fast food market, so you will not have a case of :"take our monopoly or go hungry" attitude of the railroads.
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