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[quote user="TomDiehl"][quote user="futuremodal"] This is a clear example of why an unregulated private integrated rail network is suseptable to one internal corporate division bleeding out another for the ostensible overall benefit of the whole corporation.  The easiest way to shift money around within an integrated railroad is to defer construction and maintenance of actual track, and use that money for more non-operational items, usually involving the stock price. Deferred maintenance has been a long standing problem with the integrated model, because it is easier to hide within the total corporate balance sheet.  Separating the divisions and requiring transparancy for each division's actions is one salient check on such actions, since an infrastructure company's attempts to defer maintenance would be much tougher to get away with, e.g. where are they going to hide the transaction? [/quote] Maybe in your mind it's "clear," but to the rest of us it's clear that you want to dictate to a privately owned corporation how to spend their profits.[/quote] It's not about expenditures from profits, it's about quasi-falsification of the balance sheet.  Given the Sarbanes legislation regarding the requirement of greater transparency in corporate accounting, it may be that the railroad companies no longer can get away with deferring maintenance to sex up the balance sheet. [quote]Deferred maintenance was and is a problem because this was an area that was selected to make financial cutbacks when the company needed to do that. You imply that it was the only action they took in tough financial times. Anyone with actual accounting background will tell you that just isn't so. Even some of the former employees that were laid off during this time can tell you that. [/quote] Not sure what we disagree on here.  Deferred maintenance certainly wasn't the only action, but it seems to have been the prefered action, and that is the implication.
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