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[quote user="MichaelSol"][quote user="1435mm"] Your premise is truly 66 years out of date. It really should be, "What happened to railroads after 1906?" ....The 1906 date is very sharply scribed in railroad history. After that date railroad expansion and heavy reconstruction nosedived. (This is old hat, my friend. A.C. Kalmbach and D.P. Morgan co-authored the article “The Golden Age of Railroad Construction”: in the February 1949 issue of Trains that described and analyzed this watershed quite sufficiently.  Well, at least I thought they had!) [/quote]A review of relevant peer railroads, NP, MILW, GN, CBQ and CNW shows that by 1925, the average investment in property was 72% greater than that of 1906 as the result of heavy rebuilding programs and, in the case of MILW, extension. The North Western for instance, increased its physical plant investment 1906 to 1923 from $276 million to $489 million, an increase of 77%.This enormous increase in investment occured notwithstanding the 1907 Depression -- considered one of the worst in American history -- and the collapse of the European Bond Market, the historical source of American railroad construction capital, during the leadup to WWI -- a bond market that did not recover. And the 1914 opening of the Panama Canal. Too, consider that the largest percentage historically of railway mileage in receivership was during the period 1893-1903 as a result of the 1893 Depression which took out most of the transcontinentals as well as many more established companies. Miraculously, this occured without the heavy hand of ICC intervention through the Hepburn Act.By the standards of actual collapse and bankruptcy, the rail industry was in worse shape 1893-1900 than 1970-1977  -- that is, during some "Golden Age." [/quote] You are taking a side of an argument and supporting it, as a good law student should. But for those of us interested in the truth, what is the other side of the coin?
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