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Track Abandonments.
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The problem is, abandonments are not done soley for reasons of poor traffic. They are also initiated in a short sighted attempt to prevent freight from moving in and out of certain regions and/or to keep potential freight hauls out of the hands of other railroads or other modes. <br /> <br />Usually what happens is that Railroad A has a mildly profitable Branchline from Mainlineville to Secondaryville (where Railroad A has a secondary mainline), Railroad A sells the secondary main to Regional Rail operator as part of a great plan to sex up the corporate balance sheet, Railroad A then decides that the last few miles of Branchline track into Secondaryville should be lifted because they have another connection with Regional Rail a few hundred miles away (thus Branchline loses one of it's main connections), then customers on Branchline that once used it to make shipments down to Secondaryville are told by Railroad A that they can ship the roundabout way to Secondaryville (which now takes weeks to ship carload where it used to be a few days at most), customers are forced to use trucks to ship to Secondaryville (reducing overall traffic levels on Branchline), then Railroad A notices the reduced traffic and sees this as a bad omen, so they sell the rest of Branchline to Shortline operator with promises of car supply which they have no intention of fullfilling, then Shortline operator decides they can't make a go of it because they have too hard a time getting car supply from Railroad A and file for abandonment, thus Branchline is no more. <br /> <br />It's sad, but railroading is the only business out there that thinks marginalizing itself will result in more business. It is also true most of the time that branchlines that end up with reduced traffic levels do so due to internal forces, not external forces. Death by a thousand slices as the saying goes, except in these cases the slices are self inflicted.
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