You have to have at least a 20%+ return on investment for them to consider, IMO.
Canadian Pacific is already in the luxury train business and they are a Class I. However they have to be making a decent profit on that service to remain in it and justify it to their stockholders. I think at some point CP will tire of the operation and either sell it or stop it entirely.
A long time ago Kimberly-Clark a large paper products company saw that it had a small fleet of company planes and was shuttling a lot of employees back and forth between the paper mills in Wisconsin and Corporate HQ in Dallas. Someone got the idea to start an airline based on that base traffic and they named it Midwest Express airlines. Eventually, Kimberly-Clark tired of the operation and sold it off.....later it went bankrupt or merged away (not sure which). Hence I think CP will do the same thing. I would be really surprised if they bought more equipment and expanded.
Short answer: a great deal of money. Having gotten out of the business, it would take a tremendous expediture to get back into the business. Not just cars and locomotives but crews, supervisors, administrators; platforms, stations, yards, shops; signalling and track upgrades, and dispatching. Unless the potential return is greater than what the company is already making on freight, they will be better off just sticking to their existing investments in freight handling. Any market that big would probably attract an outside operator whose specialty is passenger traffic and to whom the RR is one of the contractors.
zkr123 Like the subject line says. What would it take to get one of the Class I freight companies to get back into passenger rail?
Like the subject line says.
What would it take to get one of the Class I freight companies to get back into passenger rail?
The prospect of making a decent profit on the operation. Highly improbable.
C&NW, CA&E, MILW, CGW and IC fan
If GM "killed the electric car", what am I doing standing next to an EV-1, a half a block from the WSOR tracks?
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