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0 points9rx5mo ago0 comments

> How long did it take for 9 out of 10 of those rail lines to become nonviable?

Records from the time are few and far between, but, from what I can tell, it looks like they likely weren't ever actually viable.

The records do show that the railways were profitable for a short while, but it seems only because the government paid for the infrastructure. If they had to incur the capital expenditure themselves, the math doesn't look like it would math.

Imagine where the LLM businesses would be if the government paid for all the R&D and training costs!

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Spooky235mo ago

Railroads were pretty profitable for a long time. The western long haul routes were capitalized by land transfers.

What killed them was the same thing that killed marine shipping — the government put the thumb on the scale for trucking and cars to drive postwar employment and growth of suburbs, accelerate housing development, and other purposes.

9rxOP5mo ago

> the government put the thumb on the scale for trucking and cars to drive postwar employment and growth of suburbs, accelerate housing development, and other purposes.

The age of postwar suburb growth would be more commonly attributed to WWII, but the records show these railroads were already losing money hand over fist by the WWI era. The final death knell, if there ever was one, was almost certainly the Great Depression.

But profitable and viable are not one and the same, especially given the immense subsidies at play. You can make anything profitable when someone else is covering the cost.

Spooky235mo ago

There was alot of complexities. It's hard to really understand the true position of these businesses in modern terms. Operationally, they would often try to over-represent losses because the interstate commerce commission and other State-level entities mandated services, especially short-haul passenger service that become irrelevant.

National infrastructure is always subsidized and is never profitable on it's own. UPS is the largest trucking company, but their balance sheet doesn't reflect the costs of enabling their business. The area I grew up in had tarred gravel roads exclusively until the early 1980s -- they have asphalt today because the Federal government subsidizes the expense. The regulatory and fiscal scale tipped to automotive and to a lesser extent aircraft. It's arguable whether that was good or bad, but it is.

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jcranmer5mo ago

> The records do show that the railways were profitable for a short while, but it seems only because the government paid for the infrastructure. If they had to incur the capital expenditure themselves, the math doesn't look like it would math.

Actually, governments in the US rarely actually provided any capital to the railroads. (Some state governments did provide some of the initial capital for the earliest railroads). Most of federal largess to the railroads came in the form of land grants, but even the land grant system for the railroads was remarkably limited in scope. Only about 7-8% of the railroad mileage attracted land grants.

9rxOP5mo ago

> Actually, governments in the US rarely actually provided any capital to the railroads.

Did I, uh, miss a big news announcement today or something? Yesterday "around my parts" wasn't located in the US. It most definitely wasn't located in the US when said rail lines were built. Which you even picked up on when you recognized that the story about those lines couldn't have reasonably been about somewhere in the US. You ended on a pretty fun story so I guess there is that, but the segue into it wins the strangest thing ever posted to HN award. Congrats?

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Spooky235mo ago

Railroads were pretty profitable for a long time. The western long haul routes were capitalized by land transfers.

9rxOP5mo ago

> the government put the thumb on the scale for trucking and cars to drive postwar employment and growth of suburbs, accelerate housing development, and other purposes.

But profitable and viable are not one and the same, especially given the immense subsidies at play. You can make anything profitable when someone else is covering the cost.

Spooky235mo ago

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jcranmer5mo ago

9rxOP5mo ago

> Actually, governments in the US rarely actually provided any capital to the railroads.

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