this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2023
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All the class 1 RR companies on the US are absolutely allergic to any kind of capital expense. They will literally turn down very profitable business expansions to avoid increasing their costs because they view maintaining a good cost/revenue ratio as more important than increasing profits.
It's pretty mind-blowing how poorly-run these companies are.
Well, they're basically in the early stages of vulture capitalization. This is where businesses just sort of coast, they stop trying to grow, and just don't replace things as they break. I think the long term plan is to milk it for whatever they can before getting bought/bailed out by the federal government. We'll get CONRAIL again for a few years and maybe some pretty sick Amtrak expansions as the government goes around fixing about half of the most critical rail lines, but then the cycle will start over and we'll sell CONRAIL and our freshly repaired alignments off to some genius investor for pennies on the dollar just so they can vulture capitalize anew and talk about what a business genius they are.