I strongly suspect that this report is confusing the facts related to National City Lines (and a few others) who were funded by GM and several other internal combustion / rubber tire centric companies, who purchased streetcar lines and facilitated their conversion to busses with the abandonment of the North Shore…

There is a pretty good (and balanced, well cited) wiki article about the “GM streetcar conspiracy at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Mo ... conspiracy

As your moderator, I would suggest we use this article as an example of a well researched balanced discussion about what can be a politically polarizing subject… (either rail-trails or abandonment of streetcars) I hope we are going beyond talk radio for our source material… I don't need footnotes... but if things get weird could start requiring them...

Randy

I contacted Lou he can make a CD of the 2 shows.


When a known and existing and long discussed tourist rail line and some mayor suddenly is playing some hard ball with them and pulls a stunt, I suspect something is seriously up, and seeing it happening again someone wants to pull an existing rail line out just so some people can bop around in the buggies just clearly makes the line useless to what its purpose is/was. There can be hidden purposes behind things and they aren't telling us.

Just wait when I get these shows. Discuss away, overNout.

A holding company is not unusual in railroads or any other industry. Most of the time they are meant to keep different divisions of a business in an organized bundle. Iowa Pacific is a holding company for all of their shortlines. Canadian National with the stock symbol CNI is a holding company for its American and Canadian operating subsidiaries. BNSF is owned by Warren Buffett's holding company Berkshire Hathaway.

Sometimes holding companies buy up marginally performing businesses hoping to sell them at a profit after a short period of time, or to make them profitable for the parent company in the long term. Sometimes struggling companies are bought by holding companies to bail them out before they enter bankruptcy.

In the case of North Shore, there was probably little or no profit margin in running it as a transit service when the Susquehanna Corporation acquired it. But it had a bit of real estate, and salvageable material. When a company is no longer productive, there is not much left to do other than liquidate its capital assets, and hopefully make money doing so. Otherwise the U.S. Marshals will be holding an auction for the assets on the steps of a courthouse anyway.

Most of the Railroads created Holding Companies in the 1970-80s in part due the fear that the Railroads would be Nationalized. This allowed them to separate the rail and non-rail assets, and also had the advantage of getting their non-rail assets out from under ICC Authority.

In my opinion this did backfire for the SP RR as the ATSF bought the SP Holding Company, and when they were not allowed to merge the RRs, they spun off the SP RR but kept the non-rail SP assets.

-Hudson

that shows a holding company can be controlled by another person. company, etc.
If its held by an Automaker and the holding company owns the railroad...what now....

CTA may have been an early public company, but it was still early before things like Metra and what saved the South Shore from abandonment. Most of the early interurbans secumbed to the Auto as they depended on direct ticket sales. Most systems today are public supported, ticket sales plus the support keep them alive. It has been recognized the importance of these systems for the economy. I am not going to drivel on here tho.

next.

"Talk radio" is entertainment. As with sitcoms, opera, "professional wrestling," and other forms of entertainment, it need not have anything to do with reality.

The rantings of those citing the "Great GM Streetcar Conspiracy" and various related alleged conspiracies (my personal favorite: the old guys who insisted that the only reason railroads dieselized was because GM threatened to withdraw all their auto-related traffic if the railroads didn't buy their diesels, or, similarly, used to explain EMD's market share dominance) could very well form a chapter of the rather excellent Michael Shermer book Why People Believe Weird Things. It pretty much has it all: denial of facts, delusions, a conspiratorial villain that happens to be big, powerful, and corporate, denial of a perceived/desired alternate semi-Utopian scenario as a result, etc.

If one roots about the right corners of the Internet, one will find a freshly-growing crop of new conspiracy theories about how Americans are being "denied" high-speed passenger rail, the apparent answer to global warming, peak oil, cancer, depression, overpopulation, and toenail fungus if you listen to the most overzealous promoters of the HSR concept, all due to some cabal of repressive politicians, "Big Oil," automakers, the airline industry, and probably the Trilateral Commission somewhere behind the big black curtains.

I don't have a dog in the specific fight that started this thread. I tend to agree that at least some of rails-to-trails is being driven by a misguided anti-rail element. But it's entirely possible that the F&W simply brought its troubles upon itself. It sure wouldn't be the first time.

this is not your average talk radio, he does historical, he is not flamboyant, he is informative. I am not picking a fight here, I am going to be informative, and about GM conspiracy just read Die Day in LA book about the trashing of the LA streetcars for busses.

One of the many great points of Shermer's Why People Believe Weird Things is that "conspiracy sells." People will eagerly embrace any suggested "conspiracy" theory that embraces and confirms their worldview, biases, or agendas. Books that prosaically explain that the Loch Ness Monster can't exist as popularly imagined, that UFOs are/were mostly mistaken identification of other objects, or explains most of the "Bermuda Triangle disappearances" with "the rest of the stories" sell poorly compared to books (and shows and websites and videos) that deliberately fuel and stoke mystery and conspiracy theories with copious omission of relevant information or data, and selective omission of facts is a staple of the Internet and agitational propaganda today. If I sat down and calmly explain how the situation was complex, that there really wasn't any conspiracy, that market forces and a myriad of people making choices about working and residential locations had much more to do with the changes of L.A. (and other) transit than any actions by GM or NCL, I'd be an accurate historian, and I'd be too boring even for NPR or public-access radio.

Ira Swett was a prolific writer and editor of traction publications, based out of Los Angeles. As such, he could hardly be termed an objective historian--by the standards applied by anti-capitalist activists, he "had an obvious profit motive" in defending and supporting traction, just as GM had a profit motive in selling buses. http://www.erha.org/swett.htm

A quick search of the internet will reveal several websites and articles devoted to debunking the "GM killed the streetcars" theory, which of course garner far less attention than the ever-popular round of websites, PBS-broadcast programs, Hollywood movies, and more perpetuating the conspiracy theory:

http://www.theatlanticcities.com/commut ... ndal/5771/
http://debunkportland.com/printables/TQOrigin.pdf
http://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/file ... /PA699.pdf
http://www.erha.org/plot.htm

To bring this back to what started this thread drift:
It's been alleged that rails-to-trails advocates are now conspiring to eliminate railroads in their zeal to get governments to build them trails. I honestly have no idea whether this is true, half-true, or not--more examination of more projects and policy statements would be needed--but I have witnessed, for another example, Mothers Against Drunk Driving shift over time from an educational effort aimed at reducing intoxication standards to a uniform national level to an anti-alcohol lobbying group intent on making any alcohol consumption more difficult. (That's an opinion shared by many in the beer-writing field, not just me.)

But I will ask you to understand that when someone alleges a conspiracy theory against railroading and/or rail preservation--or anything else, for that matter--my reflexive response has become skepticism, cynicism, and demands for evidence, and indeed the response of any critically-thinking person should be the same, even if we may agree with the agendas of those postulating the theory. That skepticism and cynicism in my case has been developed and hardened by decades of exposure to everything from "the car that runs on water, man, but the oil companies won't let us have it!" to the latest political crackpottery about Obama killing Vince Foster with his Kenyan birth certificate to cover up Dan Quayle's Blackwater profiteering, or whatever.....

There probably is not an over-arching, coordinated conspiracy to tear-up serviceable railroads for trails. It's probably more a matter of individuals who are part of the trails movement managing to achieve positions of power and influence over rail lines in their local areas. That said, they are no less of a threat to perfectly good, functional railroads. The biases of those officials need to be loudly pointed out to the general populace wherever they try and destroy going railroad operations, citing their biased "facts".

Frankly, the law shouldn't allow ANY permanent transfer to a group/organization, except under very controlled conditions. I would prefer to see a program structured similar to the federal program that allows the United States Coast Guard to divest itself of the maintenance costs of lighthouses. The Coast Guard retains ownership of lighthouses in some cases and they execute long term leases to historic preservation groups. The agreements are very detailed and all retain a permanent, non-revocable right of entry for the Coast Guard to service Aids to Navigation (ATONs) and add or remove ATONs as necessary. Even in cases where a lighthouse is actually sold by GSA, the agreements always include the right of the US Coast Guard to use the lighthouse as an ATON and the aforementioned rights of entry and to add or remove ATONs as necessary. The formalities involved tend to weed out groups that do not have the necessary resources or intend to use the lighthouses for purposes other than the program's stated mission-primarily to preserve the structures and provide for continued public access.

The statute governing railbanking or rails to trails should be amended to require that the government or previous operator retains the right to maintain railway infrastructure on the right of way and the right to make improvements as necessary to ensure the continued viability of the corridor. Trails may be constructed along the corridor, but shall not be constructed in any way to adversely affect the viability of the corridor for rail use and all trail associations/authorities shall be required to enter into a formal lease with the private/state/federal entity in possession of the right of way.

Well, have a look at one of the details of the "Grow America Act", Building Ladders of Opportunity; this is from a link on the RTC web site:

http://www.dot.gov/grow-america/fact-sheets/opportunity

Please note one of the bullet items that creates new local agencies and gives them authority and control of funds through performance:

"The bill will incentivize Metropolitan Planning Organizations (MPOs) - the regional agencies that help plan infrastructure investments - to become more effective, rewarding high performing MPOs with control of a higher portion of funds under three federal transportation programs, the Surface Transportation Program, the Transportation Alternatives Program, and a new Metropolitan Mobility Program, a portion of the Fixing and Accelerating Surface Transportation (FAST) Program."

I don't think conspiracy, but I do think agenda, and I am getting more and more links to create footnotes each day. To what end, or plan, I don't know yet; but neither do I believe in coincidence. When I see the word "sustainable", I start to see red.

Jim

Another word to be wary about is "stakeholder."

I can't say that I automatically assume any "conspiracy" theory to be a crackpot kind of deal.....Often enough, they have a grain of truth to them....unfortunately its often the wrong grain! In the end, its all about definitive proof......How do you prove "bigfoot" exists? you must produce a body.....
Are the rail-trail people in a conspiracy? not neccessarily... but its been my experience that they are individually quite rabid to remove any railroad, seeing them as blocking their little corner of "progress"....They are, I think, best described as "predatory", you may notice that many of the rail lines they are after are weak or sickly in some way......
The unfortunate thing about the trail people is, due to their mindset, they want/need public money to build their vision and are generally quite willing to lie about it to get their way....They move "forward" with such goals by getting sympathetic politicians into office or simply buying votes......The only way to defeat this is to "get political".
If we refuse to play the game.....and perhaps most importantly, play it to win.... we will lose......

This business about a great conspiracy among GM, rubber manufacturers, oil companies, etc. being the source of ruin for interurbans in this country is a chestnut that's popped up again and again for the past 50 years. Not sure why it came up again? Maybe as a result of the death of Bob Hoskins: this conspiracy was a subtext in the Roger Rabbit movie. Do some searching on-line and I think you will find sufficient de-bunking of it.

The truth is: it is amazing interurbans such as the CA&E and North Shore survived as long as they did, given how much money they lost, how antequated they were, and how much competition they faced from other railroads and highways.

Chris.

I was hoping that there would be more F + W news; instead this old GM etc. bus thing has polluted this thread.