I know that Conrail was the result of bankruptcy and the courts appointing a trustee…but how did CN and British Rail come to be public when they were started by private investors…what happened to the private investors capital?
CN ceased being a crown corporation in the mid-1990’s. Not sure about BC Rail but, Google would probably have the answer.
CW
CN was not started by private investors; its constituent railroads were. They went bankrupt and were taken over by the government. The PGE was bought out by the province since it was losing money.
Google and Wiki are your friends.
divebardave / trainfinder is back
I see British Rail hasn’t been taken up yet. Start here:
https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1947/49/pdfs/ukpga_19470049_en.pdf
There were interesting differences in the ways the United States, Canada, and Britain reacted after WWI. The Canadian ‘grouping’ has been mentioned; in Britain the railroads were ‘rationalized’ into four big systems – and these are what became ‘nationalized’ under the above Act.
In my opinion it was not a foregone conclusion that American railroads would be released from Federal control after the war. There were a number of interesting consolidation plans brought the mid-Twenties, and both the vastly expanded purview of the ICC that greyhounds (in my opinion, rightly) decries and the mandatory imposition of automatic train control were part of the ‘price’ for returning control to private railroad management (via the Esch Act etc.)
In CN’s case the Canadian government guaranteed the loans and construction bonds of Canadian Northern and Grand Trunk (the Intercolonial had always been a Crown Corporation). When the railways defaulted on making payments the government assumed ownership.
Even though the Intercolonial and Grand Trunk were far older it was Canadian Northern’s management and operating structure that ended up surviving.
Gordon Lightfoots Canadian Railroad Trilogy comes to mind…It was the Irish Polish and Natives blood sweat and tears that built the railroad not Wall Street/Bay Street. So the railroad belongs to Da People
The money had to come from somewhere. In the early days it was less Wall Street than people who controlled large fortunes (US example - the Vanderbilts).
Yes, the labor came from the people, but their pay (however pitiful) came from rich men’s pockets.
I’m always tickled by this attitude. If you paid me to build a shed in your backyard, does that shed belong to me? I mean, it was my blood, sweat, and tears that built that shed. It belongs to me.
Sweat Equity. The other side of ‘Right to Repair’.
This argument comes up from time to time when college buildings have dedicatory plaques saying something like ‘built by Moses Taylor Pyne’ – he paid, and the skilled workers (many of whom were recent immigrants) did the building.
More modern projects are more specific in crediting ‘donors who made this building possible’ – which still rules out recognizing more than, say, the architect or engineering firm.
Strangely, the way to be memorialized is often to die on the job… which is not the only recognition that should be.
As Lightfoot said ‘we have opened up the soil with our teardrops and our toil’ – and that is their memorial.
I live in an old town. There’s still some older sidewalks with the imbedded plaque of the company that poured them . Always thought that was a neat little touch. Kind of kept things real, pride, and all that.
In the older parts of our city, several concrete companies used to imprint their name the date into the sidewalks they poured. The most impressive one I’ve seen also had a very accurate depiction of a P-39 Airacobra fighter plane scatched into the surface of the sidewalk. The date showed sometime in the summer of 1942.
Embedded plaques are not that common but when new public sidewalks were poured on my block some years back, the name of the contractor that rebuilt the walk was stamped into the sidewalk.
For which they were paid.
Some buildings are works of art. We do sometimes get the architect’s name on a plaque or cornerstone, but usually the name of the company that paid to have it built. By your standards, Rembrandt’s or Monet’s paintings should have the name of the patron who paid them.
At a dollar a day and a place for their head (the cost of which was deducted from that dollar, along with meals).
Same thing. Canadian National Railways was created around 1919 to consolidate into a single organization a number of bankrupt railways that had fallen under government control (plus one or two that had been chartered by the gov’t itself). The investment capital was long gone. (As mentioned above, there were also significant government bonds involved here, so the government itself was the major creditor in several cases, plus the public interest in not having a total loss of transportation systems.)
It was a major plot point in Downton Abbey. While fictional, Lord Grantham’s meeting with his attorney pretty much sums up how it worked for the investors. The money is just gone and you’ve lost your investment.
A useful modern example is Amtrak’s acquisition of the ‘Northeast Corridor’.