why did sp sell themselves?!?!?! i miss the dirty rusty equipment 
and UP looks horrible in the west
thanks for the reply
Railroads and I think all organizations go through life cycles. The SP grew from 1850-1910, harvested from 1910-1965 and went into a death spiral from 1965-1996.
You canât live forever.
Ok, so what about UP? How long will it survive? [;)]
Besides, it wonât be long, UPâs equipment will all be dirty and rusty too⌠[swg]
Yeah, except I think the REAL seeds of its death were laid a bit later, after the abortive Reichman takeover debacle in the '80s that tried to give us SPSF.
Donât know if anyone remembers the Janus bubble at Illinois Central, but SP had something of their own up their sleeve that would have been a cash cow⌠it came out of their use of railroad microwave links for communications-backbone traffic; anyone care to speculate what the SP in âSprint Telecommunicationsâ stood for?
As part of the SLSF business, SP was required to divest itself of the telecommunications business. That left it exactly as indicated â overcapitalized with things that didnât pay, undercapitalized with meaningful operating assets, and ultimately associated with good old Phil Anschutz thanks to the post-Reichman fire sale after Olympia & York imploded. Whether or not an SP that survived to the 21st Century on the strength of Sprint would have gone under by now because of the tech crash, I canât say.
Overmod,
Donât you mean Janus â KCS? And SPSF instead of SLSF (that would be âFriscoâ)? [%-)]
I donât think SP-Sprint would have been too horribly affected by the tech crash. Even Sprint itself had two separate stocks, one for the main telecom âFON Groupâ and one for wireless.
A proud Sprint PCS user since 2001,
-Mark
http://www.geocities.com/fuzzybroken
Yeah, youâre 100% right on both posts â not paying attention to details; ironically enough I thought I carefully checked âSPSFâ to ensure it wasnât SLSF by mistake⌠The point, though, remains the same, which is that the subsidiaries sometimes acquire far more importance than the original âmissionâ of the company. I hadnât recognized the oil contribution to UP until it was pointed out here. Wonder how much of the PC deficits were covered by the real-estate operations (which were certainly good enough to keep a non-railroad âPCâ around for many years!)
I was a proud Sprint user in the 1980s â and delighted with it. Not quite as delighted with the coverage of their PCS data services, though.
Mark is correct. People will need stuff in the future. It will be made somewhere and consumed somewhere and a freight rr has to connect the somewheres if it is going to make sense.
If the country decides coal has more risks than rewards there will be wrenching changes in traffic patterns and all bets will be off. What railroads will look like coming out the other end is just a guess. The surviving railroads will need to bring in people like Mike Wal***o pull through to the other side.
Where does the line form for signed copies of the upcoming book?
3,000 hours? That is hardly a yearâs work! What did you do in your free time? [:)]
Letâs see, SP was bought out by CP, but kept the SP name, then they bought out UP, but kept the UP name, so in reallity, youâre really talking about why did CP buyout SP and UP.
And really, all it is, is 3 companies that were at one time owned by the same person finally becoming one corporation.