I’m a bit confused about the Ironroad name. It seems to me that Iron Road was a “G&W” of sorts, a shortline operator. So… was BAR absorbed by theIron Road holding company, or did BAR establish a founding company, and absorb other road names in the process? I notice its paint scheme was similar to the others.
Not exactly sure what is your question.
Assuming you have already read the wiki entry on Iron Road Railways which states IRR was a holding company owning several railroads (BAR, as well as Quebec Southern, Canadian American, and several others) then this then this article from the period states “Technically, the B&A was purchased by the Bangor and Aroostook Acquisition Corp., which is wholly owned by Iron Road.” (The B&A here is BAR).
So IRR, as a holding company, owned the BAAC, which purchased BAR. I’d say it’s safe to say IRR owned BAR, if that is your question…
This article does definitively state BAR ended in 2002 with it’s purchased by MMA. Edit: Actually, near the end of that article, its stated that while BAR’s assets were sold to Railworld in 2002, the B&A system was not - maybe that means the corporate structure lives on, just not as an active railroad - maybe like the Penn Central corporation did till 1994 (or 2006 or so)?
Let me try rephrasing that:
I beleive that the Chessie Sytem was the holding company that controlled C&O, B&O, and WM. But I think I heard that C&O basically controlled the system originally, then renamed the whole thing (including themselves) Chessie.
If that is correct, then is that what BAR did? Did they absorb a bunch of shortlines, and then create Iron Road as the brand name for their system and merged themselves into it?
C&O controlled the B&O, the B&O controlled the WM. Chessie System was created as a marketing tool. C&O and B&O remained as indivually named companies that operated with a unified and common operating management structure. The WM did get absorbed into the B&O sometime in the 70’s. The formal end of the C&O and B&O happened after CSX was formed.
The reason the B&O was never absorbed into the C&O was a tax break in the City of Baltimore, so long as the company was named Baltimore & Ohio. After the formation of CSX the bean counters decided the tax break wasn’t worth the complexity of keeping the B&O a named entity within CSX and it got formally merged into C&O and then the C&O was merged with Seaboard which then resulted in CSXT. Until the formal merger and creation of CSXT each road waybill their freight under their own identitys. B&O had the accounting number of 50; the C&O had 125 and Seaboard had 712. After the formation of CSXT it has 712 as it’s accounting ID number.
I am certain the bean counters and lawyers that were involved have a much more detailed explanation.
No, did you not check the links I posted (and sort of summarized).
Iron Roads was founded in 1994 as a railroad holding company, and according to wiki (and some other articles I found) purchased a number of railroads - the list given is Canadian American Railroad, Bangor and Aroostook Railroad, Windsor and Hantsport Railway, Van Buren Bridge and Construction Company, Quebec Southern Railway, Northern Vermont Railroad, Iowa Northern Railway. Several of the railroads (e.g. Iowa Northern and VBB Co) were purchased in 1994. BAR was finally purchased in 1995 from Amoskeag Co. (which purchased BAR in 1969, and which also owned Fieldcrest Cannon, which is how a North Carolina textile manufacturer was involved with the sale of a Maine railway system to Iron Road).
So, as I understand it (many cavets apply), Iron Road was the Holding Company, BAR was just one of seven railroads it owned, and this all became academic by 2003…
So was or wasn’t there an IRON BAR?
(I’ll just hide now…)
Balt, I think you’ll find that the B&O was actually merged into the C&O a short time before Chessie was merged into CSX (which the Seaboard System was renamed to just ahead of or at the time of the merger).
I have an Equipment Register in the dungeon that shows all of the Chessie reporting marks and equipment under the C&O listing–no B&O left.
Perhaps at that point the B&O’s grandfathered tax agreements were already seen as meaningless to the soon-to-be-merged company.
I will agree with you, and emphasize, that Chessie System was never a railroad. It was a holding company for C&O, B&O, WM, and perhaps a few smaller companies at one time or another. Gene Huddleston and I once speculated about why, even if the names were not done away with, the reporting marks weren’t changed into something common to all of the railroads: CHSY would have been perfect, being acronym quality.
Iron BAR, indeed…better crawl back under that lens cap, buddy!
All those actions were taken as a part of the formation of CSXT as the operational entity out of the CSX merger between Chessie & Seaboard. In the same time frame L&N which had been a segment of the ‘Family Lines’ as Seaboard was marketing itself was also merged into CSXT.
There were operating agreements and then there were the details of legal financial ownership - they didn’t always line up during this period.
If that seems confusing enough, consider the situation when a lease is involved. Current examples include the Cincinnati Southern, leased to CNO&TP, a wholly owned subsidiary of NS; Western & Atlantic, leased to CSXT, and the North Carolina RR, leased to NS. The original Wheeling & Lake Erie was leased to NKP in 1949 and Wabash was leased to N&W in 1964. Leases can occur for a variety of reasons: a state-owned property is leased to the operating company, shareholders are not satisfied with the exchange ratio or purchase price, or various tax reasons. It certainly guarantees employment for accountants and attorneys.