>Only those railroads that were poorly run & inefficent would welcome price - fixing. No sane CEO would want the government, local or national, to dictate to them any aspect of running their business. That this did happen, was due to the laziness, greed & stupidity of a few.

This is what we are all lead to believe, but it's not necessarily so, which is the whole point. The amount of capital investment required to build a railroad is so great that there must be an acceptable return on investment, otherwise you will sell no bonds, etc. and go out of business rather quickly. What ALL the rrs were doing at the time was engaging in [pricing] competition to attract business from their fellow railroads. The the prices charged [rates] dropped so low that there was little or no return on investment unless the rates for captive shippers were sent sky high. This is referred to as "charging more for a short haul than a long haul" in the history books. If there is little or no return, the result is bankruptcy. Andrew Carnegie engaged in these very practises. The steel barons would get together (USSteel, Bethlehem, Carnegie, etc.) and agree on prices. Then Carnegie would go out on undercut everybody. It's the same thing with utilities (phone, electricity, gas, water, and so on). Competition does keep the price down, which is "good for the comsumer" in the short term, but in the long run it tends to drive all the players toward bankruptcy, which isn't so good for the consumer. How are you going to play a new Xbox if no shipper can deliver because the carrier--a railraod or UPS--went out of business?. Price fixing is sought to keep the "unscrupulous operators" from underbidding everyone else to the point of everybody's going out of business. The railroads wanted the ICC in order to be able to use the force of law to keep their rates at a preset amount and to club into submission the rrs which arbitrarily "underbid" others. After all the ICC act was written by a lawyer in the Law Department of the PRR, which wasn't then "poorly run & inefficent", as you put it (until the days of Bevan and Saunders).

>E.H.Harriman was a proponent of making line changes to effect operating efficiencies. He also tried to stop the rate wars that decimated several Midwest RR's. Harriman also saw an opportunity in Refrigerator Car services that would outdo the existing poor service & high rates of the meatpackers. Thus was born Pacific Fruit Express, which prospered for 60 years, until the uncooperative I.C.C. ratemakers & independent ( unregulated ) truckers killed the business.

The break-up of PFE was an anti-trust thing, at least according to a friend who knew B. F. Baggini. The traffic from Salinas was being lost to Bud Antle's trucks, which are now also gone. One of the biggest problems with reviving such a service is that the spur tracks which received the reefers are gone, so it doesn't matter if you get the loads back from the trucks at the point of origin, you can't deliver them because nobody has a place to unload them.