Some of this may be more about pressure to reduce costs by attempting to use bankruptcy to deal with labor agreements and/or pension payments obligations. It's seems to me it's been a while since the last ILWU contract, if I am recalling correctly, which always results in an interesting dance between the Union and the Operators. So the occurrence and timing of so many west coast operations doing this recently is interesting. I guess we'll just have to watch and see....?

This really doesn't appear to have much to do with trains, though. Except that both in LA and Oakland other competing operators raised there container handling rates, and there might be a minor slow down of pre Christmas deliveries, so it will possibly affect some intermodal movements, but probably not by very much.

As to coal traffic to China and choo-choo's, which is a kind of a different issue entirely, than most of the operator bankruptcies, this may well be Oakland's loss, but may possibly be Stockton and/or Richmond's gain.....

It's not "all" my fault, every time somebody posts about Oakland or HSR is it?

I kind of liked the the about crew quarters and crushing pennies, it brought back great memories of some good times with genuine choo-choo's in my misspent youth....now that I am slowly sliding into my second childhood.

And, I hardly ever start one of these threads that seems to attract certain folks, to topics like Oakland, Stockton, or CHSRA.

But yeah, I'm definitely guilty of being a bad influence for baiting them.....once they get some of these started. It's just so damned easy, and so much fun, to get them all riled up and knickers in a twist about the evil BART conspiracy, that secretly rules the world......

I now know that the mere word "Oakland" has the magical powers to cause all of these things to become jumbled, with other unrelated things, in a bizarre kaleidoscopic jumble of conspiracies and intrigues, in certain minds... So, I will remember, in the future, to use it more carefully.....