>When the Southern Pacific Trans. Co. was sold by SFSP, it lost most if not all of its land, energy, communications, holdings and was as hollow a company as ever.

The SP railroad was made to buy into the Southern Pacific Company, a holding company, by transferring non-railroad assets in trade for SPCo stock, assests like the land not directly used by the railroad. This became SP Land Co, and the railroad became SP Trans Co. Other railroads did the same thing (that article in Ry Age), and it was this corporate shuffle that stripped the railroads of their non-railroad land assets.

So when the Santa Fe got into the act --it had done the same duck shuffle with the land assets-- the Sante Fe Land Co was merged with the SP Land Co. This new combination was then spun off as Catellus Development Co (this is how Catellus wound up owning LAUPT). The SP Trans Co, the railroad operator, was sold to the D&RGW, which changed it's name to SP, and sold itself to the UP. SP Pipelines is now owned by Kinder-Morgan.

The "rumor" at the SP at the time of SPrint's sale, which occurred before the SF-SP merger, was that you couldn't keep a satellite up there at restriced speed. Any company which had it's own internal phone or telegraph system extablished before the 1918 consent decree which formed the original AT&T monopoly (Ma Bell) could keep it and expand it, for internal use only. Thus, with the bust up of Ma Bell (deregulation), the SP's internal phone system served as the nucleus of SPrint. Some have speculated that it was sold to raise money to derfray losses generated by the Ticor debacle (title insurance).

Ma Bell is back now, without regulation, so hold onto your pocketbooks.