> SP got the money and the upgrades were not performed.
> A few years after UP purchased SP, UP got pressure from the State of California to honor
> the contract with SP for new rail and signaling. It now is a faily smooth ride.


With the UP, or even the broke SP before them, pressure is what you had to apply, just to get what you already paid for. Ask any potential UP freight customer why they won't ship by rail anymore. Ask any central transcon trucking outfit what was the best thing that ever happened to them - The UP !

And whenever the State failed to apply that pressure, such as on the Western half of the Cal-P CTC installation (West of the present Bahia), they in fact DID NOT get what we taxpayers paid for - paid thru the nose for - actually. Instead, we got something much less.

Perhaps you noticed that 30% of the original block signal locations SP originally had in these mostly slow running areas, were taken out; lengthening those blocks (some over 3.5 slow miles long), thus trashing the increased capacity that was being paid for by the State's money. Sadly, they have had to add some signal locations back, and still have more needed - at considerable additional cost to the State - naturally.

The state missed this gambit on the part of UP, because they had no signalling expertise of their own on staff, to represent their own interests and verify what UP was doing. Instead they had to rely upon the "good will" of the UP to tell them the "Whole Truth" of it!

Come to think of it, in it's early days, BART was in that same boat too (no in house signaling expertise), forcing them to rely upon the "good will" of its worthless vendors and consultants - same results but ten times worse. Of course in BART's case, that was their own damn fault; having fired what expertise they previously had, just because they had dared to unanimously blow the whistle on vendor shenanigans (their jobs - actually).

This sort of thing kinda proves Bob2's frequent complaint that these agencies sometimes seem to think, that they exist only to funnel public money to the exclusive benefit of private contracting companies - the public be damned. They were afterall, quite willing to fire anyone that got in the way of that! I sadly have to agree.

When will government agencies ever learn?