Many of us in the consulting and engineering world have long held that if deregulation had come sooner the Milwaukee would still be running west. It would not have been any major issue to run overseas double stacks with the clearances the Milwaukee had at shut down, and only minor work would have been required to carry domestic double stacks (i.e.J.B. Hunt sized containers) at the 20' 6" standard. Reading tonnage charts from the Milwaukee after the BN merger reveals that the Milwaukee did gain significant traffic as a result of the BN merger, but the Milwaukee made no effort to increase maintainance in response, and in fact continued its long trend of cutting back on trackwork---except on bridgework which the Milwaukee always seemed to excell at. 263K covered hoppers beat the hell out of the railroad, and that problem was further complicated by Milwaukee's purchase of Pullman Standard covered hoppers with their higher center of gravity that made them much more prone to rocking on rough track than covered hoppers offered by FMC at the time. (286K standard wasn't introduced until the mid-1990's) Milwaukee bridges would not have had any issue with 286K cars and had trackwork been kept up to par, the Milwaukee would have had some great advantages over the other roads. The significance of deregulation (its actually just reduced regulation, railroads remain the most regulated of all the modes to this day.) is that not only did it give roads more flexability in rates and contracts, it also re-motivated managements to start running railroads again and that resulted in gaining new investors for the companies to allow for the many capital programs railroads carry out these days (and is enabling railroad to bear the cost of PTC without going broke). I have no doubt that the container traffic currently in the Tideflats area would have come had the Milwaukee remained, and this would have put the Milwaukee in the driver's seat for that traffic, and it's faster route would have been hard to beat. BN did make a huge mistake not keeping the Milwaukee grade over the mountains as improving the clearances of the Stampede Tunnel will be a massive and complex undertaking that I doubt will ever happen.
I guess I've rambled on long enough, gotta get back to work.