[milwaukee-electric] Re: National City Lines.

[Gary Schnabl]

On 3/24/2011 2:28 PM, Louis Rugani wrote:
> Thanks, Bill. No offense was taken; that was just an explanation.
>
> Right, one person asked to stop discussing NCL, even though NCL was active around here. Part of NCL's structure was Northland Greyhound, which got control of the NSL and Kenosha and Racine Motor Coach Lines. KMCL made a fortune buying up TMER&L lines for peanuts and then scrapping them out for ten times what they'd paid.
Perhaps, it would have been best if TMER&L had scrapped their own lines 
themselves (as did other interurbans nationally (Detroit's final 
interurban died in 1934; others there died back around 1910)--thus 
making ten times as much than they sold it for... Seems to have been 
more of a bad decision on the part of the traction company, if money was 
a primary issue.

> Their chief operative was dairyman Henry P. Bruner of Racine, who also had ties to Hammond Coach in Indiana. When the lines were gone, KMCL went out of business with their profits. I did some radio shows on the local tie-ins last year. Otherwise there is the great "Taken For a Ride" by New Day Films on YouTube.
>
> I believe there's evidence that NCL's secret efforts also quietly put the coup de grace on the wounded Speedrail in 1950-1951.
>
> NCL as such may be gone, but it's not over because now we rail advocates have the likes of Wendell Cox, Tom Rubin, the Koch Brothers, the Cato Institute and other front groups and their stooges like Scott Walker fighting rail every inch of the way.

The Kochs are to today's various (dozens?) Tea Party groups as George 
Soros is to the socialist front groups that he openly bankrolls for the 
Democrats. Milwaukee, during the first half of the 20th Century, elected 
a consecutive string of seven socialist mayors. It appears as if some 
remnants of that sort of political thought still live on.


Gary
-- 

Gary Schnabl
Southwest Detroit, two miles NORTH! of Canada--Windsor, that is...

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