[PRCo] Re: Wha[i]t a Minute...

[Derrick J Brashear]

On Mon, 12 Jun 2006, Fred Schneider wrote:

> This is an interesting concept ...
>
> Bled dry by underlying companies.
>
> It simply means that instead of PRC paying for its own property, it
> rented its property.   It never paid to build 650 miles of track.
> Other companies paid to build 500 or so miles of track and PRC merely
> rented it.   It was a common way of doing it in Pennsylvania.    Bled
> dry?
>
> Is that any different from me deciding not to own a fleet of trucks
> for my business, but rather to rent them from Avis?   Then I go
> broke.   Do I accuse Avis of bleeding me to death?   It's a business
> expense.   I need trucks.   I chose to rent them instead of buy them.

And you may have made a mistake by not buying them outright, and instead 
paying for them many times over. I bet the railway and not the underliers 
had to do the maintenance, possibly reimbursing themselves out of their 
payments at some rate which did not keep pace with inflation, screwing 
themselves harder. Tell me I'm wrong.

Of course, maybe it was deliberate:

> stock.   The really bright ones inflated the value of the property
> the built (the old $600 toilet seat concept) and still demanded it in
> cash.   It wasn't ABC or DEF that bled PRC but it might have been the
> promoters and construction companies that took their money up front
> back in the 1890s and ran with it.

Derrick