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

[Fred Schneider]

And Will Rogers once quipped that he didn't make this crap up, he  
just read the newspaper to us!    Some of the best comedians in  
history made a fortune reading the newspaper.   How about Bob Hope  
when he visited the military.

But sadly, to quote another famous comic that my mother always loved,  
it really "T'ain't funny, Magee."

On Jun 12, 2006, at 5:55 PM, Edward H. Lybarger wrote:

> Of course the railway company had to do the maintenance...some of  
> which was
> capitalized to the account of the original underlier!
>
> And of course it was deliberate.  The original promotors wanted to  
> get in,
> with largely other peoples' money, and back out with some of their  
> own.  The
> idea of ever-growing revenue is still prevalent in business and  
> government;
> it didn't begin and end with the electric railway industry.   
> Someone down
> the road will pay my bills, they say.  The first PRCo didn't  
> depreciate
> equipment because they said there would be so much business that  
> buying new
> cars would be a financial breeze.  Of course it didn't work this  
> way, but
> the same thinking is present in a few government endeavors, such as  
> Social
> Security...Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty running simultaneously  
> with the
> Vietnam action...George W's Iraq deficits (abetted by an allegedly
> conservative Congress)...and so on.  Enron was a house of cards  
> fashioned in
> similar ways.
>
> Someone always thinks they will get away with it.
>
> Ed
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: pittsburgh-railways-bounce at lists.dementia.org
> [mailto:pittsburgh-railways-bounce at lists.dementia.org]On Behalf Of
> Derrick J Brashear
> Sent: Monday, June 12, 2006 5:34 PM
> To: pittsburgh-railways at dementia.org
> Subject: [PRCo] Re: Wha[i]t a Minute...
>
>
> 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
>
>
>
>
>