Re: [DL] Passenger Train Economics

[Frempath2@netscape.net]

Although it seems pricey for just passnegers, as you noted, you did not include freight and more importantly mail.  Passengers provide the prestige and advertising for the railroads, but the bread and butter are freight and mail.  The other source of income for the railroads were the large land grants which were given to railroads for building. I am thinking it was every other section of land for 10 miles either side of the track. (for our european freinds a section is a square mile, 640 acres).  These proporties were then sold to immigrants, who had bought tickets on the railroad's steamships to get here, had to buy railroad tickets to get to their land, had to buy railroad food along the way to eat, and had to buy their equipment and from store which was run by or had goods shipped by, the railroad.
     Other costs you may be thinking of may or may not be followed. Many of the standard operating proceedures of the 20th century railroads were developed because of the huge number of people killed each year.  Little things like brakes, track maintinance, signalization, did not exist until it was forced upon the railroad companies by government.  These problems would probably be worse in a ghost rock world to.
     On the ghost rock cost issue, I am thinking that vertical intigration takes care of most of the cost of the rock.  If you own the mines and the distribution and storage of the fuel you remove the layers of middlemen, and the cost is then not just reduced a percent, but the cost is a small percentage of the market cost.  This also allows a marshall to bring in adventures where you work on various raids against rival rail corporation mining and distribution networks.

Gee and I thought I would never have a use for those economics classes I took in collage.

g'day
frempath


__________________________________________________________________
Get your own FREE, personal Netscape Webmail account today at http://webmail.netscape.com/