David Benton wrote:I am trying to think of a precedent for a private passenger railroad line been built , without govt subsidy or incentives.Well, as was suggested even with regard to AAF, some high-volume passenger-only RRs are operated by the Walt Disney company (diesel-fired steam cirumferential narrow-gauge and electric monorail) as part of their real estate development operations. I always thought that the comparison to Disney was a fair comparison (in a good way): If you have a lucrative-enough real estate idea, you very often build fixed guideway transportation to go with it. Being "like Disney's trains" should have been taken as "sustainable as part of a larger transit-oriented and real-estate development business model"
minds blank so far..., but that could be monday morningitis.
And of course if you'll accept a private railroad that also hauled freight, the US' Great Northern RR was built without govt subsidy (dynamite and steam drills having made construction cheap at a moment when laying claim to vast empty tracts was still possible), which was also the American Northwest's idea of transportation-oriented development and making money from real estate - transport synergies.
"Trying to solve congestion by making roadways wider is like trying to solve obesity by buying bigger pants."--Charles Marohn