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You really enjoy displaying your ignorance in public, don't you, "commoncarrier"?  Railroads could care less if some pimply-faced kid (that's really what you are, aren't you?) tries to penetrate their marketing operations.  Real shippers, which you obviously are not, don't seem to have any trouble obtaining cars.  If the rate is acceptable, so much the better.  If it is not, well, kindly take your business to the nearest truck line and see if they are any more cordial than the railroad.  Railroads really are in the business ofmove large volumes of freight repetitively from where it is to where an owners wants it to be.  Car leasing, by the way, is not a function of your friendly neighborhood railroad.  It is a function of leasing companies that invest their capital in acquiring cars and then lease them to shippers, presumably at a profitable price.  And where you say "BTW its (sp) worse for whort lines who have limited sales staff," demonstrates just how little you do know, despite your posturing.  Short lines are known for being much closer to customers than are Class Is.  That's because they are dependent on carload traffic and they work at knowing what their customers needs are.  I don't know why I waste my time trying to educate you, when you demonstrate time and time again that you are not educable.  Intermodal frequently involves multiple parties (not just third parties) because the freight must be loaded in a trailer, hauled to a rail IM terminal, lifted on to a car, etc.  Railroads are not particularly good at handling small volumes.  Are you prepared to use a container on chassis?  Do you even know what a container on chassis is?  Now go play with your train set and stop bothering the grown-ups.

Oh here we go with the.... Public be Damned Speech....For your information railroads operate under state charters and those charters require common carriage. The real owners of railroads are the public who gave them the charter or franchise to run over property that they either used emanate domain to get or the threat of it. Not to mention the corporate charter came from the Secretary of State of were the railroad was founded . The Employees of the D&H owned there own railroad when Tim Mellon ran it into the ground. When we need green transportation more then ever as a matter of public policy its time to make the railroad answer to its true owners the Public. We need railway express and service to small shippers. Its not fair that a small business does not have the competitive advantage of rail and STB knows this as this is why they have lowered there fee structure from thousands of dollars to file a complaint to hundreds of dollers or even free

  PS key word Adverse Abandonment something that the ICC and STB has been threatening Pan Am for quite sometime and should have done years ago.

I;ll put this in simple terms that even you, "commoncarrier", can understand.  You're wrong.  Is that simple enough for you?  Some railroads were created and bujilt under statecharter.  Others were not.  The western carriers, virtually all of them, were NOT built under state charters.  For one thing, most of the territory they traversed were not states at the time.  A number were developed as a result of the Pacific Railway Act, which permitted them to cross public lands and to obtain land grants to raise capital for construction.  I covered this quite thoroughly in Leaders Count, my history of BNSF, which went back to the start of the principal components of BNSF - Northern Pacific;, Great Northern; Chicago, Burlington & Quincy; St. Louis-San Francisco (Frisco); and the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe.  When you try to make yourself sound like an expert is when you achieve just the opposite.  You don't know enough to pick and choose who you're going to fight with.  I've forgotten more about railroad history than you'll ever know, you jackass.  Now for a word on common carriage.  Even if you know of a railroad or two that operate under state charter, you don't demonstrate any knowledge of the concept of common carriage.  That's the principle that says a common carrier must publish a tariff upon reasonale request.  The carrier is free to set any rate it wishes.  Common carriage does not, repeat, not, require that the carrier in fact provide the transportation at issue.  The "real" owners of the railroads are not the people of the states that granted charters, but the people who own the stock in the railroads.  Again, sure hope this isn't kiling too many of your brain cells.  You obviously are not aware of the passage of the Interstate Commerce Act in 1887.  That's the law that preempts state regulation of railroads.  So even if a railroad was developed through grant of a state charter, that's a meaningless thing today.  D&H, by the way, is part of Canadian Pacific, not of Pan Am.  What happens to Pan Am before the STB will be interesting to see, but it has nothing to do with your stupid blather.  By the way, "commoncarrier," the ICC no longer exists.  I went out of business at the stroke of midnight, Dec. 31, 1995, and was replaced the next day by the Surface Transportation Board. 

I find you crack about "public be damned" to be offensive as well as idiotic.  As long as you choose to hide behind stupid, anonymous screen names and use forums such as this to display your stupidity, I shall be happy to point out to one and all just how stupid you really are.  Now, go away; you're only a petty annoyance in a world that has many more serious problems than the ones with which you choose to bore people.