Comment by antonymoose
2 days ago
I remember some old tidbit about the American westward expansion, most railroad projects failed and went bankrupt and were sold for pennies on the dollar to the ultimate owners.
Something sad about that, really.
2 days ago
I remember some old tidbit about the American westward expansion, most railroad projects failed and went bankrupt and were sold for pennies on the dollar to the ultimate owners.
Something sad about that, really.
A lot of them got built with per-mile subsidies and cashed out via shoddy construction. The ones that focused on long-term financial sustainability more often did fine, but it is a lesson in perverse incentives (though some would argue that afterwards cheap overbuilt lines facilitated much faster and more extensive westward expansion of people).
> shoddy construction
Just today there was a newsletter from Construction Physics about Strap Rail. Literally wooden rails with a iron plate strapped on top put in the mud. Only in the US, 10 times cheaper. But more expensive to maintain and gone in years instead of decades for normal iron rails though.
By building the initial rails cheaply, they could then bring in equipment and supplies over those rails to rebuild the railroad to a much better quality, and at a lower cost than if they had to bring that equipment and supplies in without the rails in the first instance.
That doesn't mean they always actually invested the money to rebuild properly... but it was sound engineering theory.
Of course, there were other financial shenanigans too- see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cr%C3%A9dit_Mobilier_scandal
move fast, break things is never a good long term plan
The lesson, which we learned in the dot-com era and will likely learn again in the AI era, is that the benefits of step-change new infrastructure technology do not accrue in the long run to the infrastructure builders—the technology only creates the step-change if it finds its way to being a commodity!—but diffuses throughout the new, ultimately much larger, more productive economy as a whole.
See also the dark fiber build out before the telecom collapse of ~2001
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecoms_crash
Leland Stanford made out ok, AFAIK