I found that bit about Buffet very enlightening for an additional reason why the Keystone Pipeline is being blocked. I've been learning a lot since I started to hang out in the Gulch.

Its all politics all the time

Given the problem of right of way, and the enormous cost of rail lines ($1m/mile), it's unlikely that passenger rail transport will make a comeback.

Actually, the largest amount of commercial goods transported from the U.S. interior is by barge, with rail second, and trucking third. Barge transport is safer, cheaper, more energy efficient and environmentally cleaner than any other method.

I was aware of The Great Northern but had not heard of James Hill. While reading The Golden Pinnacle, it soon dawned on me that this was not a fictional character but a real person so I had to take a side trip to Google land to add to the story. Reading fiction makes me feel guilty but historical fiction where I learn something at the same time reduces the uneasiness.

jim taggart over here!

Meaning the idea that airlines could disappear, and passenger rail travel could come roaring back, is still plausible.

Perhaps the saddest part of all this is that Burlington Northern Santa Fe started out as James Hill's Great Northern Railway. The Great Northern was the only transcontinental railroad built without subsidies or land grants, the antithesis of Buffet's crony capitalism. Hill's construction of that railroad is one of the lost chapters of American capitalism, a truly epic and heroic story. I paid tribute to Hill in The Golden Pinnacle. I hope in some future novel I have the opportunity to skewer Buffet.

Well, sometimes they push, too.

Thanks, jb!

Nice find, lrbeggs.

A classic example of the power of pull.

The sad part is that the reason given for not building the pipeline is "environmental concerns".
I think shipping oil by rail is much riskier so it really highlights the hypocrisy of the left.

Nice. The MSM is owned ~ they can't report real news...only lies & distortion.