No industry has (and largely through its own efforts) engineered so dramatic a positive reversal of economic fotunes as ahve the railroads, and with so little public scrutiny.

In 1950 the United states still had about 100 railroad listed as "Class I by the Intersate Commerce Commission. By 1973, that number had been cut roughly in half, and prehaps a third of the mileage was bankrupt or insolvent. Few of the remainder were considered suitable for investment.

But revitalized by deregulation under the Staggers Act, and a sweeping change in work rules intitiated in 1985 (the one that cut 5-person crews to 2, and removed the word "caboose" from everyday usage. the industry began a revival which would reduce the US/Canadian rail scene to seven major players, all quite solvent and respectably profitable.

Bu the lean, mean, successful rail industry which evolved largely unnoticed bears little resemblance to the culture which still captured a certain amount of sentimental interest and recognition of common standards when this writter was growing up in the late 1950's and early 1960's

Major-railroad employment today is (in absolute numbers) about one-tenth of what it was in 1945; half again of that when population growth is factored in. The business model of siding-to-siding delivery of carloads has given way to intermodal shipments and solid trainloads of bulk commodities, a technology derided as "boxes and rocks" in the last years before the corner was turned.

And erhaps most siginificantly of all, the media reporting on that industry is now directed toward a fully diverse, feminized and sensitized socitey, on e which would be totally unrecognizable to the relative handful of mature white males who had always called th shots before the industry's fall  and rise.

Among the modes of thransport, railroading is unique in that it has, since the end of the age of land grants, privately furnished and financed its own infrastructure, and retained absolute control over it. The airlines and motor carrier have a tumultuous history, and very few of them have maintained a record of sustained and stable propsperity.

In a truly competitive economic millieu. the rail industry would spawn a number of alternative forms of entrepreneurship. with numerous variations of responsibility for and contol of the rights-of-way, rolling stock, and pricing systems. But the industry's natural tendency toward monopoly makes this highly unlikely. And the agressive stance recently taken within the Beltway increases the possibility that the railroads, like the automobile industry, will be viewed as a plaything to be seized and broken by bureacratic zeal.

Mr. Buffett's new acquisition now means that the headquarters of America's two surviving Western rail carriers are less than 25 city blocks apart, in Omaha, in a state which has proven to be one of the most entrepreneurial and most recession resistant. But rival Union Pacific has a long history of incosistent policies toward the pubic sector, and is often characterized as possessing a "bunker mentality", in part due to the centralization of almost all its dispatching functions in an underground facility on Omaha's Twelfth Street.

It remains to be seen whether mr. Buffett's bold stroke will be viewed as an opening move in what may prove to be a very great game.