Just one question here... Who are they [MRL] competing with?

Guy I went to high school with works for that outfit, unless he's moved on. He once worked for the Red Team.

I remember when the MRL came into being. The BN ex-NP route
through the southern part of Montana all of a sudden was sold
off. There were quite a few guarenteed clerks working in those
stations along that line. The age of the "rubber rooms" came to
be. Clerks that didn't want to relocate to other parts of the BN
system ended up in the most futile degrading idea anyone could
come up with, the rubber rooms. Basically since you were a
guaranteed employee and you were going to get payed your
daily wage regardless if you had a job or not, the BN setup these
gymnasiums where you had to report daily for 8 hours a day
and do absolutely nothing. No reading materials allowed. It was
fucking torture to recieve you daily pay. This went on for a couple
years. A lot of people couldn't stand it and bid out to BN jobs and
some quit period. Either way BN won. The BN tried just about
everything to get out of the guaranteed employee agreement.
Maybe some of you recall the "Winona Bridge" stunt where they
were going to change the name of the BN to the Winona Bridge
Railway. Fortunately for me that fell through.

Phukk........ I had a Goat moment....

The Krink wrote:

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Maybe some of you recall the "Winona Bridge" stunt where they
were going to change the name of the BN to the Winona Bridge
Railway. Fortunately for me that fell through.

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How can we forget??
The fertile ground Timothy Mellon plowed when he took mile long Springfield Terminal, got a consessionary contract from company lapdog utu, and screwed every man woman and dog on D&H, MEC, and B&M, by leasing them out to Springfield Terminal.
BN was licking its chops, just hoping for a piece of the action. Mercifully tho, the courts held and stopped BN from following. (Timothy got his plan thru by applying plenty of "grease" at the proper places. All the papers exist in the Massachusettes archive of Senate records. These papers are sealed for 100 years. Grandkids will be able to read just who transpired together and screwed thier ancestors)  

Burlington Northern R. Co. v. United Transp. Union, 862 F.2d 1266 (7th Cir. 1988) (Winona Bridge) (finding a trackage rights transaction between a carrier and its wholly-owned subsidiary alter ego to be a sham when the record also included indicia of anti-union animus and evidence of the grantors intent to avoid union obligations).

In Winona Bridge, the employee petitioners had been handling the traffic on the line, prior to the carrier granting trackage rights to a different entity after negotiations with the unions broke down.

The court in Winona Bridge, was concerned that a parent carrier (BN) was transferring rights to an extension of itself (Winona Bridge) and, thus, condemned the transaction as a sham.

Didn't they all, Krink? Ours are in HOT-lanta.