Back then it would have given them a competitive advantage over their peers because of faster end to end performance. Other than some of your head office folks

Back then it would have given them a competitive advantage over their peers because of faster end to end performance. Other than some of your head office folks (accounting, HR, etc) there wasnt much of a greater operating efficiency to be gained, nor do I think they would have gotten significantly lower costs (but for maybe fuel) by squeezing their vendors either. I think that rationale holds true today too. When we allowed the UP-SP and BN-SF lashups, we created two western colossuses, if we still had four roads in the west, and had they encouraged east/west mergers at that time, things would be better off today.