The summer offers greater opportunity to drive around the location where you live and learn the stories of how and why you came to be there. If you go back in history, people originally settled by the water for both water and food. In time the place either grew or people moved to other places which evolved into cities. Once the cities came, people wanted more space and if they had come to the eastern part of the US, they thought of going west. The west offered many opportunities and people shipped their goods to the east to be sold. As time goes on, the search for a less expensive and relatively faster way to ship goods and people came and the first choice was canals. In a book called Bridges, Canals & Tunnels – the Engineering Conquest of America by David Jacobs and Anthony Neville published by American Heritage Publishing, NY, 1968 the authors describe the challenges of doing what we all consider to be normal. The first canal built was the Erie Canal – from New York City take the Hudson River north to Albany (the state Capital) and turn west to end up in Buffalo.  While the line on the map is relatively straight the terrain is not. Similar to canals at the time, everyone thought it was a great idea, but it was expensive, there were many political challenges, however once in operation the cost to build the canal was earned back with 10 years. With those results, the rest of the US looked to build canals to generate income – most did not succeed, perhaps there are canals where you are going this summer many of them are now used for more leisurely or tourist purposes.  It was interesting with the building of the Erie Canal the cost of the sending goods from Philadelphia to Columbus, Ohio overland was twice as expensive and took 10 days longer than sending the goods from Philly to New York through the Erie Canal to Buffalo and then onto Columbus.

The invention of the steam engine lead to the great railway building age and once again prices fell and length of time to ship the goods fell. The challenge of the engineers was the lands around the Appalachian Mountain range is not flat and many bridges needed to be built. The design of the bridge which fit the needs to be relatively inexpensive, pleasing to look at and very functional was a given that the engineers overcame. After the bridges, because trains have to have a relatively flat base, the great train tunnels were built – it was technically easier to go through the mountains than around them and new processes were developed. After the private automobile became affordable the demand for roads, highways, interchanges kept the engineers busy.

Linking to dividend paying stocks, with the 3 transportation routes, those that could build the first ones were the companies which would have a monopoly and could increase prices to make healthy profits. The government’s role was to ensure bonds could be sold, but there was limited competition which would allow the bondholders to be repaid. The barriers to entry meant new competition was desired after the first company increased prices too much and sometimes it was cheaper to go through a different city to get better prices. There were alternatives and dividend paying companies must watch monitor closely the alternatives.

There are more questions than answers, till the next time – to raising questions.