Wisconsin Central
The Wisconsin Central Ltd. was a railroad company in the northern United States.
history
After the Soo Line had acquired Milwaukee Road in 1985 , in 1986 they combined most of their routes in Wisconsin and Upper Michigan as the "Lake States Transportation Division" (LSTD). It was hoped that this operationally largely self-sufficient regional company could operate the comparatively poorly used routes with a total length of around 3,400 kilometers more economically. However, after the expected effects did not materialize or only slowly, the decision was made to offer the LSTD for sale.
A group of investors, led by longtime railroad entrepreneurs Edward Burkhardt and Thomas Power, founded the Wisconsin Central Transportation Corporation (WCTC) and in the spring of 1987 acquired LSTD from Soo Line. Subsidiaries were founded to operate the railroad: while WCL Railcars Inc. was supposed to take over the leasing contracts for the locomotives and freight cars, a Wisconsin Central Ltd. (WC) formed as the actual operating company. The three companies deliberately used the name and the emblem of the former Wisconsin Central Railway, which dates from 1885, as a large part of the route network taken over had once been operated by it. A third subsidiary, Wisconsin Bridges Inc., was established to take over Sault Ste. , Previously held jointly by Soo Line and Canadian Pacific Railway . Marie Bridge Co. - u. a. Operator of the railway bridge in Sault Ste. Marie - furnished.
The actual takeover of the WC took place on October 11, 1987. Investments in vehicles and systems as well as an intensification of customer service led to improved reliability and increased traffic, so that a profit could be made in the first financial year. In the 1990s, the Wisconsin Central group began to expand by acquiring other rail companies. The main network grew in 1993 with the takeover of the Fox River Valley Railroad and the Green Bay and Western Railroad , which the Canadian Algoma Central Railway followed in 1995 . The North American WC network reached its greatest expansion to a route length of over 4,600 kilometers with the acquisition of a former C&NW route in Upper Michigan from Union Pacific on January 27, 1997.
At the same time, the Wisconsin Central group was also active overseas. WCTC was part of a consortium that in 1993 the New Zealand acquired New Zealand Rail Limited and as Tranz Rail operation. Four years later, the group bought shares of the Tasmanian rail companies TasRail and Emu Bay Railway. In the UK , Wisconsin Central first appeared in 1995 when it took over the postal train operator, Rail Express Systems Ltd. In 1996, Wisconsin Central also acquired the Trans-Rail, Mainline Freight and Load-Haul businesses from British Rail and transferred these together with Rail Express Systems into the new company English, Welsh & Scottish Railway (EWS). In the following year EWS also took over the former British Rail divisions Railfreight Distribution and National Power, making the company by far the largest freight transport provider in Great Britain.
On October 9, 2001, the entire Wisconsin Central group was purchased by the Canadian National Railway (CN). The economically very successful Wisconsin Central, which had increased the traffic on its main network by 300% since 1987, was on the one hand attractive for the CN because of its own traffic. In addition, their Chicago - Duluth connection closed a gap in the Y-shaped transcontinental network of the CN.