Hart,
I understand your feelings completely! Unfortunately, these people aren't children! If they were, there'd be a couple of hooligans that could be taken behind the woodshed for a sound thrashing and maybe,
just maybe(!), they'd learn their lesson!!
The reality is much sadder:
1. It was about greed. Certain people in the CHS heirarchy saw this as a chance to grab all the profits rather than settle for what they were getting. They were tragically wrong and the state (and it's taxpayers) are now paying for it!
2. It was about personality conflicts. Mark Greska and the Ashbys had ongoing disputes with Bell and Behrens. There was no incentive for the CHS to want to try and make another contract work! Quite the contrary, it seemed as if they saw it as a golden opportunity to finally get rid of GTL Inc. once and for all! Their disingenuousness in the contract process only proves that they were willing to disregard their own rules when it served them! The result? They had to scramble just to find
something that could run! They had to spend
hundreds of thousands of dollars just to do it and they are
still scrambling!!! They can't get a steam engine so they have diesels restored to run one a railroad that
never had diesels!! It would sound like a reasonable half-measure except that one of the principle complaints that the CHS levied against the GTL Inc. was that they were running non-historic steam engines (i.e. ex-WSL Shays and Central American 2-8-0's)!!
3. It was about pride. Once the CHS realized that everything was falling apart they did exactly the wrong thing! They publicly tried to put the best face on it while desperately spending money foolishly just trying to keep their heads above water! They rushed an irreplaceable C&S #9 back up to the Loop and allowed their new operator to beat the hell out of it requiring a complete overhaul after only a couple of months of service! They made deals left and right with various municipalities promising all kinds of things and delivering on almost none of them (at least as yet!)
4. Lastly, it's about accountability or more accurately, the
LACK of it!!! These people are
still around and the CHS is
still running the show!! They have proven themselves, in this instance, to be wholly unsuited to running the Loop! Their mismanagement is so egregious that, if this had been a private business, heads would have rolled! Of course, the people involved
aren't accountable which is why the situation isn't getting better! Steam on the Loop? Historical accuracy? Profitability? In 2009, five years after this entire debacle started, the answer to ALL of those questions was "no." (*Sigh) We told you so but you didn't want to listen. Now, you guys are sick of hearing about all the problems! You just want us to quit b*tching about it!! Okay. I'll quit. For now...
