Dakota, Minnesota & Eastern Railroad

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Matt Short Line H
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Joined: Fri Nov 22, 2013 11:28 pm

Dakota, Minnesota & Eastern Railroad

Unread post by Matt Short Line H »

This is the continuing life of the Dakota, Minnesota & Eastern. After 2006, when the FRA denied the DM&E's application for a $2.3 Billion Loan for the Powder River Basin & Rehabilitation project, the DM&E went looking for a private financier. The DM&E had four options for financing this big of a project. Those options were Watco, Kansas City Southern, Canadian National & Canadian Pacific. Eventually CP outbid CN for the DM&E and sister Railroad Iowa, Chicago & Eastern by putting a bid for $1.48 Billion. CP took control of the Railroads on October 30th, 2008. On December 3rd, 2012 after a little over 4 years of owning and operating the DM&E/IC&E CP decided, after a change of management, that it was not going to pursue the Powder River Basin Project & it wanted to divest itself of the railroads, citing that the railroads had proved to be unprofitable. Just like in 1986 when the DM&E was formed, several of the states that the DM&E and ICE operated wanted the operations to continue and after a little over a year and a half of negotiations CP agreed to sell the Railroads to a newly formed corporation Iowa Rail Holdings. The corporation paid what was rumored to be $350 million for the Railroads. On July 20th, 2014 the Dakota, Minnesota & Eastern & Iowa, Chicago & Eastern returned to operations with all of the locomotives that CP had acquired given back along with some "new" power. CP with the agreement also agreed to send 20 Ex SOO Line SD60's & all 4 Ex SOO Line SD60M's. CP also sent the DM&E 10 EMD SD90/43MAC's for the DM&E to test and see if they would want more SD90/43MAC's or even all of them. The last new power CP sent was 6 MP15AC's & 2 3GS21B's. These were to replace the GP9's that CP had scrapped when the IC&E was taken over. The DM&E now and the financing with the new owners to continue pursuing the Powder River Basin Project. The DM&E took the first steps of this project on August 17th, 2014 when the first new tracks were laid. To Be Continued....
"You want to be original, you want to be yourself, and whether that's accepted or not accepted, that's not as important as being you" - Tyler Hubbard, Half of Duo Florida Georgia Line

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