No, I won’t even call them hobos, a hobo is an honorable person who travels to obtain work when work ain’t available in their locale, a tramp is just lazy and finds the railroad an easy place to loaf. Couple years back a bunch of Wall Street raiders headed by Bill Ackman saw an open door on a CP locomotive and hopped aboard. If they’d just hopped in any empty boxcar nobody would have minded, but Ackman sat himself down in the conductor’s seat even though he didn’t even know how to couple a car never mind couple with another railroad. Then he invited the CEO who damn near ran CN into the ground, Hunter Harrison, into the engineer’s seat so he could work the same “magic” on CP.

What followed has been a couple years of customers pulling the pin while these Wall Street whiz kids tried to shrink what they viewed as their toy railroad until it would fit on the executive boardroom table, customers and employees be damned. The hoped for couplings with a major eastern railroad never happened, I swear both NS and CSX would have run their trains into the Atlantic Ocean before they’d merge with the barely rolling wreckage that CP was becoming.

But the Wall Street whiz kids weren’t able to derail CP, and despite Ackman dumping a bunch of stock on the market today CP’s stock price dropped a couple percent and is recovering. With over a century of history behind them, even the Wall Street whiz kids couldn’t kill CP. Lesson for Wall Street: You worry about your corner offices, and let the railroaders run the railroads!