Success Quote by John Moody

Competition, Moody implies, isn’t a sweeping, textbook ideal. It’s a patchwork stitched together at stations, junctions, and freight depots where lines physically intersect and shippers can credibly threaten to take their business elsewhere. The sentence sounds mild, almost technical, but it’s doing sharp work: it narrows “competition” down to geography and logistics, not corporate slogans about the free market.

The specific intent reads like a corrective to lazy comparisons. A railroad is not a soft, replicable product; it’s an anchored system of right-of-way, grades, bridges, terminals, timetables, and local political deals. You can’t simply build a parallel line and call it an equivalent. By stressing that “no one railroad can completely duplicate another,” Moody acknowledges the natural-monopoly character baked into rail infrastructure. Most routes confer a kind of captive market because the line’s very existence defines what is reachable at what cost.

Then comes the subtext: regulation and consolidation debates are missing the point if they assume competition is everywhere or nowhere. It exists “at particular points,” which is also where the fighting gets fiercest - rate wars, rebates, discriminatory pricing, sweetheart arrangements for big shippers. In the Moody-era rail economy (late 19th to early 20th century), those contested nodes shaped national prices and local fortunes, even if vast stretches of track faced no meaningful rival.

Moody’s realism doubles as a warning: when competition is intermittent, power concentrates in the gaps. The market doesn’t naturally smooth itself; it produces chokepoints. That’s not cynicism for its own sake. It’s an investor’s and businessman’s map of where leverage actually lives.