The State-Owned Railroad Dream
Prominent attorney and activist Colonel Patrick H. Winston argues that the state of Washington should own its own railroad to prevent corporate exploitation.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
Colonel Patrick H. Winston is greatly interested in the railroad problem which is now being widely discussed in this state, and has strongly advocated the building of a state railroad. Last evening a Post-Intelligencer reporter showed him at his rooms at the Albion an editorial in the Spokane Review of December 21, stating that the people had already rejected his proposition of a state railway from the grain lands of eastern Washington to the shores of Puget Sound. Colonel Winston commented: 'My proposition is a simple one. It is that subscription shall be obtained for a railway from Puget Sound across the state to the Idaho line; that the state shall subscribe to the stock of the road in precisely the same way an individual does. A bill authorizing a subscription would provide for the appointment of a proxy to vote the state stock at the stockholders' meetings. There is nothing novel about this business. Cities, counties and states have time and again and from time immemorial subscribed to the stock of such works of internal improvement. Ohio owns the Cincinnati Southern railway, New York owns the Erie canal, and North Carolina owns the Atlantic railway. It is only a question of financial ability. If the state should subscribe $6,000,000 to this enterprise, the stock would have to be paid for by a sale of state bonds running for twenty years. These bonds would sell at par.'
“I think sooner or later the people will discover that the way to own a railroad is to build and own it instead of trying to manage some monopoly's road.”
Winston’s 1890 proposal to use state bonding power to build infrastructure that serves the public interest echoes contemporary debates about public transit funding, municipal broadband, and the ongoing tension between private corporate control and public ownership of vital logistics.
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