This 200-Foot-Long Railway to Nowhere Is Actually a Brilliant Shipping Loophole
owl writes:
This 200-Foot-Long Railway to Nowhere is Actually a Brilliant Shipping Loophole:
Life is full of loopholes big and small, and sometimes you just have to run a train right through one. That seems to be the case with the Bayside Canadian Railway, anyway, down at the southwestern tip of New Brunswick, Canada. It runs about 200 feet along a clearing just across the St. Croix River from Maine. Its tiny train slowly bumps back and forth, going approximately nowhere. And it's now at the center of a massive court battle between its operators and the U.S. federal government.
Run by a subsidiary of the American Seafood Group, a huge Seattle-based seafood processor that operates in Alaska, the Bayside Canadian Railway is said by the DOJ to fly afoul of the Merchant Marine Act of 1920, according to Anchorage Daily News. Also known as the Jones Act, the law requires shipping between American ports be done with American-built, American-flagged vessels, which the ASG doesn't operate. An exemption known as the third proviso, however, apparently accommodates goods that make part of the journey via rail in Canada.
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