AT&T owned a railroad?
From Don Kimberlin (internal link)
The day I started work at AT&T in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, my personal induction was by Henry G. Pettit, one of the nicest people I ever worked for. Henry had been a US Navy radioman on board a four-stack destroyer in WWI, and eventually wound up working at AT&T's east coast overseas HF radio operations, transferring to Florida when that site opened up a couple of decades later.
He exposed to me his personal opinion that Bell did "whatever it wanted," and got the government to rubber-stamp it, then telling the public it was "The Law" that required them to operate as they did.
I have found out that Henry was right.
At any rate, he told me that the Bell even "owned a railroad" at that date in 1962.
I later found out that Henry was correct. However, his was that typical employee doctrinaire sort of knowledge of a selected portion of the facts.
In later years, I found out that Illinois Bell at Chicago, in the monopolistic fashion of the early Bell (pre-1913 antitrust settlement) era, had purchased a "merchants' railway" that ran in tunnels under the buildings of downtown Chicago, ostensibly to deliver coal and merchandise among the center city buildings.
What the Bell historians had neglected to include in the story was that the railway had been built by a competing phone company, to evade the monopoly on placing telephone cables in the streets; a monopoly established by close Illinois Bell relations with the rather openly corrupt Chicago city government officials.
To close that gap on their monopoly, Illinois Bell got Western Electric to purchase the railway, and thus deny the potential competitors from using its tunnels for telephone cables.
And so the railway was "owned by AT&T" for some decades.
The twist came a half century or more later, when Western Electric, perhaps suffering from corporate senile dementia, sold the railway, which had been inoperative for some years.
However, the people who purchased it without Ma Bell recognizing them, was the Chicago Fiber Optic Corporation, the first of the many local fiber optic companies to emerge in the fiber era.
That once again gave a Bell competitor the selfsame tunnels to use to beat Ma Bell at her own game in Chicago.
The first market Chicago Fiber Optic found was to provide broadband connectivity between the various interstate Bell competitors at Chicago -- Sprint, MCI and such -- thus making Chicago perhaps the first major inland interchange point between Bell's interstate competitors.
I find that a rather interesting example of how corporations create, then lose, their competitive stance.