I own both CN and CPKC. I also own them a third way, through the Canadian index funds and mutual funds that hold both almost by default. So when I ask which railroad I would buy next, I am really asking about the margin: what an extra C$10,000 should do in a portfolio that already has a fair amount of both.
Part of what I like about railroads is that they are infrastructure whose physical replacement value is enormous. Canada is not going to wake up one morning and decide that railways are obsolete. The economic cycle will keep turning, commodity prices will swing, governments will change and trade routes will shift, but the country still has to move grain, potash, crude and chemicals, automobiles, containers, lumber, metals and consumer goods across a very large piece of geography, and trains are still the cheapest way to do much of it. Nobody is going to build another CN or another CPKC from scratch. The rights-of-way, the urban corridors, the bridges and tunnels, the yards and terminals, the port connections and the signalling systems took more than a century to assemble, and the political and environmental approvals required to repeat the exercise today would take longer than most investment horizons. Inflation makes the theoretical bill higher every year.
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