Support activities for transportation

Track and right-of-way maintenance, railcar and locomotive servicing, terminal and yard operation — real work with real barriers to casual competition, since it takes certified people and heavy equipment on live track. The group is substantial: 249 Canadian establishments, 42 of them with fifty or more employees, and in the US an average of about 26 employees per establishment. The pre-screen's note was 'contract work for two customers', and the filings bear it out. CN, one of the two, spent $2,306M on purchased services and material in 2025 against $2,313M in 2024 — flat on $17,304M of revenue — and attributed the flatness to 'lower contracted services' offset by other items [A]. That line is the contractor's whole market at one customer, and it also contains freight forwarding, track materials, crew lodging and utilities. The buyer employs its own engineering forces, decides each season how much to contract out, qualifies who may set foot on its property, and can take the work back in-house whenever headcount allows. Price, volume and access all sit on the customer's side of the table. The incumbents hold multi-year approved-contractor standing and the safety record that renews it, which an entrant cannot present on day one. The reachable variant is work where the customer is a shipper rather than a railway — industrial switching inside a plant, transloading, private-siding maintenance — since there the buyers number in the hundreds. That variant was not screened here and is the part worth a second look. The freight and terminal software on this branch is screened separately.

A marina is waterfront real estate with a service counter attached, and the real estate is now institutionally priced. Sun Communities sold Safe Harbor — the largest marina and superyacht servicing business in the United States — to Blackstone Infrastructure for $5.65B, closing 123 of the 138 properties in April 2025 for $5.25B of cash consideration [A]. Across roughly 48,790 wet slips and dry storage spaces that is about $115,800 per slip, which is the number a would-be owner is bidding against. Infrastructure capital has repriced the asset, and it is not competing on service quality. The reachable version of this code is therefore not the marina but the services around it — rigging, haul-out, winter storage, brokerage and mobile repair — which need a yard lease rather than a harbour, and which the record at 441220 already touches from the retail side. That version was not screened here and is the one worth a second look.

Volume comes from rotation lists, motor clubs and insurer contracts rather than from customers, and those lists are held by operators with the equipment and the municipal relationships to stay on them. Heavy recovery is where the margin is and it requires the most expensive iron. Rate regulation and consent-tow rules vary by municipality, which caps the price of the routine work.

Asset-light and therefore crowded. The broker's product is a shipper relationship and a carrier list, and both sit with incumbents who have been building them for decades while double-brokering fraud has made shippers less willing to try an unknown name. Working capital is the quiet killer: carriers expect quick pay and shippers pay in 45 days, so growth consumes cash. The visibility and TMS software above this market is screened separately. Update, 2026-09-16 — the capital barrier is genuinely low, and that is not the problem. Federal authority plus $75,000 of financial security is the whole regulatory entry [B], which makes this one of the few markets in this research a person can legally enter with five figures. But active broker authorities stood at about 25,271 in a January 2025 update, down 9.9% year over year [C] — an industry shedding intermediaries — and in 2025 the listed brokers' shares fell on the argument that AI removes the matching work a brokerage sells. The margin here is an information asymmetry, and entering a business whose product is an asymmetry while that asymmetry is being automated is a timing bet rather than a market.

A residual, and the pre-screen was right that freight brokerage and forwarding do not live here — they are at 4885. What Statistics Canada does list under this code is an odd set: driving services for auto and truck delivery, packing and crating of goods for transport, livestock feeding stations for animals in transit, and independently operated pipeline terminals [A]. These share nothing but a filing category, so the screen looks at the two a person could actually start. Packing and crating — building export crates and preparing machinery or artwork for shipment — needs a shop, lumber and a few skilled hands, and sells to manufacturers and movers by the job. Driving services sell a licensed driver's time to a carrier or a dealer who owns the vehicle. Both are reachable within weeks, which is the problem: nothing is sunk, nothing is licensed beyond the individual's own credentials, and the customer can replace the supplier with an employee. The business counts carry a signal of their own. Canada has 1,208 establishments, 874 of them with one to four employees and 608 in Ontario, against only 2,290 in the whole United States, where the average establishment has about twelve staff [A]. A Canadian count more than half the American one, made almost entirely of micro-firms and concentrated in one province, looks less like an industry than like drivers incorporating themselves — a reading this screen could not confirm. Either way the entrant would be selling labour by the hour with no asset to defend it. The livestock, pipeline-terminal and remaining activities were not examined.