Support activities for rail 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.