Ownership doesn't necessarily mean whose name is on the door. Nobody on your railroad knows more about how customers run their plants, schedule their cars, hire or lay off workers, police their areas, or repair their buildings than the folks who run the trains, fix the track, or make the locomotives behave. And if there weren't a sense of ownership, nobody would care if a car wasn't switched or if a plant closed.
Some business transactions have many owners along the way.
A case in point is this pipe move taking place on a northeastern short line. But they wanted to truck in the pipe from a distant supplier, store it on the railroad's land, and then use short rail hauls to ferry pipe and tools to the job site. The short line took ownership of the success of the overall logistical process, coordinating the needs and the actions of the vendor, the water company, the originating railroad and, of course, itself. Because if just one player didn't buy in and make a real commit- ment to the move, the whole process would fail. And the cost of failure is the loss of repeat business.