The sale to enthusiastic investors of the 85 percent of the now-profitable freight railroad owned by the Government marked the continuation of a privatization trend and the end of years of haggling over whether to sell the stake to a company - Norfolk Southern had offered $1.9 billion for it - or the public.

But Stan Stein, a lawyer representing a tackle shop owner, Allan Bright, in a separate suit against Beaver and his club, said landowner motives were seldom altruistic, and he expressed alarm over the privatization trend.

Helping to spur the privatization trend is the widespread availability of debt financing, giving private buyers an advantage over public companies, which have traditionally limited their borrowing.

Also, government monopolies on public utilities, telecommunications and railroads have historically been common, though recent decades have seen a strong privatization trend throughout the industrialized world.

The transaction continues a pattern in Russia of uniting companies separated in the breakup of the Soviet Union and the privatization trend in the 1990s into big new monopolies, either state-owned or controlled by executives loyal to the Kremlin.

In fact, many say the privatization trend, while still just a glimmer in the eyes of many municipalities, could provide new opportunities, both domestically and overseas.

But Britain's Conservative Government started the privatization trend and has increased the ranks of individual shareholders faster than any other nation.

State legal authority for public entities to privatize water systems has aided the privatization trend.

Now Canadians run their part of the North Warning System, and in line with the privatization trend, individual sites are managed not by the military but a private Canadian technology service corporation, the Frontec Company, based in Edmonton, Alberta.