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Originally posted by Mmmm, Burger (C.J.)
the difference, while perhaps not of constitutional relevance, is that once the government enters into the role of merely "facilitating" transactions between two private parties, rather than taking land for its "own" use, there is no practical check on the number of takings that are likely to occur--it's merely a question of how big the checkbooks of the buyers are.

BTW, let's address railroads, because there's an important distinction there: they are common carriers (or were), which meant that the public was entitled to use them, albeit at some (often regulated) cost. Another distinction is that many of those cases are over 100 years old, and our concepts of "common" in common carrier have probably changed somewhat--they were much more public utilities than we might think of them now.

Back in those days before trust-busting, didn't the guys who owned the railroads make recockulous amounts of money at it? Or am I incorrectly conflating them with the steel industry?