down. MMA responded by reducing its workforce to 275 employees and cut salaries by 40 percent. The decline of the pulp and paper industry as well as the lumber industry, which originally represented 60% of the railway's traffic base, had rendered a company worth $60 million in 2003 effectively worthless. Accountants from the la Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec wrote that company's investment in MMA down to a nominal $1000 from 2008 onward. MMA laid off additional workers in 2006 and in 2008 as the company struggled to become profitable. In the spring of 2010, MMA cut train crews from two workers to one, installing remote control and cutting the total workforce to 175 people (down from twice that number in 2006). These steps were estimated to save $4.5 million annually in wages. Later that year, it sold the northern of the former BAR line to the state; this track was in very poor condition but its sale brought $20 million, $7 million of which was used to repay a 2003 loan from la Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec, an MMA stockholder. MMA was the only Maine railway to use a single-person crew and a remote-control device instead of the more common two-person crews. Largely due to the lack of money for track maintenance and equipment, adverse winter weather conditions, and possibly the practice of running with single person crews, from 2003 to 2013 MMA recorded an accident rate of 36.1 accidents per million miles travelled, versus a national average of 14.6/million miles traveled for all of North America, according to data from the Federal Railroad Administration. Freight volumes continued to drop as manufacturers, needing to meet customer demands for smaller quantity just in time delivery in order to reduce inventories, began to prefer trucking firms as faster and more reliable than MMA. 2008 Eastern Townships passenger proposal A 2008 proposal to return passenger train service to the Eastern Townships on the route between Montréal and Sherbrooke was studied but never implemented. The MMA-owned section of the line from St-Jean-sur-Richelieu to Sherbrooke would have required costly upgrades to tracks and bridges in order handle Via Rail passenger trains operating at . 2011 Twin Rivers Paper dispute In 2011, the Twin Rivers Paper Company of Madawaska, Maine, the largest customer on the former BAR line, intervened in a United States District Court lawsuit which sought to allow