Well There‘s Your Problem - Episode 119: The American Freight Rail Industry

Episode Date: December 20, 2022

train bad uday's blog: https://homesignalblog.wordpress.com/ uday on the bird site: https://twitter.com/A320Lga uday on the hairy elephant site: @[e-mail] more coverage, especially from a labor standpoint: https://therealnews.com/ https://labornotes.org/ https://www.railroadworkersunited.org/ https://www.vice.com/en/contributor/aaron-gordon Our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/wtyppod/ Our Merch: https://www.solidaritysuperstore.com/wtypp Send us stuff! our address: Well There's Your Podcasting Company PO Box 40178 Philadelphia, PA 19106 DO NOT SEND US LETTER BOMBS thanks in advance in the commercial: Local Forecast - Elevator Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/  

The software we use daily just is like not working, which is super tight. And it's a Friday, and I'm god almighty. That's the ideal, like that's mindset, you know, and I tell you what, I'm right there with you because my tummy hurts a little bit, I got heartburn. This is the worst pain that anyone has ever suffered. Oh, yeah, exactly right. I am your thing is cool, too. But I'm here busy experiencing the worst thing that's ever happened to anyone, which is

stomach, you know, some time. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I felt kind of crappier earlier today, but I feel good now. I'm going to drink myself into a coma. I feel like I just hello. Hello. Oh, I'm back. The rose is death, live on air.

Sorry, my internet cut out for a little while there. So I wasn't entirely sure whether I was audible. No, hey, how are you doing? I am happy that my semester is over, but I've also consumed way too much caffeine for the amount of sleep I've got last night. So I'm feeling like I might start like jumping or something. Yeah, fun. Welcome. Yeah.

Wait till you get to your 30s there, but. Uh, hello, and welcome to well, there's your problem. It's a podcast about engineering disasters with slides. I'm Justin Rosniak. I'm the person who's talking right now. My pronouns are he and him. Okay, go. I'm Alice Gordau Kelly.

I'm the person who's talking now. My pronouns are she and her. Your 30s are atrocious. 40s are probably going to be worse. Yeah, Liam. Hey, Liam. I I feel great up in a good mood. I things are going well here.

Uh, I am not, uh, sort of having some sort of rage breakdown. Uh, yeah, I feel great. My pronouns are he have. I feel like dog shit. Let's get through this. And we have a guest. Yeah, guest. Hi, I'm Oday.

My pronouns are he and him. Outstanding. How are we all feeling? Yeah. Fuck you, man. That's how I feel. Yeah. That's not that's not me misgendering Alice.

That's just man as a declarative. Yeah, no, it's manners and mankind. I do like all seven, eight billion. Yeah, all of you down the gender neutral man. Yeah, down the toilet where we belong. Well, what do you what do you see on the screen here is a freight train carrying that X trailers. And what do you might notice?

Tailors. Yeah, FedEx, FedEx trailers, fat, fat, fat ass. Trailers. That's short short for federal express. Oh, she's thick. Yes, if we wouldn't get extremely sued, I would like us to do a federal express t-shirt or something. Now, what do you do?

Is there something about parody where you can you're allowed to do that sort of thing? Oh, they'll sue us today. Yeah, yeah, they will. They will sue us. The Federal Express Corporation does not give a shit about parody laws or indeed anything else.

They would, you know, they would be assassinating us a moment, one after that. They don't have to win the lawsuit to majorly inconvenience us. One of the main things that will work following housing is that, you know, the lawsuit itself is the can be the problem. But you have those anti slap laws, which definitely still work, right?

So. So the now the problem with this freight train, you might notice shown here parked on the world famous horseshoe curve outside of Altoona, Pennsylvania, is that it's on its side. That's not good. That's not supposed to be like that. When you told me about my favorite synonym

in the railway industry, when you said that Amtrak put a train on the ground. Yeah, that's supposed to be there. Yeah, so they did some multi-track drifting up here on this one. I noticed the track itself is like all over the place. It's kind of all squiggly. Yes, yeah.

Yes. Impermanent way. Yeah, it's not good. You know, in a valuable way, is that what you want? Yeah, transient way, you know. That's not the sort of flexibility you're looking for in systems design. Yeah.

Listen, buddy, it's shifting like water. What we're going to do today is we're going to sort of go over like a broad interview, overview of the state of the freight rail industry as relates to, you know, causing the recent potential railroad strike, which, of course, Joe Biden averted and solved every problem on the railroad by doing so, you know.

And yeah, that's what we're going to do. We're going to do it from kind of maybe less of a labor perspective and more from, you know, just a top-down view of the state of the railroad because a lot of people have done a lot of work on labor recently. Sure. And if you're listening to this,

you have an idea of like, well, you're on the side of the angels, right? You know what the labor issues are here. You want people to have sick days. You want people to be able to like know when they're going to work or have some idea. But there's a lot of technical shit going on here as well. Yeah, we're giving you a different part of the same picture.

We should definitely put the links to some of the excellent reporting though in the description because that really has been quite a good stuff. But before we dive into this and for everyone to death with a lot of technical stuff, let's let's do the goddamn news. I didn't get it to fade out after all. Yeah, so man's hubris is once again created possibly one of the funniest things that we've ever like, you know,

like we get sent shit when shit like this happens, about five million people send it to us. We have to do a thing on the podcast Twitter account that's like, yeah, we know about this. This has been the best one so far. There's a hotel in Berlin that as part of the sort of like victory lap of capitalism in the 90s, decided to build a tower that could reach even unto God,

right? They decided to build. And then they filled it with fish for some fucking reason. A big fish tank full of tropical fish, 1500 tropical fish, it has an elevator going up through the middle of it. It's in the lobby because like when you're in a hotel, you really need a giant fish tank.

I really set that. I view this as a victory for myself. I couldn't have done it without you patrons. Thank you. Together we will defeat the fish menace. What happened and we know not why, I think, yeah, is the fish tank fucking exploded. The fish tank is gone.

1500 tropical fish are dead. This happened at like four in the morning. So no one died, no humans anyway, only many fish. But yeah, the whole thing just collapsed. Now the lobby of this thing is like flooded with water and dead fish. We've all learned a valuable lesson about hubris. I'm just waiting for the security cam footage to leak.

Yes, I want to see that security cam footage. I enjoy the genre of leaked security cam footage because like just the filmmaking conventions there of sort of guy recording a screen on his phone. There's usually like a guy pointing at the screen with his finger or a pen or something. It's usually just a silhouette of the finger. You don't actually ever see the pointing guy, yeah.

You might get some like sort of muted conversational audio in the background that's like, oh damn, that's where they fucked up. Fantastic. I saw one of those where it was like a sluice gate jammed open and a salmon fishery like factory. And one guy sort of took the initiative to wade through the flood of salmon

to like turn it off at the source and the whole time in the recording you can hear the people in the office going like, who is that guy? Like he's a superhero. Possibly some German man had to do likewise with this and like stem the tide. But like, I never got the appeal of this.

Every time I've ever checked into a hotel I've been like half dead anyway. I don't know what like a beautiful lobby or in this case a lobby full of 1500 tropical fish is meant to do other than inspire you to think, God damn, that's a lot of fish. Yes. I was just imagining waking up in the morning

in one of those rooms that looks onto the car. Oh, that smell must be something special. Opening your curtains and just seeing that wreckage. I get a refund on this. I just wanted to note this is called the Aqua Dom Hotel. It implies the existence of an Aqua Sub Hotel. Yeah, but it's a sub parade. It's not a sexual thing.

It's just a sub parade. Yeah, which implies the existence of a Dom Marine. Stop it. No, it doesn't. This is true. This is true. Stop it. No, it doesn't. If you go and grind her outside military bases you will know that there is no such thing as a Dom Marine.

They're all bottoms. They have an entire branch of bottoms which is representation, you know. Yes. In other news. Yeah, please. Go. Oh, there we go.

There we go. So much like us in this presentation, Elon Musk, a man who is having some difficulties, some problems, a man who is speedrunning the experience of being a forum mod and sort of like a rowdy forum full of malcontents in like 2005. Yeah. His new thing is you may recall when he took over Twitter

his bit was comedy is legal, free speech is legal. I am a libertarian. You can trust me 100%. I'm a nice libertarian wallet inspector. And I'm so ruthlessly committed to free speech that I'm even keeping up the account that tracks the public ADSB data tracking the location of my private jet.

This lasted until it didn't because Elon Musk is a hypocrite and a baby. And 20 spaces isn't real anymore. That's a new one. Yes. Yeah, because someone. So I'm not actually sure what happened with this. He claims someone like threatened the life

of his absurdly named child and was able to do so by tracking the location of his private jet, even though they were like, no, almost certainly not. No, probably not. If you're worried about a flight commercial, fuck you. Stop lying. And then in response, banned the account, banned the guy who operated the account's account,

banned a bunch of journalists who wrote about it at all. And then when those same journalists got together in a Twitter space, he joined it, got asked one question, stammered over his words for a bit, rage quit and deleted Twitter spaces. So he's doing great. Yeah, he's doing fantastic. I mean, I enjoy this management style.

I think it's really drawn me back to the platform and renews my interest and commitment to it. Because it's just really funny to see what it'll do next. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you're going to make a huge ad buy. We're just going to offset all of the sort of like executives from Unilever or whatever. That's what our Patreon money is going to go to.

We're going to put it all into, well, there's your problem advertising on Twitter. We're going to get everyone, all of the crypto guys, all of the weird nerds. We're going to get them all listening to us. Don't you want to learn more about Elon? Please. He could be a bonus episode by himself at this point.

Oh, yeah, this is true, actually. But he's genuinely like spiraling sort of like mentally. And you know, I refer back to my previous joke, which is you should see what happened to the last guy who tried to make me pay the post. Because he might get there. He might do the low-tax speedrun. And, you know, maybe.

Maybe, I don't think he'll do that. I don't think he'll go that far, I think. But he will wind up losing his fortune in a stupid chapter 11 proceeding. He has kind of already done this. He's not the richest man in the world anymore. He's like dropped a second after the guy who owns the like. Has Tesla stopped just been going just like down?

Oh, yeah. Yeah, he's a new two-year loader, Doug. Well, the Tesla business model isn't going to be viable pretty soon because everyone's going to be able to claim those ZV credits. I knew I knew that like the big automakers would get them eventually, not least because Tesla like barely makes cars.

But yeah, no, they really have sort of an extra impetus to do it now. I don't know if Twitter's going to survive. I don't know what the next thing after I want to survive is going to be just going to keep posting till the end. Yeah, me too. I'm like, I'll go unmasked a lot.

I'm absolutely forced to. No, for that. No, probably not. Oh, and if you follow my Instagram, there's a public service announcement. Stop trying to fucking follow my request, my private Instagram. You will not be accepted.

Liam from WTYP. That's the one you hogs are allowed to follow. The Liam like thought pics. The absolutely fucking stop requesting my private facing Instagram account. I didn't know that I had Instagram to follow that. The show does have an Instagram, but I'm talking about my Instagram

that's facing people. People keep bothering me. It's like, I don't know. You fucking don't put your name on your private Instagram. Just have you something like just completely different. Yeah, I moved to Tumblr as well. I'm doing that twice. So that's that's I like that.

Yeah, yeah, crawling back on my knees. But I enjoy the first Google result for Alas, Alas, Alasandam is Alas, Alasandam Islam, Alas, Alasandam top. Yeah, that's right. Hey, at least the top hit isn't Kiwi Farms anymore. So thank you to Keffels for effecting that. Yeah, they're going to have to drag me off of Twitter

with like the big hook that they used to have for little performers. Only God can remove me from Twitter. I've been trying to use master on more in this well, really the past few days. It's you know, the modness of it is yeah, like the thing. Yeah, I just I find it. What if Twitter had more mods and the mods were more capricious?

Yeah, I don't want to I don't want to like sort of get defederated and have to like, you know, I can't control who I'm speaking to because like half of my followers has been removed by one mod who doesn't like that. I don't content warning photos with eye contact in them. You know, I get out. Yeah, exactly. I get defederated and I have to ally myself with the Romulans.

Sort of map of the Holy Roman Empire and just be like, yeah, Mastodon instances. I think it's like Mastodon could be compelling, right? And it needs neither social. Neither social nor media nor a network. That's right. Mastodon only needs a couple of changes to become a good replacement for Twitter.

First of all, it needs Prince Bishops. Second of all, it needs electors. Third of all, the two of those get together and they elect an emperor. And then once we do that, it's all going to be good. Yeah, that's what it's going to be. It's good. We need a Charlemagne instance. Yeah, I can't do Mastodon because I'm too mean on Twitter, I think.

Yeah, you would get like defederated from everything. Yeah, because I'm hateful. Yeah, you would be on like sort of like them, like one of the prison planets, you know? We're on some sort of like instance where like, you know, they've got the like electrified floors or whatever, you know, so you can't post good. Sure, that's fine. I don't post good anyway.

Is it true social, technically a Mastodon instance? Or am I making that up? Oh, my God, is it? I don't know. I don't think so. You don't think so, right? So am I making that up? No, no, it's not. Well, that was I mean, if this fails, we'll all go to like

sort of ISIS affiliated telegram groups. And that way uses a custom version of the free and open source social network hosting as hosting Mastodon as its back end. There you go. Ah, OK, OK, OK. Of course, I like the ISIS telegram group idea, because it's the only social network that allows me to talk directly to federal agents.

This is true. This is true. Well, yeah, catch us on ISIS affiliated telegram groups in the next few months. It's going to be a bunch of guys who have been like all killed in airstrikes and like have had their accounts like harvested by scammers and some feds and us. Yes. Yeah. Anyway, that was the goddamn news.

Beautiful. So here. Oh, yeah, this is very nice. Barstow, California. I just thought before I wanted to begin here, sort of, you know, explain what we're going to do, I would say there has been a lot of work done on the railroad strikes so far from, you know, sort of bottom up labor focused view, you want to, you know, go see all that stuff.

I'm going to throw some links down in the description. Shout outs to Maximilian Alivarez at the Real News, Ross Grooters at Railroad Workers United, Jonah Furman at Labor Notes, Aaron Gordon over advice. You know, and this is this is the really labor focused reporting, which is good. It's all been really great. I'm glad people have been covering this for a lot longer than, you know, mainstream media has because this all sort of the

mainstream media coverage has been lacking. Would you call it the lame stream media? I would actually. Yes, Ross Limbaugh. The New York Times literally called you to be like, what is a train? Explain what to explain what trains are. This is true, yes. And I mean, that's you're a great person to call to do it,

but it was very funny that they like sort of one day before possible imminent railroad strike. Hello, who do we know who knows what a railroad is? It's when the thing go on track. Anyway, what we're going to do here is we're going to we're going to give you a different part of the picture. You know, we're giving our top down, neoliberal technocratic view of what's gone wrong and how to fix it.

Right. Think of us as Pete Buttigieg. It was like that. Don't fucking take it like that. I will piss in your cereal. I will make I will make like pizza boy and take all your bacon. Yeah. No, that was milkshake that did that. Oh, my bad. I will make like milkshake and take all your mostly accused. Yeah, I was about to say he's sitting here right on the desk.

He heard that. Good. So. All right, whatever. Don't shake. So. Yeah, milkshakes sitting over there on a radiator. So he heard that, too. Oh, my.

It's really like a failure of a diplomat here. That's what I said the thing. So all right, what are some of the problems facing the railroad? And the big one recently has been labor unrest, of course. That's the biggest and most immediate one must call in the Pickerton's. Yeah, obviously, Joe Biden averted that and there'll be no negative fall out from that ever. All of those problems are fixed permanently now, right? Thanks, Joe Biden.

The other one is, you know, we have disinvestment in a lot of the railroad. You have railroads not acting in the public interest most of the time. Trains are really late. Lots of safety practices have decayed to the point where, you know, stuff is less safe than it used to be. And despite all this, the railroads are making oodles and oodles of cash, right? Loads of money.

Just just just bringing them down, you know, and in combination, all these problems are difficult to, you know, trace out root causes and very difficult to fix, especially owing to the high profits aspect of it. But we're going to try and dive into the weeds here and sort of see how we got to where we are and how to fix it if there's a way to fix it. Ideally, not involving the Pinkerton's and the like stockpiled machine guns. Yes. Yeah, I don't think you literally cannot squeeze labor any farther than you have squozed them. Squozed.

I mean, a machine gun is a great squeezing machine, right? Like we we juice the whole generation of like doomed youth with those in the 1910s. I mean, if you if you if you actually made a law that forced people to work for the railroad on a sort of Corvay system, maybe. All right, fuck it. Episode over, that's that's the plan. Maybe you can squeeze labor further further. But I have to work on the sort of like

the Norfolk Southern Encomienda. Yeah, I've been I've been drafted. I mean, that's that's what I got my papers. I'm heading out to North Platinum Nebraska tomorrow for basic. I mean, Reagan sort of did a variation of this with the air traffic controllers. I was he just like militarized them, if I remember correctly. So yes. Yeah, fuck it. You know, you drive a train, you're in the army now, we're bringing the USATC back.

Yeah, you can mobilize all like 300 people in the US Army Rail Transportation Corps. It's still an MOS. I don't remember what the number is. I mean, like other countries have it, like the Russian the Russian military has a railroad troops, they're probably not up to much right now. So you just they're they have an order of magnitude more, probably two or three order of magnitude, more people. No, I mean, we should take them, right?

We should encourage them to defect and just sort of slide them. The militarized train bureau. Yes, we need up. Yeah, we need Russians for our railroad. What does the US say about strippers on train tracks? What is the rail safety administration is talking about like this one? Like that. So I guess our first thing is to go through some history.

Like, how did we get to where we are? Not enough Wildcats tracks. Yeah, yeah, that has not winning Blair Mountain. Henry Clay Frick's secretary tackling Alexander Bergman a second to early. Yes. So we'll start with some ancient history, right? And and you wrote all these notes. So yeah, for you. Yes, I mean, I'd say that I think a good way of framing the current issues

with the railroad industry is that, you know, in the broadest possible terms, the industry has had two sort of essentially ever present problems. Number one, it is obsessed with a very particular sort of form of productivity, which is the operating ratio. The operating ratio is the ratio between sort of the expenses incurred in running a business and the the revenues of that business. So the lower it is, the better it is.

Bad obsession is actually actually is sort of an interesting history. There is a book for those who are really want to get into this, The Visible Hand by Alfred Chandler. And one of the things it talks about is how back in like the 1870s, you know, railroads were like the big business. They were sort of the first, the pioneering, you know, corporate entities to have sort of, you know, scale and size that required like really intensive statistical management tools.

And for all intents and purposes, they invent capitalism. Yeah, basically, basically management, management, exactly. Yeah. So, you know, in in in having that, you know, responsibility, one of the things they obviously needed to do is figure out a way to sort of measure how well they were doing, how much money they were generating for themselves and their shareholders. At that time, people, you know, in the 1870s and 1860s, there wasn't really any great way of figuring out exactly how much

all of the infrastructure you own is worth. And certainly, I think I'm not as certain about the whole history of like depreciation, accounting and all that. But basically, the upshot of all this is that instead of, you know, trying to look at return on investment, so, you know, how much money you're making relative to the money you've invested in what you have, they decided to look at the ratio between expenses and earnings to as sort of the key metric.

Um, because every manager wants to like stride into their office and say, to borrow a line from Kilgames Bond, give me good numbers, Jimmy, right? Like the question then is, is what numbers are you trying to get? Exactly. Yeah. Railroads ended up with, as I understand it from this, this sort of like dead end theory of management and like operating expenses that like they just capped because it gave them good numbers. Well, so yeah, basically, it's an easy number to calculate.

And as, you know, railroads invented things like, you know, like divisional structures and management. You know, they took inspiration from the military. And, you know, as these sort of tentacles of managerialism extended and got more complicated, you know, it's really easy to, really, not really easy, but relatively easy to figure out how much money you're spending on different parts of the system and different types of train service. So operating ratios were just easy to calculate.

And, and, you know, because of that, they were obviously something that railroad management became sort of used to looking at. But they're also investors became able to look at. So by the 1880s and 1890s, you know, you open up Wall Street Journal issues from then and you'll see, you know, little like columns written in very fancy English talking about, you know, how like the Pennsylvania Railroad had this operating ratio and here you had that operating ratio. And, you know, what whatever financial analyst was writing this thought

about those operating ratios relative to, you know, what they could be. And even back then that created problems. I'm going to read this long, but I think useful quote from Railway Age on November 8th, 1901. It says, were the question only a matter of comparison upon which to base values present or perspective? The use of the operating ratio would be of comparatively little consequence. But so long as the capacity of men is to be judged by this factor, so long with

the average railroad manager, will it work against the best interests of the road? It is not only easily conceivable, but not it not infrequently happens that under certain conditions, net earnings may be materially increased by the handling of certain traffic, which because of low rates, may disproportionately increase the operating ratio to augment one's net earnings 5% and at the same time, increase one's operating ratio. 10% is a proposition that has caused many a railroad manager to sacrifice his earnings for the sake of maintaining his reputation.

And even in these days of enlightened railway management, such men are sometimes employed to operate railroads because of their demonstrated abilities to reduce the operating ratio to a low limit. It is unfortunate that the loss of traffic resulting from such an attempt cannot be determined. The traffic man who deals with the side of the question is painfully conscious of the condition of a ferris, but he can neither demonstrate nor overcome it.

All he can do is to grin and bear it until such a time as having established his reputation for a low operating ratio, the operating official is called to other fields at a higher salary. So like we do this in like all different forms of management now. Like this is like this is the line, right? Like the line has to go up and we do everything in service of the line, even if it like destroys our own company. This is like weird antiquated 1870s line.

It's like a line in like like written with a quill pen. You know, in this case, it's you want the bar to be shorter. Exactly. You know, everyone wants to be Pittsburgh and Lake Erie here with an operating ratio of 49 because they move one type of traffic to one destination, which is steel to Lake Erie. It's a very small feedback loop in that if you have to draw the line less, you use less ink, which means less expense on ink.

Precisely. Yeah. And I mean, honestly, this like the relationship between the operating ratio and like bad managerial incentives is not like, you don't need to know shit about railroading to understand how it works. You know, like if you're just looking at the operating ratio, it's better to be, you know, a railroad that carries like coal for one customer and then makes like a massive margin on it than one that carries like a much larger

and more diverse type, you know, set of freight, you know, with 10 times the revenue, but, you know, has a lower margin because of it. As I said, the Pittsburgh and Lake Erie here, you know, it's a very small railroad, but by this metric is the best one. Yeah. Let me write my favorite Hunter Harrison quote, actually. Hunter Harrison, and we'll get to this later, was sort of the intellectual modern position scheduled railroading.

But he wrote in Railway Age in June 1996, all other things equal particularly with respect to return on capital. I would rather be a two billion company with a 70% operating ratio than a $700 million company with a 50% operating ratio. It's simple math. So like, not that simple. Seeming. Yes.

Yeah. Even the people who are like, one thing that's interesting to me is I'm just sort of like drifting off into my own fantasy land here is that like, we have all of these, these examples of like, managerialism and like the thing that I always go to is like, like strategy games, simulation games, management games. Yeah. I've never seen it done where one of those has like, changed the information

that is available to you as a player, like the way that you categorize it, the way that you think of like, something doing well is in order to like change the way you play it. And I think that's something that like, it's really like, because that's that's what this story is, right? Is different ways of thinking about what a railroad should be and what a successful railroad looks like. And so all of these, these, these guys are like managing this to sort of like

broadly well intentioned ways. It's just that their intention is make bar graph smaller. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And it's not even like these people themselves don't recognize the problem. I mean, that's Hunter Harrison in that quote, you know, who, who of course goes on to become like the operating ratio guy at the 21st century railroad. But he recognizes this is bad.

But, you know, when your CEO pays like tied to operating ratio performance and when all the investors ask about an earning calls or, you know, in the older days, like, you know, investor meetings is operating ratios. Of course, you're going to, you know, focus on the operating ratio because it's just what we're all sort of conditioned, you know, and this is like a fundamentally social question, but we're conditioned to care about, you know, this, this isn't because the operating ratio is a good metric. It's in fact, in fact, a really bad way to sort of design an entire sort of

railroad operating paradigm. I also feel like, you know, especially in a more modern era, when railroads are perceived to be in terminal decline, you know, the operating ratio is the only possible way that you could stave off, you know, the end. Right. Trying to get more traffic or trying to improve service. Those are dead ends. You have to, you have to do this sort of chemotherapy, you know.

Right. It's the cure worse than the disease, right? Yeah. It's the last good number that you can show someone. Yeah. He might like be missing an arm, right? And he might have like a, like a half pint of blood left in his body, but there is still a detectable heart rate, you know?

Yeah. And that life is very productive now because there's less. Exactly. Yeah. Wait, exactly. It's doing so much work. Yeah. You know, it's, I think I told the story the last time I was on this podcast,

but I'm going to repeat myself because, you know, well, I'm here again. You can do whatever you want, but we can have it done that. In the 1970s, I believe the Burlington Northern Board of Directors was voting on whether or not to build their line into the Powder River Basin. That line was going to end up becoming sort of an unbelievably sort of profit generating extension field. Exactly. Yeah.

And again, we'll talk about this more later, but the people on the Board of Directors were so convinced that it was a bad idea that I think one of them actually resigned in protest over it because they all just, you know, they thought railing was a dead industry. The only way to, you know, that make money of it was just to, you know, stay the course and cut costs wherever possible because that's easy. You know, you're not, you're not really putting anything on the line. If you, you know, you make your trains 10% longer or whatever, which actually

brings me to another point, right? You know, you know, to what Alice was just saying about changing the information available, you know, people had that thought and there was exactly one moment in American railroad history where anyone actually did something with that and that someone was, it was the federal government. In 1918, when they nationalized the railroads, they did so under sort of the auspices of a bunch of like, I mean, essentially there's like, like, like managerial eggheads who were like really obsessed with scientific management

and really sort of ensconced in like sort of academic debates about, you know, good railroad practice at that time. Um, and they appointed this guy. Progressive Taylorism. Yes, exactly. Exactly. Um, we're going to, we're going to make managerialism better by giving it, you know, better numbers and also controlling workers more.

Um, but yes, we're going to measure the shapes of their skulls. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah, it was just a wonderful time in American history, but they appointed this guy, um, uh, I think is William Cunningham. I think his name was, uh, he was a Harvard professor. I actually don't know if he was a professor before or after that. Um, but, uh, he, he was appointed as sort of like the statistical chief of the

nationalized, you know, railways, the United States railway administration. And in that position, he came up with a sort of standard statistical reporting form for all railroads that included, you know, the obvious things, revenues, expenses, et cetera, included the metric that they currently, you know, that they, that they used then to measure themselves, which was, you know, average train length. Um, so, you know, as, as now everybody back then was like, Oh, you know, make the trains longer and then we'll run fewer trains and it'll make more money.

But he added to that a bunch of new metrics that he made up, which were ones that had to do with speed. So, you know, before, like if you read the Pennsylvania railroads annual report from like 19, I don't know, 15 or 16, they don't measure average speed or any sort of speed related variables at all. And this guy, Cunningham, forced all the railroads to start reporting speed metrics. So, you know, the number of cars, like miles, cars traveled in a day, the average speed of trains, um, he came up with this crazy metric gross ton of miles per

train hour, which is, yeah. Um, but anyway, I quite like this one. Yeah. Yeah. But I mean, the upshot of all this was that, um, in the 1920s, you know, these, these metrics were eventually sort of taken up by management and people were realized, you know, gee, these things might actually be useful. And then also the ICC mandated that railroads report them.

And in the 1920s, there was this period interstate commerce commission for the listeners, we'll, we'll get, we'll talk more about them later. There. Yeah. Definitely. I assume. Yeah. But, you know, again, so, so, so you, so after this era of nationalization,

there's this period of time when like there is a radical change in the sorts of things that railroads are investing in, like you, you, you know, if you go and you read like, you know, issues of railway age or, you know, railway signaling or whatever from, from, from that era, they're, they're doing all these things that are essentially intended to reduce like delays to trains and, and to, you know, improve train speeds and, you know, just again, make sort of the whole network more fluid. Um, and, and, and I think, you know, again, to Alice's point about the

sort of information available, almost all of these are being designed around sort of operating strategies that have like gross time miles per train hour or something like it at their heart. Um, and so, yeah, I, I really think it is just kind of impossible to overwrite the impact that sort of the, the, the, the, the, well, really sort of the values that are built within the numbers you choose to measure things with, like it's kind of impossible to overstate the impact that can have. Um, you're sort of fading in and out.

Am I? Okay. Yeah. All right. Is it better now? I don't know if it's better now. I don't know if you're like moving your head back and forward or something. I got up.

That's what it sounds like. I got off to close the door. So maybe that was it. Yes. Oh, that'll do that. Yeah. How could you do that? I don't know.

Um, anyway, I'm, I'm back now. I'll sit still. Um, okay. But yeah, I mean, point being, I think, um, I don't know how much that got through, but hopefully some of it did. Um, I think all of it probably did. Okay. It'll just sound weird after leveling the volumes.

Like a brother dumb face is actually grateful you get anything. I dry up right now. Anyway, point being, um, there was this period of time when sort of the legacy of railroad nationalization and statistics had this very positive impact on, on sort of the things that railroads chose to emphasize. Now, of course, you know, later on that, that we sort of return to railroads old ways and we start thinking a lot more about train length and we missed some of like, I think railroad management's end up missing a lot of the sort of more

systemic points of what Cunningham was trying to do with speed. Um, and you know, that all again informs later parts of the stories. But, um, yeah, the history of sort of railroading and the history of, of, of, you know, the numbers with which we railroad. Yeah. Incredibly important to, to, to link. Um, that sort of brings me to the third point here, which is that, you know, productivity oriented railroad managerial strategies, um, have historically

been very good at reducing the cost of moving trains between terminals. So, you know, we got bigger steam locomotives and we got diesel locomotives. We got bigger freight cars. It doesn't make them any more efficient at unloading those things. Exactly. Exactly. So it's the, the, the operations in and around and through terminals and like complex junctions have always sucked.

Um, and that's because, you know, it's, it's a lot of the time and I think this is necessarily like a universal quality of sort of terminal problems, but a lot of the time terminal problems involve sort of complex interstakeholder coordination problems, whether that be between railroads and the shippers receiving goods railroads and like freight forwarders or whoever's taking the freight, you know, to some customer that doesn't have a rail siding between, you know, multiple railroads between railroads and, and sort of the municipalities they're running through, et cetera, et cetera.

And managerial strategies that are, you know, internally facing and are often again, sort of fascinated with, with just, you know, make line go up or make line go down, um, aren't so good at parsing that kind of complexity. Um, and that has, you know, historically been immensely sort of impactful for railroads, you know, back in, back in the, you know, 19 teens. It cost 13 times more to get a car from Jersey city to New York city on a, on a barge than it did to get that car from Philadelphia to Jersey city. Um, just because, you know, it's, it's moving, yeah, moving again.

And that's obviously some of that's just the unique New York city, like, you know, you need to put freight cars on a barge to get them to New York problem. But you need to like stop in front of a bunch of guys who are walking here. Yeah. Yeah. Listen to our, uh, West Side Elevated Highway, uh, it's a great episode for more of a cube. Yeah.

Me. Cube. Meep deck. Sorry. The meat deck. But yeah, I mean, it's also the, the, the, the issue is not just that, but it's also like, you know, you, you have, you're moving the freight cars in like three or four different train yards and you have all these different moving parts and

crews. And it's, it's, it's just a much more complicated problem than, than figuring out how to make things move quickly and efficiently between terminals. Um, now, if you want a more current example, uh, you know, there's, of course, Chicago, um, you can get a car from Los Angeles to Chicago, like a freight car or an, or an intermodal container and about the same amount of time it takes to get that car through Chicago and onto an East coast railroad. Um, and that, that's depressing and that inefficiency.

I mean, it's first one of the many reasons why, um, so many intermodal containers are taken off of trains and then trucked to a different intermodal terminal and then loaded back onto a train in Chicago, which of course causes an unbelievably large number of emissions and environmental justice problems. Um, and it's, it's resulted in like these bizarre decisions, like Norfolk Southern has decided to completely level the neighborhood to expand their inner motor yard so that they can, they can receive these trucks full of containers that came off of the trains somewhere else in Chicago.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, what are you going to do? Is you're going to like take this off of the train, but, but like a huge crane to do this, we're going to put it on the truck, you know, take it on the truck, you're going to drive it two blocks and we have another crane that we're going to put it onto a different train. Uh, this is the same occupation that we're doing, but, but you're, you're,

you're hiring a drage driver that you're paying an effective negative wage. So you're making money. Exactly. And you know, it's actually funny. One of the first uses of trucks in sort of American transportation was moving less than carload freight between different railroads terminals, um, in like places like Cincinnati. Like there was a, I wrote a reading for my thesis, some article about, yeah, it

was Cincinnati actually about like some very excited trucker who wrote an article in one of these freight trade journals. Like, you know, oh, you know, look at all the great things that trucking is going to do, you know, we, instead of having to, you know, keep the stuff on trains and, you know, spend three days waiting for your freight to get moved in with, you know, within this Cincinnati terminal area, you can just unload it from the train, put it on a truck and then put it back on a different train and save all that time.

And I mean, again, time is a flat circle in railroading. You know, nothing ever changes. Um, and I think, you know, to be fair, some of that is past dependency, right? You know, I mean, you know, going back to the Norfolk Southern example that, that, you know, Justin just cited, um, one of the main interchange points for intermodal freight going across the country between sort of the Norfolk Southern network and then, you know, the railroads to the West is one of the old yards that used to handle like livestock for the stock yards in Chicago.

And that's obviously a facility that's not laid out terribly well. I mean, you know, they've made it work, but it's not, you know, perfectly aligned to the needs of the money. It's laid out well to kill, it's like kill a shitload of cows. You know, what are you complaining about? It's going to bring them back. And just handle like blocks of livestock traffic. Yeah, it's, it's, you know, they, they, they, they decentralize that industry.

They now kill cows everywhere as opposed to at one central location. We're receiving, it gets to you a lot more tender. Yeah, we're receiving the diffuse effects of that evil as opposed to having it concentrated in the cities. Yeah. But there's a really sort of important labor story to that change as well. But I mean, that's another episode. Great book also.

Shane Hamilton's Trucking Country, which talks all about sort of rural trucking and that ascendancy of that particular geography of cattle killing. Anyway, you could read The Jungle by Upton Sinclair and read a lot of like dubious pack dubious sort of things about Serbian immigrants. It was much easier to do an expose on that sort of thing when the stockyards were concentrated, as opposed to now being very diffuse. And they hire a bunch of illegal immigrants to come to a town in the middle of nowhere and run the slaughterhouse.

And they get mad at them. But on the other hand, in the 1920s, you could be like a racist in a sort of much weirder way about the illegal immigrants. So, you know, swinging around. This is also true, yes. The hands of the filthy Serb are touching your meat, you know, and imbuing it with like orthodoxy. Yeah, but the Serbs invented bread in the fork, Alice.

Hey, listen, I'm just I'm just reporting what Upton Sinclair wrote, which is the same racist insults. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I'm just engaging in racist tropes against Serbs. You know, the Scottish are a Turkic people. Listen, all Scots are part of sort of the greater Bosnian diaspora. We're not sort of relitigating this here.

All right. You brought like quite a serious presentation with like a shitload of graphs and I'm just here like, yeah, you know what the thing about Serbs is? Yeah, you know, trying to replicate a Balkan YouTube comment section. How banion is dark, you know, precision scheduled railroading is invented in Montenegro. You know, sometimes, sometimes it's all about sort of like finding cosmic balance as a various sorts.

So it's true. Yeah. There's an English quote. Sure. Yeah. Um, anyway, where are we? I think you're on your on your last bullet point here about consolidation. Oh, yeah.

Yeah. Um, so one of the other things about so I almost like the corollary. Is it corollary? Corollary? I don't know. I should know this, but I don't know. Corollary. Corollary.

Okay. Um, Toyota corollary. Um, sort of the corollary to railroads being very bad at sort of managing the collective action problems that arise at like terminals or junctions or any place where they're, you know, interchanging cars with each other is that it is very good for railroads to merge. Um, you know, mergers mean that railroads, you know, duplicate each other less. So, you know, if you have like one really good line and one really terrible line

between two cities, you can use the good line instead of having a bunch of traffic go by the bad line. Um, and then also like, you know, instead of having traffic, you know, sit for three days in a city where it's being interchanged between carriers, you can just have a train that runs through the city between the two carriers. Um, cause it's just easier to manage once, you know, it's merged into one cohesive system. So in recognition of both of those benefits, the service benefits and the like, okay, let's, you know, get rid of some of this very destructive competition benefit.

Um, there were, there was a lot of talk in the 1920s, um, and well, 1910s and 1920s about sort of doing a planned consolidation of the railroad system in the entire US, um, to, you know, reduce the number of carriers and make larger, more sort of financially and operationally stable networks. Um, and for a variety of reasons that did not end up panning out. Um, because they hated each other. Yeah. They hated each other.

Congress didn't give the ICC the Interstate Congress Commission. Every, every railroad executive was very enthusiastic about the concept of merger as long as they came out on top. Exactly. Yeah. And it's the Holy Roman Emperor. Yeah. It's just like, yeah, it's just guns to everybody's heads.

They, it was a feudal system. Ultimately. Yeah. The railroad, the railroads were competing with each other, undermining each other like feudal states. Yeah. Yeah. And it was, and the rivalries were also just very personal.

Yeah. Yes. ICC is supposed to fly in like Charlemagne and consolidate everything in the Transportation Act of 1920, but, uh, it turns out they're not, uh, they're not that good. Yeah. I'm not authorized to do it either. I'm always going to give them the powers.

Yeah. Once again, the problem is the God damn prods. Yeah. So anyway, that sort of, you know, doesn't happen. And swiftly on for the prod bashing. Cut damn Apple watch. Cut damn Apple watch, dude. Um, I've lost my notes again.

There they are. You Apple watch flashes up a notification like it's time to be racist against Protestants. It's not being racist. Dude, if any fucking group on the planet deserves to be hated in his protestants. Oh, I can't wait for the comments to this. Shut the fuck up.

Um, anyway, so, you know, you, you don't get, um, any sort of consolidation at the national level, you also don't really get much effort or well much successful effort to consolidate terminals at the sort of regional level. You know, there are a lot of planning efforts, including in New York to like, okay, you know, you guys can be your own, you know, competitive carriers outside of this region within this region. You know, all of you guys having like nine different identical facilities is really bad for us because we're paying a lot more, you know, for, and we're

losing a lot of like efficiency because of it. So you're going to cooperate. And those, those schemes don't really end up working that well either. Um, you know, the Port Authority in New York famously got its start as like this immense railroad rationalization and consolidation effort. Um, and it achieves exactly nothing on that front and becomes sort of this, you know, amorphous highway construction and port and airport development body. Airport, World Trade Center builder.

Yeah, the Austria of the Holy Roman Empire here. Yeah. It's, it's the, the, the, the famous book producing a Habsburg sort of. Just put authority presidents getting like more and more inbreds, you know, the last ones, like the heads full of water, you know, yeah. It's full of chopped cheese. Neither port nor authority and not in New York. We're going to, we're going to apply this to every organization we come to.

Yeah. So anyway, I think we can go to the next slide now, right? Yes. Um, we move into some more of the modern history, right? Which is thinking of the Holy Roman Empire. We've got this fucking aristocratic family tree here. Yes, this is, this is very simplified, actually. It's good.

Now you build an inbred railroad. It's a lot of, a lot of sort of like cousin fucking between all of these, like small railroads that did one thing and had a sort of very low operating ratio because they were the railroad that moved hats from Danbury. Shout out to the New York Central. That would be the, that would be the New York, New Haven and Hartford. Oh, excuse me. Shut up, the wizard of the Coast Guard that used to be there.

Yeah. Once again, I am begging you to go back to pre-zendocard meta. Thank you. The New Haven, you know, moving hats becomes part of the, becomes part of Penn Central, which does everything. Yeah. Yes. Oh my God.

Wait, this, this chart is very wrong. It's missing all sorts of stuff. It is missing a number of important things, but it was the best one I could find. Including the Hartford. Where am I going to get my hats from? And there's some inclusions here, which are interesting, like Pacific Electric, when I'm missing. Oh, sorry.

Yeah. The Akron, Kenton and Youngstown is a cool railroad, but it does not merit inclusion when the New Haven is not being included. Yeah. I'll be back in one second, risking myself some water. Oh, you motherfucker. I can still hear you. I have, I have those wireless headphones, so.

I am the way, I am the way. This is like a roaming Uday, you know. A wild Uday appears. What the fuck is going on in my house? I don't know. I don't know what the fuck's going on in mine either. You know what? My stomach still hurts.

I'm back. Hi. Hi, I'm sorry your stomach hurts. Do you drink a ginger ale? That's all right. Nice guy. I don't know. Full of water with like tea residue in it because I was too

easy to get a new cup. So I was using my mug. You're a monster. This is sort of the glamorous lifestyle of the international podcaster. Yes. Oh, boy. So you had like, OK, it's sort of more modern history, especially like post war. It's just great.

Long distance trucking becomes more important. And real road. Liam, we're going to get like a sort of on on recording home invasion where you kill someone on the microphone. And you know what? When that happens, my promise to you, we'll publish it. Well, that's that's going on. Well, we'll slap a content warning on there, but it will be going in.

It's like, hey, FYI, Liam fucking shoots and kills a guy in like a minute, twenty eighth of this being in his house. Yes. And the railroads response to trucking initially because the trucking industry became sort of under the control of the Interstate Commerce Commission. They tried to convince the Interstate Commerce Commission to regulate it out of existence rather than try and compete, right?

And this doesn't go very well, not the least of which, because it was very easy if you, you know, owned trucks to not use like a trucking service, but simply own your own trucks to ship your own product, which case you weren't regulated or, you know, the Interstate Commerce Commission had sort of arbitrary rules about how they made rates based on sort of their own whims. We'll talk about that in a second. But I love a whimsical federal bureaucracy.

Yes, yes. So this is sort of the railroads sort of fail to improve service to compete with trucking in any way. You know, they they just don't want to. They're sort of comfortable in their long term monopoly position. And the boss will be in Scrivener Road. Yeah. And I think it's also worth mentioning here that that sort of productivity or the very sort of specific productivity fixation they have

is very relevant to why they didn't improve service. You know, if you're if you're focusing a lot on sort of running longer trains and trying to specifically minimize operating costs, you're not going to be pursuing things that might cost you more money, but also when you more like sort of, you know, higher value goods and more traffic. So you have you have railroads, you know, responding to trucking with, huh, what if we ran fewer longer trains? Wouldn't that be cool?

Rather than like, oh, let's let's create a network of like reliable fast, you know, what if we did it the wrongest way? Yeah, exactly. Exactly. What if we did I'm pitching this to you. What if we did low speed rail? Exactly. Yeah, I mean, you know, congratulations. You're the board of CSX. I'm doing it like slow food thing.

Or I'm like, you enjoy your train more authentically if it moves at 15 miles an hour. Yeah. And you're in a situation here where, you know, all of a sudden with the competition from trucking, there's like, OK, on the one hand, we could try and improve our service to compete. On the other hand, we have these things that trucking is taking away from us. Like, I don't know, the way freight that stops in every town drops off Farmer Brown's tractor and his new Sears kidhouse. We can just eliminate those now.

Yeah, yeah, go use trucks. You know, so this is this is a big factor in like, especially in the Northeast, where you had these dense rail networks. A lot of a lot of trains being discontinued, a lot of freight switching the trucks just because not so much that railroads couldn't compete, but more they didn't want to. I mean, you know, critical support for like having a very easy and profitable job and like not wanting to do it.

Yeah, I'm lazy. I'll get to it later. It's worth doing. There were, you know, in some cases, like there are like, I think it is, you know, in the most abstract terms, true that trucking is going to have an easier time running sort of fast and reliable service. You know, trucking is like, you know, it's it's atomic, right? You know, you put your freight, unless it's less than truckload freight,

which is a different story, but, you know, you put your freight on the truck and then the truck drives and it gets to the destination. And then the freight is there rather than having a bunch of, you know, intermediate handling in yards and different freight trains and everything. So, I mean, it is true that, you know, they had, trucking was likely going to capture the high end of the freight market. That said, I think, you know, there's a mistake you often hear. I think when, when, I mean, especially I feel like when a certain

flavor of economists talks about these things where it's just, you know, these advantages and disadvantages exist in sort of, you know, a binary space where it's like, you know, trucking is better in all cases. And railroad doing these things and railroads is are better in all cases at doing these things when actually it's more of a spectrum, right? You know, they might railroads might not have kept, you know, the, the, you know, crates full of, I don't know, like diamond and crushed handbags or whatever, but they might have kept, you know, some of the, the intermediately valuable stuff,

you know, appliances or, I don't know, like some sort of, you know, auto parts or whatever it is, right? You know, stuff that is stuff that's only moderately time sensitive, you know, stuff that's like, and also you're shipping in, you know, maybe not bulk bulk, but a lot of it. I mean, I feel like the complete loss of less than carload traffic is pretty crazy to think about, especially given, especially, especially given, how, you know, we, we live in this very much more urbanized society now or those

sorts of, you know, the ability to deliver a lot of parcels to a city center without using the roads would be very useful. Yep. Yep. I mean, I think it's interesting too, because, you know, even in the fifties and sixties, you know, they were, I mean, at that time, they were basically inventing the, again, the sort of managerial tools of modern logistics. You know, they were industrial, you know, traffic managers were, were, you know,

moving away from just asking, okay, what's the cheapest way to ship, you know, good X between point A and point B, and then choosing to do that towards asking like, okay, you know, well, maybe if we ship this thing, maybe if we have like instant, like instead of having, you know, one truck or train a week that goes between these two points, if we had like shipments every day, we'd be able to save on warehouse space because you'd have less inventory in stock. So you're, you have this sort of sectoral shift through the fifties, sixties, and seventies towards smaller, more frequent freight shipments.

And of course that becomes the underpinning of, you know, what we all call just in time logistics today, which is, you know, basically this concept, right, you know, optimize your transport network to minimize overall transportation costs, including, you know, warehousing, including, you know, I don't know, whatever, like other factories you want to include. Exactly. Yeah, so it's, so your freight railroads are pivoting towards, you know, the stuff that they can do most like easiest, you know, the bulk materials,

the long hauls at a time when the freight mark is sort of heading in the opposite direction, and they have, you know, ways of squaring that circle, i.e. intermodal service, we'll talk about that more later. But I mean, I think it is worth recognizing that there really is this disjunct here. And it's one that only gets worse as railroads, you know, start to lose money and they, you know, can't make improvements to their physical plans, which, you know, just worsens the whole problem. But, you know, you obviously don't want to overstate, like the fact that they

you know, or understate, I should say, the sort of somewhat anti-rail policy context that they were existing a lot of mouth breathing on the mic. Ross, is that you? Could be. I think so. I'll do some so you don't feel lonely. Thank you, Alice. Honestly, that's kind of how I feel.

Like I've been, I've been hitting the mute button every time I need to like sort of double over and be like, if you want a sort of like insight into how I'm feeling inside baseball, but it's just Alice Tummy's heartache. Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. I got like one finger paused on this mute button. And another factor that kind of screws over the railroads is through that threat, the like the post-war era industry becomes much more decentralized. And that makes it harder to serve by rail, because, you know, you're moving

on these factories out of the city centers, you're moving them to big sprawling facilities, you know, in the Southeast, you know, where you can have well, more atomized workforce, which is non-unions. Yeah, you pay people less, you know, this is this whole thing. And because, you know, railroad efficiency is sort of proportional to sort of the density of railroad customers. Um, these things become a lot harder to serve by rail, because you need more infrastructure per facility.

You've got to run more trains. You've got to do all this stuff. So this, this is a factor in shifting things from rail over to trucks. And again, railroads played sort of video games where you have to like put rail lines to stuff. And once there's too many, it gets complicated and you don't do it. Yeah, yeah. I think railway empire, my nemesis.

Yep. If I have to comprehend more than like four different goods moving across a network at any one time, I'll kill you. Yeah, that's how I feel right now is stop making me do no things. I'll kill you. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's, it's interesting too, because, um,

I'm sorry, good age. Try lightly, buddy. What? Try lightly, buddy. Okay. Oh, that's the limit is threatening your life and making him no things. Yes. Tell us the sentence with it's interesting that he's going to learn something in it.

I like learning. I just, it's Friday, you know, it's, it's five 13th of Friday and I could be getting drunk, but instead I've listened to the insane ramblings of a bad man. Yes. You can get drunk during this, you know, normally I just, I just listened to Ross talk, but now it's Ross and Uday and there's too much. We've reached, we've reached like some sort of escape velocity.

Um, just your hands a buddy. Yeah. Um, can I count the number of charts in this, in the slides for this? Two fucking many charts. This is what you get when you're going to get a podcast. I will bring a lot of fucking charts.

Uday. Seven, eight. Oh, we got, we'll, how far do we make him for podcast? I'll leave him Senate an hour and five minutes. God, I slide seven out of 25, by the way. Some are the ones in the future should go shorter. Yeah, yeah, definitely. You always say this.

They never, you always say that and it's always a lie. Well, well, you know, we're in it now. We're, we have, yes, we're past the point of no return. The only way else is through. This is the part of the podcast where you spend 15 minutes of podcast complaining about the podcast is. We're not right. And that's, that's my human right.

That's what the people want. It's, it's like, except for all the fucking downers, you know. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. It's the rocket, tyranny of the rocket, you know. Yeah, exactly. The fucking downers are like, man, why do you, it must be so hard being a podcaster.

It's like, shut the fuck up. This is the hardest job anyone has ever had, including the guy who got fell into the hot acid that. Yeah. Yeah. Close compared to us. Critical support for podcasters, I guess. Oh, yeah.

Right. Here's the thing. I know that you're trying to get back on track, but at this point I track picture. Yes. When I picture yourself swimming away from some sort of shark. Yep. I am the shark and I've suddenly grabbed one of your legs in my mighty jaws. And I am about to bring you below the surface.

Damn. Where you will spend eternal nights because it's annoying Roz. You're kind of a bi innocent bystander here. Yeah. Roz was surprised you would be a fish, Liam. Yeah. Yeah, I know. It's, you know, I think that's what I hate them.

Oh, they deserved it. Oh, they deserved it. You just like the thing is that Liam has evolved tonic immobility, which means that if you rotate him 90 degrees, he's not going to do shit to you. He's just going to be fine. You know, he's going to lose their space. Usually less violent. That is true.

Yeah. Well, let's let's do it today. Let's go. Oh, yeah. So the point I was, I think making was that on top of the decentralization thing, there's also this thing that American industrialists get really into, which is just having like very small plants after the 1930s when, you know, like the mega factories, like, you know, River Rouge, for example, were bonsai trees.

So are we talking just highly specialized plants? Like the way Ford has like 9,000, uh, yeah, suppliers for like, like 9,000 things. Yeah. Yeah. Hyper specialization. Okay. Yeah. And, but, but it's hyper specialization that sort of really ends up being more of

a labor story, you know, like these, these industrial managers see that, you know, having 10,000 workers in one place might cause them to organize and then they get scared. Um, so there's like lots of stuff from the 50s and 60s about how, you know, the optimal plant sizes, you know, somewhere between 500 and, I don't know, 2000 people because it's, you're, you're more able to cultivate the sort of, you know, big scare quotes here, industrial family vibe. Um, yeah, harder to, harder to make it like craft union.

If you don't think of yourself as a worker, because you think of yourself as like, cause you're just closer to management. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You got like, uh, you know, that trend only gets worse until now where it's like, you know, uh, an industrial facility is 10 guys and five CNC machines. Um, yeah, exactly.

So it's lots of just layering, lots of different things are, are coming in, you know, not doing good things for the railroads here. Another, another factor, end of the passenger service. Yeah. Um, and this is sort of one of the things, uh, which brings in, you know, a lack of scheduled discipline, uh, cause he didn't have these scheduled passenger trains anymore. So you were running the freight trains a lot more willy nilly.

Yep. Um, you know, and this is, this is, uh, something that's, yes, this is something which is going to factor in later. Um, but yeah, you have, um, uh, this, this contributes to our horrible scheduling system right now. Um, then of course we had this thing called deregulation in the 80s. Um, and deregulation is essentially, you know, what was the regulation? The main regulation was that railroad rates were set by the ICC.

Um, and the ICC had sort of an arbitrary view of what rates should be, right? Um, railroad rates were set by like the cost of the value of the goods being transported less than the cost of transportation, right? Which is a weird phase of the moon stuff. Yes. It's sort of a weird system. Um, and there were situations where the interstate commerce commission would not let railroads wrote lower rates, even if, you know, they economically could.

Um, it, cause the ICC sort of had this vague idea that we're going to run a, a balanced transportation system, but we're not going to intervene directly in any way. We're going to do it indirectly through rate regulation. Um, and this, and this is sort of a strange idea, considering there was massive federal investment in highways, in waterways, in airports, and basically nothing for rail, um, you know, and, and, and huge investments in the stupidest things possible, like the, the Tennessee, Tom, Biggie, uh, canal, right?

Um, and railroads didn't get anything. So this, this sort of contributes to, um, this drive for, you know, as today said, productivity, um, you know, you get this whole concept of demarketing where railroads are going to go out of their way to get rid of traffic they don't want. Um, it also makes it, once they're deregulated, it makes it easier to trim or eliminate these branch lines. You, you can drive away customers. You can discipline labor this way as well.

Um, because it's like, oh, you know, we want to complain. We can just, uh, you know, fire half of you tomorrow. We'll make more money. Um, and then, of course, we lose the passenger service. We gain M-track, uh, and M-track is, uh, just a weird system because it introduces this weird adversarial dispatching regime, right? You know, because, uh, it's not like we're going to, you know, these, these, these M-track trains, you have to pay a fine if you delay them.

Um, but sometimes it's easier to just pay the fine. Uh, you know, so this is, uh, another, another factor going on here. Um, and a big one in this era is we start developing Wyoming coal. Yep. Oh, fantastic. This, you know, gonna have no negative consequences anyone. None whatsoever. Nope.

Yeah. Yeah. So, uh, would I mention this previously, the Burlington Northern brings this, uh, runs this line out to coal fields in Wyoming. They make oodles and oodles of cash. Um, all of a sudden these big coal unit trains are very, very profitable. It's one of the, one of the several shots of adrenaline in the arm of the industry that happens after the 1940s, you know, like dieselization, like, uh, reduced

crew sizes, so on and so forth, um, which, you know, are sort of keeping this, this whole system barely functioning. They got lucky is definitely an underrated argument for why railroads, you know, turned around in the 80s, you know, between the coal and then the rise of, you know, international container traffic, which is essentially just like, you know, bulk movements of a bunch of very easily stackable boxes from ports inland. It's, you know, it's a lot of high density traffic that is very railroad friendly. Highly recommend them.

Although I forget who that's by Mark Levenson. Yep. Had they, had they not done this? Had they not gotten lucky with, uh, with like Wyoming and coal? What would have happened? Would they just like not have been a credible American freight railroad outside of like a couple of areas or, or, or what, you know, do you think that would have forced some kind of positive change out of it?

Would we be on the good timeline? Mixed bag, I think, I think, um, there would have, I have been a very sort of regionally sort of different. I think, you know, Western railroads really had a good time of it in the 80s and 90s in part because of all the coal traffic. But of course, coal traffic had its own problems for them. Um, but say that, that, that branch line probably single-handedly destroyed the American nuclear power industry.

Yep. Yeah. Jesus. Yeah. Can't have anything. Nice. Exactly. No, you have to look at this, like 24 meters tall wall of like open cast coal.

And just be like, yeah, there's, there's like a hundred gigatons of, of like carbon dioxide emissions alone and like what you can see here. And this is the reason why we can't have nice things. Yes. That is modernity. Um, but yeah, I think railroads would have survived. I think it would just be a very different looking system, probably less profitable, um, on the whole.

You probably, uh, you probably have a more credible case for nationalization earlier. That's fair. Yeah. Yeah. Um, because, you know, if you look at the numbers, I mean, the, the big drivers of traffic gains between like 1980, 2006 were coal intermodal. Um, so considered some trailers, coal. Oh yeah.

No, coal grew in like immensely from, well, definitely from the 70s, but even from the 80s to 2006. Um, yeah. Coal, like it was on its way out in the 60s. And, uh, and then what happened was, uh, god damn powder river base. Yeah. And also, I mean, also Wyoming ruins it for everyone. Yeah.

I mean, the unit train itself, you know, unit trains are, are essentially like, instead of having a train that carries like a bunch of different cars for a bunch, a bunch of different customers, unit trains are, you know, one customer is going to fill like 110 cars of freight train with one commodity, you know, grain, coal, potash, whatever it is. And then we're going to ship it, you know, we're going to shuttle it back and forth between ours and destination. And because it's really simple to run, um, it's cheap to run and attractive.

So railroads love unit trains, um, and large customers love them too. And, um, unit trains were invented in the 1960s by coal railroads in the east coast who were really scared of nuclear power plants, natural gas power plants, and then coal slurry pipelines. Like unit trains were their sort of managerial response to all that. And then of course they, you know, they go west and like, huh, well, that was really cheap, you know, cheap to ship stuff from Wyoming to, you know, power plants further east.

So what if we start doing that? And then cleaner act passes. And, you know, I really don't like the sound of like a coal slurry pipeline. I feel like you dodged a bullet. Yeah, you should go to West Virginia. I think the last one in operation in the United States just shut down. Um, yes, something in like, uh, like coal slurry is when you grind the coal into powder and then you mix it with water and then you ship it down

the pipeline and then at the other end you dry it out and then you put it through the power plant. Yep. Gross. It's horrible. They also were scared of barges. I should add there was a weird sort of little recognized subplot of American transportation history where like the waterways system in the fifties and sixties

got a lot of money. Um, yes. And, and like really actually grew quite a bit in that time. Then we stopped investing in it. Now like what 70% of dams in the US are some way deficient. Um, thank you. Bureau of reclamation. Yeah.

Anyway, so yeah, all these, all these factors combined to make the railroads specialized more heavily on the most profitable traffic, which, you know, is, is bad for a lot of us. Very good for the operating ratio, though. Yep. Um, which. Line go up. Line goes up.

Line, yeah, line must go up. Yeah, it has. Yeah. So this is if you like, if you're just listening to this, this is, uh, how would we describe this graph? Line go up. So basically it's sort of the inverse of the operating ratio. So rather than being, um, you know, like, uh, expenses over revenues, it is.

I mean, it's one minus expenses or one minus expenses on revenues. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Basically it is the, the percent difference between expenses and revenues. So the higher it is, the more money you're making per dollar of gross earnings. Um, and it's going up in 2005, it's around, well, a little bit below 20. And in 2021, it's above 40.

So railroads are making a lot more profit per dollar of sort of, you know, basic revenue now than they were 15 years ago. Um, and these, uh, these operating ratios are previously unheard of. Yeah. Well, and it's, unless you were the Pittsburgh and Lake Erie or the, or the Great Northern, I think they got their ratio, but like in like 47 or 46 at some point in the 80, wow. Good for them.

Yeah. That's with steam locomotives too. W plus ratio. Well, I mean, that's actually how, that's actually how sort of we all became so obsessed with train lengths. James J. Hill's whole thing was maximize the length of every single train, leaving your terminals and then make money.

Um, and it worked like very well. If you just look at this, then the state of the American railroad, it's fantastic. It's only getting better. Incredible. Yes. Exactly. Yeah. Why would, why would you strike when the line is going up?

Why would you strike? Pay you so well. Yeah. Yeah. Because that, that's something that's going to be represented by this metric, right? Absolutely. Because this is the line.

This is it. It's so important. This is the thing that we prioritize. It's got to reflect this. Yeah. Yes. Well, next slide. Yes.

So the fun thing about operating ratios is that, um, you know, you can have a great operating ratio on like a dollar revenue, but it's still a dollar revenue. And that's sort of the problem with, with railroads right now. Um, the ideal railroad is one that owns no track and runs no trains. Exactly. Listen, he might have half a point of blood left. There's cholesterol level. Fantastic.

Yes. So, so this chart is, it is, so if you add sort of the total revenue of railroads and truckers together from 1990 to present, it is the share of that sort of two-way sum that railroads have. And guess what? As that line has been going up, especially since about 2010, the railroads share of revenues have been going down. And that's in large part because, you know, despite the fact they're making a

lot of money, um, on, on the traffic they do have, part of how they're accomplishing that is by pushing away all the traffic that, you know, is profitable. And, you know, they might want to carry, but it's not sufficiently profitable enough to push their operating ratio up. So like, let's say you're, you know, you're, you want to ship paper from, I don't know, um, like Old Town, Maine to Scranton, Pennsylvania. You know, maybe the, the, the operating ratio of that particular shipment is like, uh, 70%.

But, you know, if you, if you, if you, the railroad want a, you know, operating ratio of 50, you're going to reject that traffic, even though it's profitable because it's going to, you know, on net push your operating ratio upwards. So, you know, and that doesn't disappear. It just goes to trucks. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly.

And so between, between that sort of demarketing pressure, um, and then, you know, structural factors like there's a client of coal and, you know, changes it in the way the intermodal market works. Um, railroads have not been doing too, too hot lately. They've been losing like sort of market share and revenue share to truckers. So, you know, despite the fact that they're internally profitable and all the investors like, oh, look at all, you know, look at all this operating ratio of performance, you know, we're doing so well.

You know, again, the metrics we have, you know, socially chosen to be representative of good railroad performance are, you know, belying the fact that the industry is shrinking basically. Um, and that's bad on a whole number of different fronts. Obviously it's, you know, it's bad for the long run health of railroads. You know, it's harder and harder to make lots of money and, and sort of be relevant and, and, and maintain your infrastructure. If you're continuously losing traffic, it's also really bad for the environment.

You know, as whatever you might think about the class on railroads, their, their emissions per sort of ton of freight are in order, or not in order of magnitude, but significantly smaller than trucks. Um, and they, yeah. And I don't know, Justin, if you want to say more on this, but. Yeah. The, uh, the, the, the railroads, it's sort of a contradiction here, but, um, you know, the, the railroads are the most efficient way to, uh, environmentally

friendly way to ship anything over land. That's despite the fact that they're all diesel, um, you know, the, the, the three largest consumers of diesel fuel in the world are the U S army, union, Pacific and Burlington, Northern Santa Fe. Um, in that order, I believe, uh, but it is much more environmentally friendly to ship by train than it is by truck. I think barges have them beat, um, but not by a huge amount. Uh, shipping by plane is stupid.

Air freight as a concept is really dumb. Uh, but, you know, it makes sense for like some tiny percentage of things that need to be there. Extremely quick, like right now or whatever. Yeah. Yeah. Fresh cut flowers are insanely dangerous to fly. Uh, it's one of the things that they give off a shitload of like, uh, small

dust in particulates that set off smoke, uh, alarms. Fascinating. I don't know that. You never asked. Yeah, you love renovator explosions, but at 3000 feet. Oh yeah. Well, not, not even the, the fact that they start fires or like can explode, but the fact that it means that like, you get a bunch of spurious fire alarms, which

can lead you to like ignore a real one. Um, even better. They're like, genuinely, like a shitload of, of air freight is insanely dangerous because the industry tolerates a much higher risk to, to cargo pilots than to, well, passengers. Yeah. I played transport fever too. I know that you can ship crude oil by plane.

That's right. Yeah. It's definitely not, you're not flying some sort of like trijet that, you know, in passenger service would have been retired 25 years ago, which has every single possible warning light on, uh, in like a completely dark cockpit over the middle of the Atlantic. My old Jeep Cherokee was like that. Yeah.

You, your Jeep Cherokee was a trijet? Yeah, dude. It was really weird. It was, it was really weird. Like the only, only one they ever made. Yeah. I was going to go a last one that I thought, man, not ridiculous enough. In aggregate, um, shifting freight from train to truck is bad.

I will note that this chart is revenue and not tonnage, which I think would also, it would show a similar trend. Um, cause, uh, you know, describing, you know, freight rail share of freight in revenue versus tonnage, these are two very different numbers. Cause the railroads tend to handle a lot of stuff like gravel and coal. Yeah. 01:24:29,720 --> 01:24:32,120 That shit goes through by truck like that.

10,000 ton aggregate train that has, has a net worth of like $5. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's exactly right. Yeah. But yeah, it's the sort of similar story with, with tonnage as well, or tonn

miles, if you know, that's generally the one that people use. Yeah. You know, I could be something like the trash that has a negative value. The take away from this is, as, as we've mentioned before, is that like steel wheels on steel rails with a very low rolling resistance is a very efficient way of moving heavy shit quickly. Yes.

Um, to, to the point that it actually offsets, you can use fucking bunker fuel in these things that would still be. Net gain. Yeah. And, and, and, and, you know, on from both a business perspective in these revenue charts and then a tonnage perspective as well, railroads are just not doing too hot. Um, despite what the operating ratio says, this chart, I'll only speak about briefly, but basically the point here is that, you know, on the left, you have, you know, a

large bar that is the amount of traffic railroads handled in 1980. And then on the right, it's a large bar that's 2019 and really not that different. You know, despite all of, you know, this, this, this is using sort of car loads and your mobile units as its unit. So, you know, there is, there actually has been more traffic growth than is represented here because the length that trains move goods is just longer than it used to be. Um, for, I mean, a variety of reasons, some of which railroads cause some of

which are just structural factors in the freight market. Um, but basically railroads have lost traffic in essentially every car load category and have gained traffic through intermodal sets. You know, containers and trailers on trains. And I think, you know, it's, this is relevant, you know, both because, you know, intermodal is the, the way that, you know, trains contact Amazon or, you know, access like the Amazon packages and, you know, the widgets and stuff were, you know, sending across the globe to each other these days.

Um, but also because it is like intermodal is kind of like efficiency minded railroad par excellence. Like instead of having to ever, you know, deal with, you know, local freight switching or, you know, the complexities of, you know, moving trains around, you know, terminal areas, you instead just have tracks to all that. And, you know, the trains, you know, gather all the containers and trailers at, at major terminals and they haul them for a few thousand miles and dump them somewhere else.

Um, perfect standardization. It's a box, you know, you don't think too much about what's in there. Exactly. And it, you know, in like to their credit, like this is something that does on some level play to the strengths of each mode, right? You know, trucks have flexibility and railroads are really good at scale economies. And like that does make sense. Um, that said, um, I think, you know, things like the Chicago example earlier

that we discussed sort of speak to the fact that, you know, even if you're running an intermodal network, you know, there are going to be situations where you might want to be able to be good at handling complexity. Um, and you have, um, I think a good, uh, maybe a good example here, uh, there's some perverse economies that come out of this. Like, um, so Boston, there was, uh, CSX had an intermodal terminal that was relatively close to downtown Boston. Um, they decided, you know, rather than ship all these containers into Boston

and then have these relatively short truck runs, they would consolidate everything in a bigger facility in Worcester, Mass. Yep. And, um, you know, yeah. So now, uh, Nemesis podcast, all of the, all of the containers down WPI shut the hell up all of the containers bound for Boston rather than coming in really close on a train. Um, they all get unloaded in Worcester and then they, uh, and then, and then

they're trucked, you know, 60 miles on the, on the mass turnpike. Um, and that's, you know, a massive increase in vehicle miles traveled. Uh, it's bad for emissions. Uh, you know, it's bad for traffic. Um, but, you know, it's good for the railroad operating ratio. So yeah, it also, of course, meant that they could do a huge land deal and sell that land. Um, there's a lot of that like peaches packed in Argentina, like peaches

from, yeah, yeah, yeah, packed in Argentina or whatever. And someone's going to point out, you know, the net carbon emission, blah, blah, blah, okay, fine, whatever. But, um, uh, in this case, say it's very real concrete effects, you know, and yet the economics look great. And then from a lot of other perspectives, it's like, you did what? Well, you like this, yes. And you know, it's in Boston, like, especially like there's, you know,

there has been a real trend of like decentralizing industry away from the core. You know, like there are now a lot more distribution warehouses out by route one 28 or 495. Um, and like, part of what that change internal location reflected was exactly that, but you know, these things have a momentum to them, right? As you start moving more and more free infrastructure away from the urban core, you know, you're only going to get more and more warehouse relocation away from the core, which means that, you know, now instead of your, you know,

delivery truck or whatever traveling from, you know, somewhere relatively near, you know, the population in Boston itself, it's now going to be driving, you know, however many miles on the pike, um, which is, yeah, bad. Um, so it's, it's, I mean, it's, it's a problem everywhere. And so there's the whole universe of literature on like logistic sprawl or freight sprawl or whatever you want to call it. Um, and it's hard because on the one hand, like, yeah, having a big truck tunnel next to one's home is like just objectively bad.

Um, like that's a huge, huge emissions source and it, you know, drives asthma and cancer rates up through the roof. It's, I mean, it's, it's, it's a disaster. But on the other hand, you know, having all those trucks instead go by people's homes who live along highways is also bad. So there's, there's, there's a, there's a sort of, and this is a broader theme in American freight policy where there's sort of like, these are all like problems that are systemic, right?

And they, they're, they involve the, the lives and, and livelihoods of all sorts of different companies and, and people and, and actors. And, um, and we don't treat them like that right now. We just sort of do policy-making piecemeal. Um, and that sucks. Right. We don't, we don't look at anything inclusive. We just don't look at anything.

It's like the problem stops here. Yeah. Yeah. And, and, and nothing affects anything. Exactly. You have this wonderful, um, environmental impact, uh, process mandated by the EPA, which seems to only be able to reach bad decisions. Yeah.

Yeah. It's, it's a mess. It's a mess. Um, yeah. I don't want to draw on this slide for too long. Yeah. Okay. So I'm going to, uh, absolutely, absolutely do not dwell.

Uh, I think when I was that Tommy Alice. Bad. I'm just going to, I'm just going to, like, whenever it gets bad next, I'm not going to mute the mic. You can experience it for yourself. It would be a little treat for you guys. Thank you. Yeah.

Yeah. Your focus on your operating ratio at the expense of like, you know, gaining traffic has had real concrete effects, um, for, uh, well, let's say for this, in this case, the, uh, the, the American taxpayer, right? Um, oh, those idiots. I know, right? Yeah. Fuck them.

Okay. So this is, uh, this is a trash train, the city of Ronan, Virginia. It's kind of rude to call it that. I mean, look, it's not in the best shape, but Harry's trash. Oh, well, I mean, I wish they could have made it like a little prettier. Like the greed, the dumpster greed is out of feeling. It is a really dumpster. Yeah.

Things are rolling dumb still. Hmm. It's the convergence of function and form. Yeah. Back in the nineties, the city of Ronan wanted to, um, get a bunch of municipal waste trucks off of I 81, which was quickly crowding up, right? And they decided, okay, we'll talk to Norfolk Southern, which is the railroad that built that town while the Norfolk and Western did, not the Norfolk.

And then what they do to it, Roz? Oh boy. That's, that's been cast off. Um, yeah, they left that whole abandoned skyscraper downtown and they shut down the locomotive repair shops too. Yeah. Wow. But they also did this very recently.

So, um, the city built a new rail line to get to the city dump. They built a new facility near downtown, which is a waste transloading facility. So you, you know, the garbage trucks pull in, they dump everything in the railroad cars and they go out and go grab more garbage. They built the world's largest rotary dumper. That's the thing. Oh, it's a beautiful, beautifully seductive sentence. Yeah, that's pretty thick, bro.

That's, uh, that's, that's weird in the bio. Yeah. They tip, they tip the entire railroad car upside down in order to unload it. It's so cool that you can do that. It's real about you. Okay. What happened? This is where the home intruder, uh, second, I'll be right back.

I'll be right back. I'll be right back. You keep going with, yeah, yeah, you, you guys, uh, you guys can do without me for a hot. Hi, it's Justin. Uh, so this is a commercial for the podcast that you're already listening to. Uh, people are annoyed by these. So let me get to the point.

We have this thing called Patreon, right? The deal is you give us two bucks a month and we give you an extra episode once a month. Uh, sometimes it's a little inconsistent, but you know, it's two bucks. You get what you pay for. Um, it also gets you our full back catalog of bonus episodes so you can learn about exciting topics like guns, pickup trucks, or pickup trucks with guns on them. The money we raise through Patreon goes to making sure that the only ad you hear on this podcast is this one.

Anyway, that's something to consider if you have two bucks to spare each month. Uh, join at patreon.com forward slash WTYP pod. Do it if you want. Or don't. It's your decision and we respect that. Back to the show. Yeah, so anyway, they, they, um, you know, they built this entire very expensive facility to get these trucks off the road and work great for about 30 years.

You know, the, you know, you go to the, you know, the train would pick up the trash. It would go 20 miles to the dump. They'd unload it. It would come back, right? Another 20 miles and they did this. I want to say once, maybe twice a day. Um, but the thing is you're tying up a whole rail crew for the day for a 40 mile round trip. And that's, uh, that, that is not a, a great operating ratio compared to a longer whole.

Right. Yeah. They're merely providing an essential service to an entire setting. Yeah. Making 20% rather than 40 or whatever, you know. Exactly. So in 2020, Norfolk Southern stiffed the city because the margin on the train was too low to maintain those sweet, sweet operating ratios.

So this brand new train. Yeah. This brand new branch line and this whole facility, uh, were just stranded assets now because the only connection was with Norfolk Southern. They couldn't get a short line to operate it or something because short lines, like these sorts of things, because they don't have operating ratio constraints. And they wound up having to pave over the new branch line, uh, and run everything on trucks. Yeah.

Um, it's just, yeah. It's castle doctrine, mean anything deal. Liam, how does it feel to have killed, to have taken a human life? Pretty good. And these sorts of things. What do you feel when you kill women and children? Recall. Recall.

Yeah. We've all seen it. So, so it's all it is. This sort of thing hurts everyone except investors. And these sorts of strategies are how railroads were able to plow, you know, about $180 billion or so into dividends and stock buybacks over the last decade. Is that 180 billion with a B? Yes.

Fuck my thoughts. So this has been a great time to be a railroad investor. Oh, yes. It's been incredible. And, you know, all this money, all this money that goes into increasing, inflating the stock value and to investors, you know, that 100, if you were like, I want to build high speed rail from New York City to Los Angeles. $180 billion is the sort of figure you'd be looking at.

Yeah. You know, this, this, this is a crazy amount of money. And there's so little infrastructure investment to show for it because it was stacks. Is that a different kind of line? Yeah. Different profound kind of line must be cited. Yes. No rail lines, only number lines.

Managerialism. Yeah. No catch, only throw. Yeah. Okay. Schedules. Schedules. So I think I think it's sort of the reason this schedule is up on the screen is because

these sort of central animating catchphrase of railroading in the past few years in the United States has been precision scheduled railroading. Just send out your thoughts on a new day, boo. Hey, no attention to the man who knows much more than me to please throw him. I agree. So PSR, which is what people call precision schedule railroading, you know, acronym, it is sort of one of these somewhat amorphous concepts and that, you know, there is, there is, you know, one vision of it, but then it's kind of also like a set of words that's thrown around

and kind of ends up meaning kind of whatever depending on who's saying it. But basically it's doctrine and we love a doctrine. Yeah, yeah. We do love a doctrine. And we'll, in a few slides, we'll give a much more sort of operational description of what it is and it's not. But as with the highest level, it's sort of an operating philosophy that asks railroading management to, you know, be much more, let's say intentional about how they use their assets

and how they plan their trains and how they sort of, you know, use, and how they, you know, structure crew assignments and, you know, whatever in running the railroad to sort of improve productivity and also at least theoretically improve service to customers. Essentially by making, and here's where the sort of the scheduled part comes in, by sort of making regular consistently delivered operating plans rather than having everything run ad hoc, you will, you know, be able to both save money and improve service. That's sort of the idea in a nutshell. But really, precision schedule railroading is nowhere near as sort of new or revolutionary

or anything as anyone might want you to believe. American railroads have for, well, we're all over a century now, been sort of struggling with what it means to actually run a railroad and have a schedule. And I think both for understanding how sort of the, you know, productivity managerialism and traffic losses and infrastructure changes that we talked about in previous slides played out and also for understanding what PSR is sort of, you know, intervention is. I think it's very important to understand how that's all played out. So like, you know, way back in the beginning, like we're talking 1840s, 1850s, railroads didn't

have telegraphs or signals. So the way that trains were stopped from colliding with each other was by schedules, you know, your schedules would tell you where you would meet other trains, they would tell you where you were going to, you know, drop people or freight cars off. They were sort of the managerial fabric of railroading. But then, you know, we got signals, we got telegraphs, we got sort of equipment that allowed managers to intervene and supervise their railroad in, well, nearly real time. And we started to move away from schedules. There became things called extra freight and, and, you know, and freight trains that essentially had no schedule and we became more certain delays and

railroading sort of incrementally lost its structure. Now that sort of varied back and forth the time. I think one particularly interesting example of, of scheduling, having a sort of a moment in the sun in sort of an industry that was overall trending towards more use of like extra freight trains and sort of flexible unscheduled operations is, is the schedule I have on the screen here. So this is from the Buffalo Rochester and Pittsburgh Railroad, which became part of the B&O and then became the Buffalo and Pittsburgh Railroad, or a lot of it ended up becoming the Buffalo and Pittsburgh today, which runs in Western Pennsylvania and Western New York. And essentially what this is, is it is a timetable that's not assigned

to trains. So these are times that, you know, freight trains really mostly full of coal would be released from various stations that, and they're written to sort of minimize what they call avoidable delays. So, you know, if, if, if, you know, your, your 1.15 a.m. departure from Lincoln Park, which is on the left in the, in the second row here is, is it's timetable to meet all the other trains in the other direction that it, that it will go into somewhere called tied up station, which I think I've been there, and then to next stop, and then to Farmersville. So, mobile games even then. Yeah. But anyway, so the idea here is that, you know, even if you're not assigning these, these train

slots and these, these train past individual trains, you're, you're at least, you know, running trains at times that will mean they meet trains the opposite direction without, with sort of a minimum delay. So these are the times you can release trains. Basically. Yeah. Yeah. And then, and then you're not going to, you're not going to fuck everything up. Exactly. You will fuck things up if you release them any other time. Exactly. Exactly. They call these pegs. We now call them paths. Anyway, so, you know, band-pagged, huh? But yeah, so throughout the sort of teens and 20s when railways were really busy, they were, they played around a lot with schemes like this to essentially, you know, even with a more sort of

contingent, flexible, whatever you want to call it, operating model to still have sort of schedules and regularity and importantly infrastructure that was optimized for the schedule. So like there is one example for the Missouri Pacific where they did a very complex exercise sort of like this one where they, you know, tried to figure out when to release trains from major terminals. And then what they did after that was they're like, okay, so we know what, what, what times to release trains from these terminals. Now let's go along our lines and figure out how to improve our infrastructure to, you know, make this even better. This is sort of the nightmare situation of like the exam question of, you know, train is leaving Cincinnati, you know, exactly. Yeah. Yes.

Doing that with like a hundred more variables. Exactly. Exactly. There's a horrifyingly complicated chart that I almost put on this slide, but decided not to. That's from the Missouri Pacific exercise and like, I don't know, even I can't really make sense of it. It sounds like a military exercise. Like it's, you know, it's one of those exercises is seldom this well planned, I think. One of the, whatever the one where we were going to fight Iran was in Iran one more planned challenge, one of them challenge. Yeah. I don't remember what year it was. 2002 maybe. Yeah. So just out speed boats are not your friends if you're able to destroy her. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, point being, so these, these schemes are really popular in the 20s.

But then, you know, in the 30s, the depression happens in the 40s, you know, World War Two, but then throughout the 50s and 60s, railroads begin to lose traffic. And when you combine traffic losses with a fascination with train length and sort of product and sort of really cost reduction, you end up with, with networks where trains aren't really that scheduled. So I should think back up one step here. So there's scheduling on sort of the line level like this, but there's also a different sort of scheduling that exists in railroading that's I think really important. I think it's worth understanding a sort of a separate category to this. So historically, like way back in the 1880s or whatever, the way people ran freight trains was

very just these sort of decentralized, you know, freight cars would show up at yard A. And, you know, the yard master would be like, huh, these 50 cars are all going in roughly the same direction. And these 50 cars are all going roughly in the same direction. There you go, two trains, and we're going to send them along to the next yard in that direction. And then it's the, we have a bunch of guys all playing a little puzzle game, you know, this is fun. Yeah. And they don't really talk to each other. But yeah, of course not. They all hate each other. They're all like in sort of an Intany sign series. No, exactly. No, quite honestly, they did like, like oftentimes you're like, I don't want these cars on my hands. I'm just

going to send them along to the next yard. And that's someone else's problem. You know, yeah, exactly. Let's bastard Harrisburg set 50 cars this way. Yeah, I'll show them. Exactly. Dream job. Absolute dream job. Exactly. Yeah. So, and there were some exceptions to this. Like, you know, if you, if you got one of those like time freight for livestock, whatever, obviously, your cars are going to be handled in a much more sort of direct and controlled fashion. But, you know, for, you know, this entire arcane, your arcane system of freight forwarders and things like that. Yep. Yep. Yeah. So it's all a mess. Anyway, but as one of the, one of the outcomes of the whole USRA like federally led statistical reform efforts

that I described earlier, and also just the general interest in like scientific management and like process control that comes out of sort of, you know, managerial progressivism in the 1910s and 1920s, or as people start to think, huh, what if instead of doing this crazy chaotic decentralized thing, we instead actually planned how cars should move throughout our network? That sounds like communism to me. Yeah, central planning. I know. Crazy, right? So, the road in the 1920s and really mostly in the 1920s begin doing these very detailed traffic studies where they, you know, they look at all the freight moving through their networks and then they start to plan like, okay, so, you know, this freight train here,

it's going to take cars for, you know, these four different destinations and it's going to drop, you know, the first two blocks of cars here and then it's going to take some more cars and basically structuring and sort of controlling the flow of cars across the entire network. So that instead of, you know, handling a car like 25 times across its trip, you know, cars are sorted in one place and then they're taken as far as possible and then sorted again. And that means that, you know, cars move through the system much faster because you're sorting them a lot less often and, you know, trains flow better because, you know, they actually have, there's actually a plan that sort of knits the entire function of the network into a network rather than a bunch of, you know,

individual sort of like, I hate you, here's 50 cars, relationships. Beautiful. So 50 cars below the trade's car. Yeah, 50 cars are the most foul-smelling thing you can think of. Exactly, exactly. Like moldy lettuce or something. I should really smell that bad. Moldy beef. There you go. All the ice melted in the refrigerator. So yeah, so you end up with a little system classification planning in the 1920s and, you know, everyone's into it and it's like, oh my god, this is so great, you know,

where cars are moving like four times faster than they used to because they're not being sorted every 100 miles and our trains are moving better and everything's more productive. And service is better. And those things were all true. But then again, so, you know, the sort of line level scheduling and then this sort of network scheduling, they both end up colliding with, you know, our good old friend, the operating ratio and then the truck. So as railroads lose traffic and sort of fall back increasingly on these strategies that emphasize sort of productivity improvement as like one of, if not the key sort of response to declining profits, these schedules and these network plans begin to come apart because, you

know, it might not be that every single day of the week, you know, Wichita, Kansas is going to have enough cars to justify, you know, a train that has traffic for like Chicago and, I don't know, Peoria or whatever. So on those days, you know, yardmasters and local supervision on these railroads are going to be incentivized to, you know, to look good for their managers above them by, you know, okay, so instead of running this train, we're going to combine these two trains into one and run them at a different time and, you know, we'll sort it out down the road what's going to happen. So you end up moving back away from these. It's still the next guy's problem. Exactly, exactly. So you end up in this weird liminal sort of limbo space where, you know, you have at least

these theoretical sort of network schedules that show how cars are supposed to, you know, move between trains and make connections and, you know, work nicely. But then in reality, what you have is a bunch of people whose, you know, salaries depend on them reducing costs, you know, combining and cancelling and rerouting trains willy-nilly to, you know, like essentially maximize train length and make sure you're getting as much as possible out of every single crew rather than trying to think of this from like a network service perspective. And well, that's bad. And it only gets worse in the 60s and 70s where you have this whole new thing that happens with unit trains. So, you know, all the trains I just described are trains

that are generally carrying cars for many different customers. But when, you know, as railroads get more desperate and as capacity becomes more, you know, there's just so much capacity around, they start trying things like literally like called rent-a-train. So if you're a big customer... Oh, I'd get Ross. Ross, you're up. Yes. I would like to rent a train, please. Yeah, exactly. So let's say Ross... Do I get to drive it? Maybe. But you can put your locomotives on it. So like you have utilities and big grain shippers, they'll come to railroads and they'll literally be like, okay, here we want this,

you know, we're going to rent a few trainsets from you and we're just going to kind of send them wherever we want to whenever we want to do so. Railroads, because they're, you know, they have so much infrastructure relative to the traffic they have, they're kind of just like, okay, sure, you know, we'll take what we can get. And so on top of this sort of increasingly chaotic scheduled environment, you also now have all these trains that are essentially running randomly across your system, sort of whenever they're their shippers desire. And yeah, we took one of the advantages of trucking that it's like atomic and molecular and we just applied that to trains. No, exactly, exactly. It's one-to-one, baby, shut up.

Yeah. And I mean, you know, and to be fair, like in some cases, it absolutely does make a huge difference and it works and it helps railroad stay competitive. It worked really good on a redding. Yeah, yeah, they did on a very micro skill. And like, I think obviously, you know, however annoying the unit trains consequences might be, they were an incredibly important development to sort of help sustain railroading through this era. Anyway, though, you know, end product of this is, you know, by like 1985, you end up in a railroad network where you have a bunch of, you know, you have a few priority trains that really do run schedules and then you have a ton of these mixed freight trains that sort of run, they run like

schedules with some scare coats around them. And then you have all these unit trains, you know, coal, grain, I don't know, soda ash, whatever else you want to sort of ship and bulk over long distances that are running essentially ad hoc. And that creates a very, very chaotic and complicated environment for operations. And into this sort of fun house steps Hunter Harrison, which is our next slide. Yes, I did want to note. Yeah, fun railroad naming convention here. Yeah, northward and southward. Because they don't use northbound and southbound in railroading. Northward means north to a specific point. Southward is south to a specific point. But it does not necessarily have to actually be south or north. Sometimes southward is a train going north and vice versa.

Anyway, that's a fun fact. It was a good time. Yeah. All right. Yeah, Hunter Harrison time. Hunter Harrison time. Yeah. I guess I should just start this one and then we can. Yes, that sounds like a good idea. All right. So Hunter Harrison was he got to start on a Frisco, I think. I mean, he worked his way all the way up from really the bottom of the ranks on the railroad. The railroad that was named for a city it didn't reach. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Also was famous for having given the Burlington Northern a particularly anti schedule management. And a management that also did a bunch of really, really, in retrospect, at least dumb line of amendments. But yeah, again, a different podcast.

Anyway, so you Hunter Harrison, his the story, I don't know if it's apocryphal or not, but the story that he always told in interviews was, you know, he was some like junior yard master in Tennessee somewhere in the sort of south or southeast. And he his boss asked him, you know, they were standing in the tower that overlooked the yard, wherever, whatever yard this was. And his boss asked him, Hunter, what do you see out there? And he Hunter replies, you know, that I see good business. And his boss was like, no, I see a bunch of traffic that's not moving. Some kind of old wise and railroading Gandalf. Exactly. You thought I was being metaphorical and I wasn't. Yeah. Move the trains. Yeah, I know exactly. Because like, you know, if you're running

like a chaotic operation with like a bad schedule plan, one of the outcomes of that is that your cars are going to spend a lot of time sitting in freight yards waiting for their planned freight train out. And that, you know, it gets to the point, well, I mean, this has always been a problem with rowing and continues to be a problem with rowing, but cars and sort of mixed freight service spend about 60% of their lives in freight yards doing nothing. They spend maybe 10% of their lives actually moving on freight trains and the remainder is spent at like sitting at customers sightings being loaded or unloaded. So really, like, you know, if anyone ever asks you, and like, if your one is like, sounds smart when talking to someone who thinks they know a bit about

freight rowing, and they're like, oh, well, you know, if we run the trains 90 miles per hour, it'll be so great. You reply, no, it doesn't matter if you're the 90. Really, what you need to do is get them out of the yards faster. Because the end of the day, freight rowing is not really a game of run the trains faster between points. It is get the stuff out of the origin. Exactly. Yeah. So PSR sort of become is an operating philosophy that's organized around, at least in its original conception around, well, what if we, you know, didn't do this thing where we had cars sitting in yards every 200 miles for days on end. It, it's sort of commitment is, okay, so we have, you know, these unit trains, we have these mixed freight trains, and we have all these freight

yards. Let's try to figure out how to absolutely minimize the number of times that freight yards or freight train freight cars end up sitting in yards along the way, maximize sort of the velocity of shipments across the system. And let's, let's do that by creating a network plan that we're actually going to execute every single day rather than modifying it by the whims of whoever. That's actually, you know, like on paper, it's a great idea. And maybe, maybe we should go for the next slide here and we can sort of, I made a bunch of very quick diagrams to sort of describe the process. So this is sort of how railroading worked until some degree still works. And let's, let's say 1990. So you have, you know, the trains at the top and the bottom, the ones that are all

red and all white, they're unit trains, right? They're carrying, you know, they're all freight for, well, let's imagine they're both coal trains. And one is all, you know, all that coal is going to like the red dot. And on the other one, all that coal is going to the white dot. And that's, you know, and they run, you know, let's say about once a day on some random schedule. And, you know, the utilities are happy and it's, and it's, you know, it's fun and games and it's nice. And then you have these mixed freight trains, the two in the middle, and they're carrying freight for, for a whole bunch of different places. You know, there's some is going to the red dot, some is going to the white dot, and then some are going to the blue and the green dots. And you can give these

places names if you want in your head to make this simpler. And what does mixed freight trains do is, you know, while the unit trains just run directly to the destination and then, you know, cycle back, the mixed freight trains run to a yard and right there that you see. And the cars are, are, you know, broken apart and, and, you know, are sorted into one very angry guy. Exactly. Just one by some angry yardmaster who just yearns for the days when he could just make this someone else's problem. Really, really wants to send like 25 cars of sewage to blue because he hates the guy. Exactly. Exactly. Fuck that dude. So, so he, so what he does is he takes, you know, and these, let's, the mixed freight trains that are starting out from the, from the

left here, let's say they both run once a day. So the guy in the yard is going to, I'm sorry for people who are listening to this on, on, on, without slides, because I guess this might be kind of hard to understand. But he'll make one freight train at that yard that runs, let's say every other day and that goes to the red dot. So he can, you know, maximize the length. So, you know, some of those red freight cars end up spending like two days in the yard waiting for their train out. Then he, you know, takes the blue and the green cars and puts them on the same train and then sends them to the blue and the green points. And that runs once a day because, you know, it's three cars. So that's long enough by his standard. And then he runs a freight train to the, to,

to the white dot. And that runs, it's, you know, you wouldn't have enough cars every single day. So maybe you run that four or five times a week. So again, you end up with some cars sitting in the yard for, for a day or two. So what you have here is a bit of a mess. So you have some freight trains, which are just going directly and it's all nice and pretty and back and forth. Then you have some freight trains where the shipments might take, you know, three days to arrive, they might say five days to arrive, you know, the yard gets congested, the freight cars are sitting there, you know, costing money to exist. And they're, the goods are losing value inside them or rotting or whatever. It's just a whole train full of potatoes. Exactly. Exactly.

It's, they're all getting lost in, in a yard. We're going to imagine this is so for a second. I believe there was a recent incident where once again, the railroads lost a whole crop of potatoes. It was like a couple of weeks ago. Yeah, I heard about that. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, so, so you have, you know, these, these like time is a flat circle. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Nothing ever changes. So you have this sort of mess, this sort of messy operating model. But, you know, it's sort of, just some people looks nice. And it, and it, I guess, works well enough because the trains, you know, the trains are long. And at the end of the day, all these crews are still pulling three cars at a time. Obviously, in real life, we're talking more of like 100 cars

at a time, but I can't fit 100 little boxes on my screen. So too bad. So your productivity numbers still look good. And I'm sure there's some guy at the yard who's like computing the number of cars switched per like yard engine hour. And that figure looks good too, because you're sorting all this traffic in the yard. What PSR does is it throws this all out in the trash and, and, and combines everything and remixes it to make it better, at least in theory. So let's go to the next slide. So rather than having all those trains, you know, all those cars getting sorted in that intermediate yard, what PSR will do instead is like, okay, let's make these trains a little longer. And instead of running all those trains to the intermediate yard, we're going to

have, you know, the unit train is going to run on a consistent daily schedule. And it's going to take that sort of red car that used to sort of have to suffer like every other day service from the yard to the red dot. And it's just going to, you know, that car every single day is going to be taken to the destination. And that's great, because now those shippers have more frequent service. And then for the blue and the green, they're going to get added to the car is going to the white dot. So rather than having those wait and have to, you know, endure sorting at the yard, they're going to be combined with, with, with all the goods headed to, to, to the white point. And then I'll just, we'll be dropped off along the way. And it's going to be all sort of nice and

good. And, and that's great. And we can fire the yardmaster. Exactly. Yeah. The yard goes by by. Yeah. You can sell it goes away. And then see this way. Yeah. And over all of the like rails, we can sell that off. And, you know, because railroads hate their racing railroads. Yes. Yeah. The New York central approach to restructuring. Yeah. There'd be fewer yardmasters and they'd have more intense hatred for each other. Exactly. Yeah. And honestly, like the conditions that would turn you to the thrive. But, you know, you're losing a yard, but you, this actually would, you know, if, if this actually were how PSR works in practice, this would actually be pretty good. You know, now there's two daily regular trains between, you

know, the starting point and the white dots here, you know, the cars that are moving to the green and the blue dots are, you know, moving faster because they're not being sorted in the middle. You know, the car is going to the red dot or getting more consistent service. Like people, like in theory, PSR means that everybody kind of wins, you know, you're saving money, but you're also delivering better service for your customers through sort of an integrated, you know, more cohesive and more regularly delivered operating plan. However, you get more traffic, you get more traffic, which means you would need to run more trains, which means you hire more people, right? Yeah, yeah. It's getting more productivity out of those. You also have,

you also have better schedules, so you're not ruining those people's lives. Exactly. Exactly. You know, the initial implementation of PSR on the Illinois Central actually came alongside an effort to give crews regular schedules. So, and in fact, one of the sort of children of that original PSR implementation to Florida East Coast to this day, I believe, still actually has a lot of its crews on regular schedules. So, there really actually is precedent here for, you know, PSR or PSR-like concepts actually doing good for a lot of people involved, you know? Problem is, that's not really what PSR has been in practice, right? So, that brings us to the next slide. So, you know, if you're a railroad and you have this opportunity to completely

sort of restructure your entire operating plan, but you do that while, you know, just being obsessed with, you know, making that operating ratio line go up and making those train lengths even longer, you're not going to do what was on the previous slide, where everybody wins. You're going to do this instead, which is combine all the traffic into just really incredibly long trains that run as or less frequently than the ones that preceded them. So, in this example, instead of having, you know, that nice daily freight train between the origin and the red dot, and now we have like a three times weekly freight train that's like a bajillion feet long that carries everything for the red dot. Everyone's unhappy except for the productivity

metrics. And then same deal with the blue and the green, right? Instead of having that nice sort of twice daily departure that, you know, makes shippers happy and sort of removes the freight along nicely. You just put that all on one daily train that's like, you know, 15,000 feet long, and people just have to deal with it. That sucks on many levels. And Justin, you want to jump in here on the suckiness. Oh, yeah. I mean, the trains are long. They're slow. They have more problems. I mean, it's a bad way to run a railroad. I got a demonstration, but that's a few slides up. Yeah. What is the next slide actually? I've lost track. The next slide is the yard. Oh, yeah. So this is my favorite example. So, you know, to this point of it being a mess,

one of the things that you hear a lot when talking to people who, you know, want to do like, you know, better planning for like commuter railroads, for example. If you want to do rail playing well, you're really interested in making your sort of infrastructure and what you plan to do with infrastructure match each other as close as possible. So, you know, on a commuter railroad, like, let's say you want to run, you know, trains every 15 minutes, like SEPTA wants to do right now, you'll build passing sidings in places that all like allow trains running every 15 minutes to pass each other. And you're going to design stations that facilitate that. And you're going to, you know, put your flyovers at at junctions

that allow you to do that. So you're going to, you're going to design, again, infrastructure that matches your operating plan. Now, one of the big problems with PSR or sort of evil PSR, as it's being implemented today, is that Because good PSR was like a holistic idea. So of course, you would do this as part of it. Whereas evil PSR, it seems was, what if we got rid of the sort of like petty yard fiefdoms and instead replace them with nothing? Exactly. Exactly. Well, you replace it with, you replace the petty fiefdoms with great powers. Yeah, exactly. And just, and just, and only Roman Empire railroad once again. We have united all the warring kingdoms into one kingdom called Germany and nothing bad will

happen from that. That's right. Yeah. There are no more yards. There's just one long freight train. I was, I always thought that was, as someone described the while back, I forget who it was, like, what if M track adopted PSR and ran one long northeast regional in the morning each way? It's like those, those elevators are patinoster, right? You just get on one car, wait for it to get to the like platform, get off. And the trains are still going the whole time like snowpiercer. I'm just, I'm just imagining the 190 car train, the boarding process in Boston. You could probably get on back bay or Boston south station at the same time. Like it's sort of platforms at both stations at once. That would be, of course. But anyway, so the thing with PSR

these days is, you know, because it's being implemented really as a way of, of advancing the sort of the long standing fascination railroads have had with operating ratios and train lengths and just productivity improvement rather than being sort of like, okay, let's, let's, let's really properly do scheduling. Because of that, it's often being sort of, you know, railroads are often establishing train lengths and operating patterns that are wildly sort of mismatched with what the actual capacities of their infrastructure are. So one example, and it's the one we have on the screen is Englewood Yard in Houston, Texas. It's an incredibly busy facility. It handles a ton of chemical and, and just general freight traffic across the Gulf Coast and serves all the refineries

and it's a Union Pacific yard. The tracks where they sort of build and break down trains in this yard are about 7 or 8,000 feet long, I believe. And of course, Union Pacific has decided that, you know, in pursuit of their, their new PSR operating plan, they're instead going to run 14,000, 15,000, 16,000 foot trains into those tracks. Oh, and just block a shitload of sidings with one train. Exactly, exactly. So now what you have is you have, you know, in this incredibly congested terminal area, a bunch of trains like, you know, doing all these back and forth moves to break themselves down into chunks that can actually like literally fit in the yard.

And they're not going to expand the yard, of course, because that's impossible to do. Yeah, I think they're talking about it. But like, this is one of those things that is like, very self evidently should have been done before you started running these gigantic trains, especially given how congested Houston is as a terminal. I believe the only flyover in the entire Houston terminal region, like for trains at least is actually in this photo. Like it's Houston, Houston is a mess, and a fascinating mess, but a mess nonetheless. So you what you what you get is at yards like Englewood and across all these main lines that have like 8,000 foot sidings for, you know, 14,000 foot trains, you just have chaos and variability

and, and sort of the ideal of the scheduled railroad becomes this this this gloopy, unreliable mess that might look good on investor presentation, because, you know, your your again, your productivity metrics are looking good. But in reality, precision schedule routing, as implemented in the US has just made routing very fragile, and has has taken a lot of the potential benefits, a lot of the upsides for everyone that might come with this model and just made them into, you know, an exercise and sort of missed opportunities. Yeah, it's very easy for corporate for corporate governments, because you can go to shareholders and say, we're running, you know, 10 or 14,000 foot trains,

as opposed to last year when it was 8,000 feet, exactly productivity, this line is going up. And if you want to explain why that's a stupid idea, it's going to take you two hours and 11 minutes, which, you know, none of these guys are going to take the time to learn what is even a stupid question to ask. Yeah, it's making the money. Why do they do that? They have no incentive to. And again, like it's one of these things where, you know, it's not only just that like, you know, they're not learning it, but it's everybody in the industry has been conditioned to think this way, you know, like we've been using it, like the reason I read that quote from the railway age in 1901 is like this problem has been around for like really as long as railroads have

existed, you know, like we're talking about turning an incredibly sort of heavy ship and making it do a 180 like this hasn't like these sort of ingrained ways of thinking about rail routing and about transportation and about productivity are the takes a lot of effort to shift that. And that's also led to like other weird problems, like everyone remembers over the summer, there was that thing about, you know, theft from trains in Los Angeles. Oh, yes. You know, the dumbest YouTube comment we've ever gotten. I think so. That was that was definitely one of the dumber ones. You know, these trains pull into these yards, and they're so big, the ass end of the train is outside of the secure yard area. Of course, people are going to come

and steal shit from it. Right. And this is like, you know, you can't police your way out of the situation. It's a fact that freight at rest is freight at risk. And you you the only way you can solve that problem is for the whole train to fit in the yard. Yeah, yeah. So it's, it's, you end up with this, this, this really this mess. And, and again, it's frustrating because, you know, it's, it's a mess that's both a very sort of particular one to like 2017 through present, but it's also one whose roots really lie in like the 1850s, right. So it's, it's one of those sort of wicked problems that you just, you need like sort of radically new policy and sort of discursive strategies to take apart and make better, which I guess we're going to get to in a minute. But

anyway, enough about Engleard yard and and long freight trains. What if we put the the walls of the yard on like a sort of extending rail and then like the one 10 library that's basically on rails. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. We have an example next, right? Oh, yeah. Excellent. I have a, I have a, I have a demonstration. Excellent. All right. Let's say I have three carloads of steel. I'm shipping from Birmingham, Alabama. Oh, Mr. Richman, Mr. Podcast. Yes. You know, you get a couple of Patreons and all of a sudden you're buying carloads of steel. Yes, I'm shipping them to Philadelphia, where I'm going to use them to build an extension to my podcasting palace. You got to talk to Ms. Venus about that, bud.

That's about to say. Yeah. So the old way you do that is like, you have a local train in Birmingham that picks it up from the steel mill, right? Brings them to the yard in Birmingham. That's on day one. On day two, the cars are sorted. Day three, the train brings them to either Chattanooga or Knoxville. I think Chattanooga in this situation. You don't know in your own made-up scenario. No. It depends on which one of the sort of capricious princes of Chattanooga or Knoxville that you got. Yeah, exactly. It depends on who is the, who is the yardmaster on duty today. You're on an essay. Do you want to be Chattanooga? I think it'd be Chattanooga, too. I think in

reality, I looked this up after I wrote this a while back. I think in reality, the shipment would go by way of Atlanta. But I'm more familiar with this route. So day three, day four, the cars are sorted again onto another train. That's going to bring it up to Roanoke, right? At day six, they are going to be sorted into another train that's going to bring them to the yard in Harrisburg, Enola, right? They're going to be sorted on day eight. They're going to go to Philadelphia on day nine. On day 10, the local train that drops it off on my siding, right? So this is over a week to go 900 miles. This is not a great average speed. And in fact, classifying cars in yards sometimes takes longer than a day. Sometimes it takes multiple days. But as we saw with the guy with

railroad Gandalf, like there's a lot of sitting around where people are just looking at your cars full of steel doing nothing. Yes. But the steel is not going to go bad. And all the trains involved here go relatively short distances. It's hard for them to accrue a lot of delay, right? Your shipments are slow, but they're pretty predictable. Now we're doing precision scheduled railroading. Okay, I'm doing the same shipment. But rather than make all these stops, we are going to bypass intermediate yards with one big train that goes 600 miles from the big yard in Chattanooga to the big yard in Harrisburg, Enola. Yard masters hate him. It's one weird train. Enola is not as big as it used to be, but it's still there, right? Now we're going to say

this train is going about Norfolk Southern Systemwide average train speed of nine miles an hour. No, it is 21.9 miles an hour. Jesus Christ. And they say America doesn't have high speed rail. So this train will take 27 hours to reach its destination and be recrude two times. So same process as before. On day three, the train sets off the big train. The first crew has about 12 hours on their shift. They can reasonably be expected to cover about 250 miles enough to reach Bristol, Virginia down here, right? But you start to accrue delays, right? Sometimes it's a little thing like a break test taking too long. Maybe a local train hasn't cleared the yard. Maybe there's a big train on the yard lead because it's too short, right? Or just a unit train just appears

out of nowhere. It's like, I'm going to sit in the main line like 20 miles per hour for a while. This is mine. Giant Amtrak train that's like going between New York and Boston is like in your way. Or mega regional, yeah. Yeah. Yes. So it could be like a big thing like there's a truck stuck on the tracks and they have to wait for a tow truck to go take it off. So we'll say the crew loses about two hours on the way up to Bristol, right? Which means they don't quite make it to Bristol. So they're stuck somewhere in like the Tennessee Valley. The call goes out to the other crews. It's like, okay, you're getting on a train right now. Come to the terminal, get in the van. Are you sick? Well, you should have scheduled that in advance.

You know, they're recruit about 40 miles short of their away terminal. So, you know, meanwhile, the crew timed out, they're sitting there waiting for the van to bring them to the away terminal. They're in the middle of somewhere in the Godforsaken Tennessee Valley in the middle of the night. The banjo music is getting louder. It's not a great situation. Got to start keeping a shotgun in the cab just in case. So crew two shows up. They've been bounced and bumped around on a van for an hour on dirt roads next to the train track. They're here. They should reasonably be able to get the train as far as about Harrisonburg, Virginia, which is somewhere around here, right?

And there's no crew change and no car switching in Roanoke. We've skipped that yard entirely. There is a big yard there that you have to go through, which means potential for big delays. There's also a lot of unit coal train traffic there. So maybe, you know, someone's fat ass train is blocking the yard. All the downsides of this yard, none of the upsides. It's a convenient place to recreate. You don't have to drive people around in the middle of the night. But we're not going to do that. We're going to do that in order to get them stuck there. Yeah, there's maybe there's like, you know, there's a bunch of unit trains going through all at once. Maybe something broke down. Maybe there's a truck that got stuck on the infamous Holland's Road Crossing, which is, I believe

my uncle's shortcut to get to work that was very unpredictable. It was faster than taking the bridge, but it was a five track crossing. If you got stuck there, you got stuck there. So anyway, you lose another three hours in Roanoke. The train's five hours behind at this point. And then the line here hasn't been fully upgraded for these longer trains. So an unexpected delay in one train can pile up and down all the way up the main line, because trains can't pass each other effectively, especially a really long one like this. So the train has to hit a pass exciting at, let's say, Univista, Virginia, somewhere around here. Yeah, it's a social club. Yes. And the, you know, the crew times out, they had to get a new crew, probably from Bristol,

they got a van all the way up. I'm making up these terminal points, by the way. I don't know the actual ones. Everyone's getting insanely demoralized because they know this is ridiculous. Yes. So it's the morning of day four now. This train is now five hours late, but crew three could still reasonably be expected to get as far as Harrisburg if they make good time. But there's a problem here, which is the train is now off of its precise schedule, right? This train is now not where it's supposed to be. So all of this hypothetical scheduling is for nothing. It's fucking up everything. You've done the thing that we literally had a chart from like 1907 or whatever to avoid doing. Yeah. You got to let the train go this time. And if it misses it, do the next time after

that instead of in between because you'll fuck everything. Or even more basically, just make sure your trains and your infrastructure match each other. It is entirely possible to run a scheduled railroad. Like most other places in the world do it. But if you run your scheduled railroad, both all these asterisks, we're like, oh, you still have these unscheduled unit trains, and oh, you still have sidings that are half the length of the trains you're running. And oh, we're not actually going to really get our yards and mechanical forces and everything, invest in them enough so that they can really reliably deliver service. Then yeah, you're going to have some weird puree of freight train mess. Unless you're going to try and bring back

the art of the double saw by, which I don't think anyone wants that. For the uninitiated, the double saw by is a very complicated series of maneuvers with switching to allow two trains, which are longer than the passing siding, to still pass each other. It takes a very long time and it's very stupid. No one does it anymore. All right, so I have a question in the midst of this, which is just to play devil's advocate, just to sort of like lurch myself over to the opposite side of the political compass. Why don't they unite to fight the real enemy, the federal railroad administration and crew time limits? I've been saying Alice. Why don't they make the impoverished workers work longer?

You're already allowed to work them 12 hours as opposed to eight. Yep. What if 14? What if as long as necessary? I mean, in practice, you get in that van and you are spending at least another hour. Yeah. Trucking is essentially what you're describing, Alice. Yeah, exactly. Why don't we just load them up on amphetamines, cut all the regulation. It might not be high speed rail in the sense that the train is moving quickly, but it's high speed rail in the sense that the fucking neurons are firing. Problem solved. I have solved this like the Gordian knot and the thanks that I get. Not enough. Never going to be enough.

I should get the Congressional Medal of Honor for this. Oh, my God. So you've got this situation where they want to get off the Harrisburg, right? And so, you know, but they're so delayed, you can't delay the rest of the system. This train keeps getting shunted into passing sidings and stuff. So they lose another three hours. They time out 50 miles shorter their destination in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, right? Oh, not a place you want to be stuck. And I have to call a fourth crew to bring it into Harrisburg, right? Where, you know, this is the end of day four. So the train took two days and four crews, four crews, yeah, four crews to make it this far. Now, had this train

not accrued all this delay, the yard at Harrisburg would have time to classify all the cars, get them moving the next day, but they have not done that, right? So on day five, the cars are sorted. Day six, they're on a train to Philadelphia, right? Which actually doesn't go like that. It goes more like that. And, you know, the railroad delivers the cars a full three days faster than they would have otherwise, but one day later than scheduled. And having also emissarated a bunch of workers. Yeah, yeah. And also, like, importantly, I think, you know, if you survey shippers and ask them what they want, they want speed, but more importantly, they want reliability, you know, if they can, if they can predictably sit, like, if they can, like, you know, they can really believe and trust

that their cars are going to come, you know, eight days after they shipped them from Birmingham, that's actually better than having it. Well, you know, they might get here in five days, but they might also get here in 22 or something like that, you know, which is frankly, that is, that is how it works right now. You know, there's just, there's no reliability in the system, despite, you know, this at least theoretical effort to achieve that. And that, that is more so than anything else, what holds people back from, from, if your, if your priority is speed instead of reliability, and you're like willing to sacrifice reliability, just goes to like to reduce that to absurdity, fucking put it on a rocket, you know, on a suborbital trajectory,

you know, from, from Birmingham to Philadelphia, it'll get there, the state it's going to get there in, I don't know, but it's going to get there very quickly. Crucially, although you've, you've ruined crew's lives, you've also saved a lot on labor by doing so, because you're not classifying as many cars and yards, you know, and you are, you're moving the train quicker, so it's more labor efficient to do so, even though it's late. Now, the customer has a different experience, which is they don't know when the cars are going to show up. In the worst case scenario, let's say I ordered three cars of steel, and my siding only holds three cars, and I'm getting this on a regular basis. Well, if the train behind this one showed up on

time, I'm going to have six cars that I can't fit in my siding that only holds three. So the railroad is going to say, well, you couldn't accept the load we delivered. So we're going to take the cars, we're going to storm the yard, we're going to charge you something called demerage, which is a fee for being unable to accept delivery. It's... This is what, this is why you want to be like no loads refused. Yes, pretty much. Good Lord. Yeah, because if, if, if, if you refuse the load, you get charged demerage. It's just, it's, it's,

it's, it's a fact of life. It's a bad time to be a bottom. Yeah. So this is really bad. This is really bad for customers and shippers. It's really bad for crews. It's really bad for trying to attract customers to the railroad when the service is this unreliable. It's unsafe a lot of the times just because the trains are so long. You know, it's, it's, it, you know, when these trains stop because the crew timed out a bunch of railroad crossings get blocked for a while. You know, you know, this is a whole, it's a bad

way to run the railroad, except it makes a lot of money. You know, and this, you know, it saves a lot on labor by abusing labor and doing these ridiculous runs. You know, it's why I sort of call PSR sort of a one weird trick to move trains faster by making them all late. Hey, but the good news is that because all of the, because they're all sort of nominally light, that also means that you can punish the crew for poor performance. This is true. There's also all kinds of like surveillance and crap in the train cabs now. And, you know, you're very restricted on what you can do in the train cab, even when you're stopped and you know you're going to be stopped for a long time.

You know, it's not just dead ahead into the dark for 12 hours. Into the abyss. That's, that's why you start dipping. Yeah, it gives you something to fucking do. So Uday found this great chart. I made it. Oh, you, you made this one. Yes. Yeah. There's a, there's a very dedicated group of rail fans at Horseshoe Curve who like take notes on all the trains that pass by. And I'm like huge, actually, honestly huge shout out to them for doing this. They keep like long-term records of all their data. So you can, you can

just download a huge spreadsheet of like all the trains that passed Horseshoe Curve in 2019. For some people, that means you can see which locomotives that those trains had or whatever else the foamers want to know. For me, it means you can see when they passed the, like what time they passed the curve, which allows me to make a graph like this one. So this is four different freight trains. And I used their data throughout 2019. I made this graph showing sort of essentially the distribution of times that they arrived at the curve. So 20E is a freight train from Chicago or they actually changed all the symbols recently. So now 20E is called something else. I think it's, I want to say 22G or 20G, I don't know.

Or yeah, no, no, 20, it would be 22X not 22G. Yeah, because X is, never mind. That's a tangent. Anyway, so that's, that's a, that's a sort of high priority intermodal freight train from Chicago to Northern New Jersey. 20W. I think 20E is the, the eastbound one that goes from Jersey to Chicago. Jersey, Chicago is westbound. I think 2020E. Oh, right. Excuse me. I forget how, I don't know. Your first seven symbols are weird. Yeah. 20W is another train from Chicago and North Jersey, but really what it actually is, is it's a BNSF train that comes in from Los Angeles and is just handed off to Norfolk Southern in Chicago. 38G, that's a mixed freight train from, from a yard just outside of Pittsburgh to Camden, New Jersey. And now these days,

I think it terminates in Abrams, Pennsylvania, which is near King of Prussia, if you know where that is. Unfortunately, yes, we doubt. And then, and then 590 is a coal train. It's a coal unit train that runs from, from like Southwestern Pennsylvania to export coal terminal in Baltimore. So you have a few different types of trains here. And as you can see, none of them, not even the high priority or mode trains have particularly consistent arrival times. So 20E tends to arrive somewhere between like, I don't know, 8pm and about, I don't know, 12, 30 in the morning. 38G seems to get there, I don't know, some time between 12 and 6. 20W, which is like this, you know, supposed to be this great cross country train, is essentially

like a bell curve. It's one of the highest priority trains in the country. Yep. It gets the, when it gets there, it has a full, full normal distribution here. Yeah. It's pretty, honestly, it's pretty incredible, right? You know, it's, it's just like, okay. And then 590, which is a, you know, again, a testament to the just unbelievable randomness of unit train operation. 590 is, I mean, it's not exactly a, a sort of a flat line, but it's pretty damn close. So it just kind of shows up when it wants to, and oh, the fun part about 590 in particular is that this is a train that ends up on Amtrak Northeast corridor. So, you know, that's fun. A nice sort of random addition to the, I mean, the chaos train. Yeah. It's 590,

the one that derailed. Yeah. Yeah, there's a few different symbols they use for the, for the Baltimore export coal trains, but it very much could have been 590. It shows up at any time, full of whatever, and then it gets in the way of an Amtrak and then it's like derailed. And then it just pops the sloth. It is a solid soccer player, yes. Right. I love, I love this train. This is, this is beautiful. You know, it's just, it, it, it, it looks up on every possible level at once. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's doing its best. When, when does it show up? We don't know. What's it carrying? We don't know. Does it get, does it, you know, does it get where it's going efficiently? No.

Does it get there at all? Also, no. And it's like barely a train. Like this is sort of a philosophical thing. Like how many things can you, like, yeah, I'd rip away. It's a ship of these years, right? How many elements of a train route can you strip away from a thing functionally and like leave it still a train? So the governor lady said, I'm sending in more trains. Anyway, so, I mean, the point here is, I mean, it's just to underline everything that Justin just talked about, right? You know, so 2019, Norfolk's Island was already implementing PSR. And yet, you know, in reality, these trains are not really that precise. And I mean, this has only gotten worse actually recently because of all, you know, COVID disruption,

cruise shortages, you know, making the trains even longer. You know, American railroading is just not a precise art. And PSR, despite theoretically having the potential to make it a lot more precise because of its sort of, you know, overlap with all these other long run problems in the industry and the way people think about the industry, it's just ends up actually making the problem worse. And that's bad. It's bad for, for, for shippers who, you know, let's say, I don't know, maybe your container is on this 20W train. Like, if that train was more precise, you could be getting your, your container, I don't know, 12, 18 hours earlier than if, then in this sort of random. Right. I also believe 20W and 20 or E are both

trailer trains, not container trains. So they actually, they are supposed to be, oh, okay. One of them was probably the one that we saw derailed in the first slide. Yeah. Yeah, I was going to say, so the difference isn't just between getting your container sort of reliably and getting your container unpredictably, it's getting your container reliably, or getting a phone call from Norfolk Southern being like, your container is on its side around horseshoe. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Your container is on its side on our track, and we're going to charge you for that. Yeah. That's a B. That's a fine. Stepped off the logo. Yeah. So it's, I mean, you can, you can run this sort of, you know, this is something I just,

you know, I did this in R. This is very easy to like do, even like just accelerate or whatever. Like you can, you can take any, a lot of these railfan cams will have logs where all the, all the railfans put in like the information of the trains going by. And if you like me have a passion for charts, one of the things you can do with that is like, yeah, literally just choose any of them and just do this with it. And you will always find that there is this unbelievable amount of variability in, in when the trains show up. You need to see the, the statistics for Santa Fe Junction seeing as how many derailments they've caught on virtual railfan over just like the past two months. I know. There was one that was going around yesterday or day before, right?

Some like auto rack train. Yeah. Who's moving in a good clip too. It was. Yeah. On a bridge. Hey, do you want high speed rail or not? Exactly. Not really. At this point. What do you, what do you, what do you want at this point? I'm going to go on my side on my bathroom floor and just kind of like experience suffering for a while and, you know, hope to feel better. There was a chart I probably should have thrown in this podcast somewhere. I did not. That was published in trains magazine earlier this year. The surface transportation board, which is a successor to the ICC has forced railroads to start publishing on time performance.

And it's bad. It's really bad. Yeah. The Norfolk Southern in particular. They invented a line for this. Yeah. Norfolk Southern in particular. Less than 50% of car loads are delivered on time. And the definition of on time is within 24 hours of schedule. Yeah, that's not how on time works. Now, meanwhile, of course, in Switzerland, like 90% of their freight car loads are delivered within 20 minutes of schedule. So I mean, like this, this isn't like an unsolvable problem. You know, this is really a sort of very contingent sort of manufactured problem of sort of the railroading as we do it in the US, which is to say, you know, for all we might hear about how great American freight roads are,

like, you know, yes, they do keep a lot of trucks out off the road and, you know, they're better than some other ones, but they are so much worse than what they could be. You know? Yes. Yeah. No, like the Swiss railways aren't better because of like a sort of innate biological, cultural, Swiss superiority that you only get by like marching into town with a Horbit and stopping women from voting for seven or eight years or whatever. Oh, they use the P5s now. Yeah. In fact, the Swiss actually are up against much higher odds than the American railroads.

You know, they have all this passenger traffic, you know, their freight trains have couplers that are like shit. And they're shorter, you know, the cars can carry a lot less stuff like. Weird mountain curves that they didn't like, like through in the 1910s. Yeah. Everything's on containers, which are hard to unload at on sidings. They've all these structural, all the structural factors point against them, and yet they achieve, I think, relatively similar, like freight mode share to the US on a much like objectively more competently operated system. It's much more complex operations where you have shit like the local Ikea gets all its stuff.

Yes. By a railroad spur as opposed to as opposed to buy a truck. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's, yeah, it's remarkably effective. Cool system. It is, it is. So yeah, so this is, you know, this is just, it's really the point that I think is just so important to drive home about all of this is, you know, like badly done railroading is not just bad for labor and for the people who live along railroad lines itself.

It also just really like shrinks the potential expansiveness of like the railroading business itself, you know, unambitious, you know, poorly implemented scheduling that sort of just, you know, bathed in this sort of operating productivity obsession that railroads have had so long. It's like so sabotaging. Yeah. It's shrinking the pie. It's just, it's, it's bad. Like at the end of the day, it's just not actually that good business for them. And then, you know, I think I'm a little hopeful that, you know, between the regulatory pressure and the events of the past years that railroads might, you know, change their ways a little bit,

but like it's just not a sustainable model at the end of the day, you know, like none of the incentives and none of the, the, the sort of deeply ingrained cultural institutional factors are pointing in the right direction here. Yeah. Anyway, so next slide, I guess. So take a quick bathroom break. I'll be right back. Yeah, I can blabber a while. Good luck, Alice. Oh God. Okay. Yeah. I'm holding it down. I am like, I'm pinching the bridge of my nose. I'm trying to maintain thinking about anything else other than my stomach hurting.

So let's talk about some graphs and talk about some more graphs. We've got some intersecting lines now. We've moved up the graphs to 201. We do, we do. So here we have a blue line and that blue line is a passenger train. That represents the police, the thin blue line between your container getting there on time and chaos. So we have, so we have indeed this, this thin blue line. And the thin blue line is, is traveling upwards. And so on the Y axis here, we have distance and axis, we have time. So this train is, you know, moving along, I don't know, 400 miles of railroad over four hours. And that's our passenger train. And it's, you know, picking up people on the way.

That's a mega regional. Exactly. Exactly. It's, it's our 140 car, you know, train number 66 or whatever. And somewhere along the way. I really like this idea. We should, we should expand this. And I would like really, if you want to have a transcontinental railroad, have a transcontinental railroad, have the train still moving, like people getting on and off the same train in like Los Angeles and New York. Exactly. Exactly. It can, it can be done. One big conveyor belt that's also a train. That's right. What I mean, the Swiss did this, if we're going to go back to Switzerland is they, they sort of deliberately set that record for

longest, I think longest passenger train just by like coupling as much of their shit together as they could. Yeah. So yeah, why can't, why can't Americans do it? And why can't Americans humiliate the Swiss? Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. Bring back that spirit of like international competition. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. But yeah, so start up some jingoism, you know, we need to like be more racist against the Swiss. Nationalism but only for trains. Yeah, exactly. Right. We need, we need to like make the average American competitive with the Swiss train. Yeah, exactly. You know, so we need to do some like stereotyping, some fear mongering. We need to like sort of

have big posters and like public places of sort of smug looking Swiss people and be like, you want this guy to have a longer train than you? Yeah. Yeah. Have an anti-yodeling campaign. That's right. Yeah. That would definitely be an interesting timeline to watch. Amtrak public relations, I am available to consult on this at any time. It is funny because they constantly get dunked on in their replies that I always love it. I mean, doing like social media PR for a railroad is like one of the worst. That's a circle of hell. Not a high one, but it's wonderful. It is. It is definitely. Yeah. Anyway, so you have this, your thin blue line train that's going about this business and it's

going to have to intersect with the red line, your freight train somewhere. Yes. But we don't know where because the freight train is in that range. Yeah. Yes. The freight train is just, you know, we don't know when it's going to come, but it's doing. Yeah, somewhere along there, this passenger train is going to have to pass that freight train. Now, if we know, you were the one time that freight train was going to arrive at different points, like IE, if that freight train hadn't actually reliable and delivered schedule, you could just build a passing track where the two trains were scheduled to meet. But because the freight train has the schedule predictability of, I don't know,

me waking up on a Saturday morning, it's, you know, going to you're going to either have to build like 100 plus miles of like passing track and be like, OK, well, unless. Yeah. Less than that precision because you do wake up in the morning. Yeah, that's right. Sunday morning without apparently still counts. Yeah, Friday night without apparently still counts. This is a good point. Yeah. But yeah, so like you have to either build a ton of track or you build less track and then are like, well, I just hope that these two trains don't catch up to each

other in the middle portion, you know, in the scenario where you build a bunch of shorter track, like shorter passing tracks, because then you end up with delays and, you know, the passengers are unhappy and there's angry Twitter complaints and yeah, everyone loses. So basically, I mean, the upshot here is that having unscheduled unstructured freight operations is not only bad for shippers, it also just makes all of these expansion plans for passenger service unbelievably difficult to accomplish because you're either exposing future rail passengers to a bunch of unreliability or you're spending however many hundreds of millions of dollars, like essentially like bulletproofing your infrastructure against like random freight

trains coming along and messing up your passenger timetable. It is, it is quite, I mean, this is why like, you know, here in Pennsylvania, there is one train a day from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh. Well, it's fucking embarrassing. And they want to increase that in the next five years to two passenger trains a day. Wow. From Philadelphia to Pittsburgh. Incredible. And in order to do that, they are spending something like $200 million on passing sidings. Yeah. For an extra passenger train per day. Yeah. And this is the kind of this is because of the schedule unreliability that you have to do that or you have to accept random stupid delays constantly. Absolutely. Absolutely. And I mean, another really nuts thing about this is that there's like, even within the US, there's actually a few

parts of the country that actually have figured out how to do this properly. BNSF has seemingly cultivated a very good working relationship with the rail planners in California. And they have, they've, I mean, scheduled freight trains like entirely along the line to San Diego. Now, there's only a few freight trains a day there. It's easy. So it's easier. But I believe there's also like, at least like, you know, done a sort of similar like, peg development or path development sort of thing for the very busy mainline between San Bernardino and Los Angeles. So now you can, you know, they're talking about, you know, half hourly or hourly MetroLink service and expanding, you know, the Pacific surf liners, and they're doing all these things within sort of a defined

operating plan that allows them to be like, okay, so, you know, if we want to run X many more trains at Y times, we're going to have to put in like exactly this bit of track here and exactly this bit of track here. And that's going to open up these, these new sort of scheduled paths and these, in these, these new frequencies. So, you know, even in the US, like there is precedent for, for this being possible for, for scheduled freight and passenger service to coexist and grow together. But it just requires a different sort of approach to freight routing and a different sort of institutional outlook. Really, everybody involved that is currently sort of made really fundamentally difficult, if not impossible by the obsessive like cost cutting and sort of

infrastructure second, you know, profits first mentality that a lot of these railroads have adopted. There seems to have also been sort of a synthesis in Virginia, where I would say trains like Richmond, Richmond and Roanoke are surprisingly reliable for what they are. Well, I will say when the, when the Roanoke train fucks up, it fucks up bad. Oh, it sure does. Yeah. Show up there at 11pm. When you get there, motherfucker, would you like another beer? That's what I did. I was on the train to Roanoke. I was pretty sloshed actually, because it's a long train. You know, I realized when we were coming into Roanoke, I was like, cafe car is going to close in a minute. I can just feel it in my bones. Norfolk Southern is going to

do us dirty. Yep. I was like, I ran to the cafe car. I was like, can I have one last beer please? And the guy was like, because I think Norfolk Southern is going to do us dirty. And he was like, you're right. And he served me a beer. And then, and then like, and then sure enough, we sat in a passing siding for two hours. Oh, dear. We're like 15 minutes out of town. This is this, you have a sort of like pre-to-natural ability at this point, you know, this is sort of like minor, minor wizardry. The train whisperer. Yeah. Just get a sense like this train is going to fuck me. Yeah. That's roll 34. And the French call for posh. All right, let's fucking wrap with this

bitch up. I am so god damn hungry. Alice is dying. I feel atrocious. Like I say, like the guy who fell into the hot acid vat is a pussy compared to us. All right, this one, I'll do a very quick research basically. Sort of trying to minimize the complexity of operations under PSR, you know, will lead to do things like instead of having, you know, so this is Los Angeles for context, this map. And it's a map of Union Pacific's terminals in Los Angeles. Union Pacific here on this map, of course, is blue because, you know, he used the hell out of me because I'm like, wait a second, Chicago isn't like, I saw this as this is a map of the United States, which has been like seriously reconfigured. They moved Denver, Kansas City, El Paso,

Laredo, Houston, Salt Lake City, St. Louis, Twin Cities, Council Bluffs, and San Antonio into Long Beach. Exactly. Exactly. Where they belong. And then Chicago's just up here. Yeah, Chicago is in the city of industry. Chicago is actually in two locations. Ah, yeah. Greater Chicago. So it is. This is in the city by China Manville. I should know this having made this map. But yeah, basically, so Union Pacific is a part of their PSR effort. It used to be that they offered, you know, like each one of these four terminals, all of which are, you know, quite a good distance apart, used to offer service to a bunch of different destinations. So, you know, you could ship from, you know, the right most of them to, I don't know, Dallas or

Houston. I actually don't know if that was necessarily what was offered. But basically, there was more options than Chicago previously. But to simplify their operations, they're like, okay, we're going to dedicate certain terminals to certain sort of directions or like, you know, just cities of traffic. So, you know, immediately see the problem. It simplifies their operations. Exactly. It complicates everyone else's because you have to truck all of this shit across from like across from one yard to another yard. Yeah. And it takes you like eight hours. You're just sitting in traffic. Exactly. They just built this brand new Alameda corridor. And their first reaction is, yeah, let's move all that traffic onto trucks. Exactly. Exactly. Let's not use it,

you know? Yeah. It's better to build it than not use it. Well, the government helped them build it. So, of course, they're not going to use it. Honestly, the whole Los Angeles freight policy, well, that was not a word, freight planning and policy, like sort of disaster would be a great episode of this show. But again, for another time, because there really is just like unbelievable amounts of chaos and fun. Well, that's your problem bonus episode, the city of Los Angeles. Yes. I'm in favor. From Mulholland to the Alameda corridor. Let me tell you why the Lakers are a poverty franchise now. Anyway, so I mean, the upshot here is that, you know, like one of the problems, and then this is not just a PSR problem, this is just sort of a freight

policy problem. More broadly is that, you know, all of these efforts that are being made to simplify rail ops, they, you know, they have, they have a positive impact on rail operations, you know, it makes Union Pacific's lives simpler. But it also means that, you know, all these truckers are working more, there's more sort of truck driven emissions in the air, you know, truck driver shortages. It's like, it's like, like consolidation of like a narrow solar system view of what a railroad does where it doesn't exist in a society. The railroad ends where the track ends. That's not part of a much broader sort of system and set of point you were hitting on earlier. Sure. Well, think about it, we did invent

the innovative new solution of paying drage truckers negative wages. That's amazing. You know, one of the, I wrote a long blog post on Los Angeles last summer, and one of the craziest statistics I found in that is that from 1974 or so to the 1990s, not even to present to the 1990s, the real cost of drage container from the ports to like real yards around downtown Los Angeles fell by like more than half. Simply because, you know, we went from Teamster truckers to, you know, these supposedly independent contractors. Union busting, it works. That's why they do it. It saves you a lot of money. For those uninitiated who are listening to the podcast,

drage is moving a container from one port to another port. A lot of times the way the industry works now, everyone's an independent contractor, right? And generally, they're very poor. They may be illegal immigrants. And essentially, these lessers will say, all right, we'll put you on a least to own scheme for a big rig, right? And then essentially, your wages are docked directly to pay for the big rig, which means if you don't make enough money, you are, although you're doing work, you are effectively paid a negative wage for that day. It's very predatory. Most people do not, because it's least own. So there's no equity in the truck, right? Not the truck equity. But you're also still paying like maintenance and gas and also

Uber for freight. Yeah, it's exactly that. Yeah. And there's no working regulations. There's no minimum wage. There's no healthcare. It's all the, it's just nasty, nasty, nasty stuff. Really bad, yeah. Yeah. And it's literally the animating sort of sinew of the modern economy, you know, without drage truckers and sort of just modern trucking in general. Like, a lot of what we currently consume and the way we currently consume it just would not exist. Like, yeah, it's like, we've literally created like a goods movement system that is predicated on unbelievably exploitative labor practices. The ones who drive away from a malice. And this is, this is how it becomes economical for, you know, a ship with,

I don't know, 20,000 containers on it to pull in the Long Beach and have 20,000 truck trips resolved from it rather than 10 or 12 trains. Yeah. And it's actually, it's funny because, I mean, not funny, it's horrible, but one of the trends recently has been actually shipping less and less stuff by trains directly from ports and instead sort of trucking it to like an inland distribution center where a bunch of, you know, also terribly treated workers like sort the goods and, and sort of repackage them and, and arrange them in such a way that sort of facilitates and cheapens inland distribution and they're loaded and then they're trucked either, you know, back to downtown Los Angeles or to, you know, one of the intermedal

terminals near San Bernardino and then loaded on a train to go inland. And that, I mean, talk about like, you're racking up, you know, 100, 200 miles of, of truck travel there, all those emissions, it's, it's again, it's, it's this unbelievably large coordination failure where we've, we've created not only like, again, a system that's predicated on all of this exploited labor, but also a system that relies on, you know, kids in inland empire and along, you know, I seven 10, like having like terrifyingly high asthma rates and, and people just getting, you know, all these respiratory diseases and illnesses, it's, it's, you know, as consumers, it's sort of abstract from us, but it's like the visceral experience of these modern

logistics and freight systems is horrifying. And yeah. Yeah. Hey, hey kid, you want a CDL? Yeah, you want to do Drayage for $5 an hour? Yeah, you want to do Drayage? Super fucked up. Yeah, man, American truck simulator really sanitizes that industry. This is true. Yes. American truck simulator. Yeah, exactly. You do the same route over and over again, I never make money. Another good book recommendation. Getting the goods. It's by Edna Boninich. That's in my bag somewhere. And Jake Wilson, maybe. But it's, it's a bit dated now, but a lot of the problems it describes are like very much still relevant. And it's, it's just a really, really great sort of like holistic look at the problems and, and, and like practices of the modern

logistics economy in Los Angeles. I think it should be required reading for everybody, but I certainly, we're deciding the book now. Yeah, short of, short of dictatorial powers over the curricula of people. I will certainly recommend it strongly. Speaking of dictatorial powers. Yes, yes. The labor side. The labor side. Yeah. Speaking of dictatorial powers. Yeah, exactly. As we, as we spoke about before, this model of railroading predict on a very unreliable service, cost of minimization, trains that arrive and depart at random times, puts immense stress on crews. And it doesn't have to be this way, right? And this is why we've had these, these major labor disputes, which has not been about wages. They've been about quality of life.

We made a joke about this on the Newfoundland Railway episode where we're like, Franz Kafka loading and unloading cargo and his boss being like, listen, you got fucking two extra legs now that you're a bug so you can move like 20% faster. Right. And they're doing it. They're doing it in real life. Uh-huh. It's so fucking depressing. It's, it's wild. And all these, these, these, the way that PSR has been implemented, you know, is really the core of why schedules are so unpredictable. This is why workers like evil PSR and so they did evil PSR. Yeah. Yeah. Their lives are completely controlled by the big railroads. And this is also why the railroads were so reluctant to do a basic thing like sick days because, you know,

they have no, no, no room to do that. Yeah. Their business model relies on you being at their, at their whim at all times. Um, you know, the other thing that is really useful to note here is that these, these labor disputes were entirely from employees of class one freight railroads. So, because M track, uh, crews, commuter rail crews, short line crews, so on and so forth, they don't have these problems because either their trains run on real schedules or you're not, you're not chasing that operating ratio. So you don't have to, you know, run everything as this like bare bones. Right. Yeah. And also like, you know, whatever the railroads might say, they're like, it not only can be done, but has been done to like actually,

even with the sort of current model, give train crews more regular schedules. Like, um, in the nineties, Conrail did a, did an experiment with the FRA to reduce actually like fatigue related, uh, crashes and accidents, um, where they gave about 75% of the crews running, uh, between Toledo and Buffalo, I believe, um, or it was Cleveland, Cleveland, one of the two, um, regular assignments. So they had regular hours and a regular train they ran, um, and they knew what time it'd be. It's like sleeping and it just, it gave them predictability. Um, and it worked. It worked great. Now, a problem, of course, is that, you know, that corridor has a very large number of sort of relatively more scheduled here intermodal trains versus, you know, unreliable

unit trains and sort of errant mixed freight trains. So, you know, that was a very easy environment to do that in. Um, and as, you know, these operations have gotten more complicated and as you try to expand that to other corridors, you really end up having to actually schedule things properly to, to, to make progress here. So those, those sorts of regular jobs, they're called assigned service. You know, you can do them for, you know, a yard crew pretty easily. You can do them for a freight train that goes and serves customers, but for the road freight trains, you're going to have to actually write like an actual timetable for those before you can really start, you know, running. Yeah. Yeah. The other thing to note is that a lot of the stuff only really got bad

over the past five or six years. Yeah. Yeah. As, as the, as the PSR model became the standard. And that's not good before, but it's really bad now. It's real bad now, right? Because they, they, they just usually reduce the number of crews that they had at all these terminals. So, you know, before you'd have unpredictability, but you, there is a bit more flexibility and give in the crew rosters. So now we're running on razor thin. Exactly. So now everybody has to be there all the time. And even people with like a lot of seniority are getting. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And yeah, it ends up just all this stuff collides and creates just a bad scene. And there's other aspects of this that we haven't really talked about, you know, the safety standards

are down. Yard crews are overworked. It's really bad morale among the entire workforce. Yeah. You know, these, these trains are so Kafka-esque. Yes. Right. Truly. I mean, the fact that like, oh, we got one sick day and leadership of the unions was treating that as a win was fucking. One, well, BLET did vote out their president yesterday. Yeah, I did see that. I was blaming that. Yeah, I was not blaming the rank and file there. Yes. You know, that does lead us to the question of what is to be done? Probably nothing. Parody redacted. All I want to do is parody, parody, parody, et cetera. I mean, the thing is right, like most people don't want to strike. It's like a high bar, even if you hate your job, because it's a, it's a difficult confrontational

thing that you're sort of primed more. You're taking a big risk to do it. Not want to do. Yeah. Luckily for us and unluckily for workers, you know, capital keeps fucking containing the seeds of its own destruction. And so it keeps making the decisions that make working in anything, but in this case, railroad, so intolerable, people keep doing it. And the answer of what is to be done is, you know, fucking the process of dialectical materialism resulting in parody redacted, you know? But if you, but that's not us, right? That's, that's, that's me talking, but we're not me right now. We're Pete Buttigieg, as we said in the beginning of this. So what is the Pete Buttigieg sort of top down managerial answer to how do we fix

railroads in the United States? I guess if you want to start there, we can talk about the railroad solution to this idea. The big incoming problem, the one that we're going to really see. Yeah, and the next like three years wants to work anymore. This labor shortage is going to be getting much worse because working conditions haven't been improved. The strike was a real off ramp from the bad stuff that's going to happen in the next couple of years. This is kind of like the averting this strike, Joe Biden saying no strike, everything's fixed. This is really screwed us a couple of years down the road. Yeah. You're going to lose. You're going to by winning the battle, you lost the war. Yeah. A direct through line there.

Perik victory. Yes. Well, yeah, I think it's, I think it's not even a Perik victory. Is there like a word for like you won the battle, which directly causes you to lose the war? Like, yeah, it's a Perik victory. I thought, I thought there was like, I thought that was like you won the battle, but you lost the war incidentally. Oh, I don't know. No, I don't know. I think it's a victory that causes your defeats. Oh, okay. Well, let's go with that. Could be wrong. I could be wrong. Let's have a look at related terms here. Could it be a Cadmian victory? Yes. A victory involving one's own ruin. Ah, yes. So this was sort of an off-ramp victory. Yeah. Perik was sort of this sort of off-ramp where the railroads would be forced to change their operating practices

in order to provide workers with, you know, actual sick days, actual time off. It would require you to really have to put in the work to provide better schedules to do all of this stuff. And, you know, at the moment, the business practices of the railroad simply do not allow for any kind of time off at all. And they're not going to change that unless they're absolutely forced to. So the railroad's idea has, and they're like, all right, we can't do time off. We can't do all this stuff. We're having trouble recruiting because our workplace is so bad. Let's go from two people in the locomotive cab to one person in the locomotive cab. So it's way more efficient. So you go to... Now you can't be on your phone, but also you don't have anyone to talk to.

Yes. Yeah, that's why people start drinking a lot. So you're doubling down on this productivity idea at the expense of, you know, safety and reliability, right? At the expense of your shit getting there. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that costs a doing business. Now, one-man crews have been like the holy grail for the railroad industry for a long time. And the thing is they want to do it without any of the commensurate like improvements in infrastructure and safety and so on and so forth that would allow that to happen because in Europe, this is fairly common, right? But they sort of, you know, they want to preserve the chaotic environment they have right now, but also, yeah. Yes. And I mean, you know, there's

arguments that like, okay, well, we have these new signaling systems like positive train control now, which is kind of fake. You know, we have all this all this exciting stuff. We should we should be able to run one-man crews. You know, Union Pacific is starting this experiment, I think, in a couple weeks where they're going to they're going to say, all right, we're going to have people called expediters. Yes. Yes. Like in a restaurant, they will perform the role of conductor, but not from on the train. They will be in a truck and will be dispatched to the location of a train if there is a problem. Motherfucker, what? Get the drive up to you. You're in the truck hearing banjo music getting closer. Yeah. I mean, you're in the train getting hearing banjo music getting closer. A guy in a

truck drives up, rolls the window down, throws a brick through the window with like, just deal with it written on there and then drives off again. That's fucking nuts, dude. Yeah. So if you're in a situation where, you know, I don't know, a couple or breaks, 55 cars down the train, you know, you can't leave the cab or even check on what the problem is because you got to be in the cab. You got to call Union Pacific and say, I will send a guy eventually. Yeah. So Union Pacific thinks this will actually be a more efficient system. I'm always suspicious when anyone says anything about efficiency because that's always always in terms of over labor basically. Yeah.

You know, you could do one man cruise if you were like, okay, we're going to install European train control system. We're going to run trains a quarter of the size. We're going to run them shorter distances. We're going to have higher track maintenance and car maintenance standards, so on and so forth. But you know, they're going to become Europe basically. Yes, basically. And you have to, the railroads don't want to do this. I think the one man crew thing is mostly there to frighten labor as opposed to something that anyone actually thinks is feasible. We will get to this when we do, I want to do a companion episode to this about why British railways are fucked and we'll get to sort of some of the conservative

government's demands for reform, which are along very similar lines. Please do do that. I would love, I'd be very curious to hear. I don't know enough. See if we can't get Gareth on. That'll be fun. So the other option is, I mean, so railroad workers united, which is a sort of a caucus of rank and file railroad workers within the several craft unions which compose the railroad industry. They're just saying straight up, we need to nationalize the railroads. It's time. It's a good idea. I mean, it's about the only way you could do it at this point because they're providing such bad service. They're treating their workers so badly and so

on and so forth. And you know, they're not investing in infrastructure and that working in the public interest that this is the obvious thing to do is nationalize the railroads, just put it under government control. I disagree a little bit on the specifics here because the RWU idea is you nationalize the railroads and have sort of an open access agreement where different companies run different trains on it. I think you need to go do top to bottom nationalization. I think that would result in a much better system. I don't think you can divorce operations from infrastructure in that way. We tried. In Britain, we managed to do rail track and train off racing companies and look where it's gotten us. That's gone very poorly.

You know, it's bad in the US when you're looking at the sort of the British settlement of powers and the railway system and this would be an improvement for us. I think what I would say about nationalization is I think I definitely share your concerns about sort of that model just. I think also having spent some of my life working in this sort of transit space, I think it's also obviously you want to build up the state capacity and required institutional supports to actually do it well before you go ahead and take over the railways because you want to be sort of playing them on a good footing to succeed under government management. But I also will say that whatever you end up doing, I think there's even very strong,

just like even basic geographic arguments for nationalization or some greater government intervention regarding to make them do things they're not doing right now or support new services or whatever. One of the problems you actually see written about a lot in trade publications that cater to like intermodal shippers, for example, is the complete lack of intermodal services between cities within like 200-300 miles of the Mississippi River. So like, you know, you can ship a container from New York to Chicago. You can ship a container from Atlanta to, I don't know, I think you can do it. I think they offer that or like Jacksonville to Memphis or I don't know, whatever other like medium distance, distance pairs you like. But you very few railroads offer

services between like, I don't know, Minneapolis and Columbus, Ohio or between like Kansas City and or better example, or like Dallas and Detroit or whatever. Actually, they do offer Dallas, basically these short distance. I seem to remember you posting like a map of railroad intermodal services and it was like this Gordy and Knot of one way services. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, but basically sort of the point there is that, you know, you can ship from Louisville to Dayton one way. Exactly. The other way. Oh boy. Oh boy. Yeah. No, you better get a truck for that. Yeah. But I think the point with the Mississippi particularly is that the sort of relative underdevelopment of intermodal services in that particular region has everything to do with the

fact that if you wanted to ship a container from say Minneapolis to Columbus, you'd have to interchange railroad in Chicago. And because, you know, BNSF or UP would be getting like a, I don't know, 400 miles from Minneapolis to Chicago, they'd be getting that much revenue and then have to give it over to CSX, which would then get, I don't know, 200 miles of revenue to get it or 300 miles from Chicago to Columbus. That's not very attractive to railroads who could be using their capacity or their, you know, their operating, like their operating resources to ship containers from Chicago to North Jersey or from Chicago to Atlanta, which are further. So you end up with this, you know, the very contingent geography of like railroad capital where it sort of split down the

Mississippi River and sort of along this like imaginary line that goes through like Chicago, St. Louis, Memphis, New Orleans. You end up with, yeah, like these, these, well really these policy failures where markets that have real sort of amounts of freight moving in them just don't get rail service because it, as it so happens, railroads, you know, geographies don't match them well. And that's something that, you know, public policy should be involved in solving. And because I'm hearing all these, all these city names right now and I'm imagining Madaglacius's head imploding because he believes all these places are hamlets. Yeah, train discourse on Twitter these days is a lot of fun. Oh yeah.

And I really enjoyed watching everyone's head explode when Amtrak initially posted the sort of connects US map because I guess people hadn't seen a population density in the US in a while. No one knew that Columbus has over a million people. Yeah, wild. Yeah. Big if true. People live in Ohio? Yeah. All those voters we spend a lot of time talking about every four years. They're real. They're all in diners talking to New York Times guys. Yeah. Yeah. The Ohio is just a network of diners. Exactly. But no, but I mean, I think that the point, basically my point here, I'm making it in the most roundabout and obfuscated way possible is that there are a lot of sort of policy problems and sort of environmental problems that result from

those policy problems that have everything to do with a sort of the weird structure of American sort of railroad capitalism and whatever it is. And I hope something does change. That needs to be fixed. That is something that governments should be involved in fixing and should be involved in doing better because it's a coordination problem. And no matter how good railroads might end up being, maybe tomorrow we're going to wake up to headlines about how they're all rejecting the operating ratio and are going to start operating themselves as sort of good corporate citizens like that. Those basic incentive problems that come from their geography, those are very hard to fix. And that's a policy problem. I mean, there's other sort of layers

to that, right? The Chicago interchange is itself a huge sort of coordination policy problem that needs even more government effort on top of the create effort to fix. I feel like you also have the fundamental issue with trying to correct problems with the railroads, I think, is that they make a whole lot of money. You are looking at a situation whereby, if I am an economist, I look at those numbers and I'm like, damn, railroads are great. Yeah, that's fantastic. They're making loads of money. These companies are really good and healthy and good for the economy. And it's like, yeah, the line keeps going up. The line went up. And yeah, this is why I feel like all these, it would be very difficult to do all these policies, solutions, because, well, A, no one

cares about freight rail and B, we're going to keep riding this line until it crashes into the moon and explodes. Yeah. I mean, I think it's also worth noting here that there was a 10-year period when everybody in Congress was thinking about freight railroads in the 70s because they were doing so badly. But the collective political imagination at that time was not let's make a rail network that works for everybody and achieves good policy outcomes on a holistic basis. It's no, let's return these carriers to profit and that will just be good. So I think there's so many different layers of failures of capitalism, failures of civic political imagination, failures of infrastructure that are just all sort of layered together and then coalesced to create this

crisis we're in right now, where climate change is bearing down on us and these workers are suffering and we have this real network that's just not working. We're not working as good as it should be. Well, I have to also mention, because I put the picture in here, there is something called the Steel Interstate Coalition, which is a bunch of folks who are advocating for what have the government built, a lot of brand new railroad right-of-ways that were electrified, so on and so forth. This is another open access thing, which is, again, I think the open access model, very questionable, but they have nice renderings, so I put it in here. But this also doesn't solve the problem of getting cars out of yards. Yeah, again, it's an in-between solution,

not a yard solution. Only thing I'll mention, just to go back to the whole Minneapolis example, is actually, in a weird way, allowing more mergers would help with the geographic problems, but of course, you end up with some potential competition problems in everything too. I don't think railroads have ever meaningfully competed, so. Yeah, railroad competition is a weird, weird thing. Although who knows, maybe the STB will wake up and decide on their whole reciprocal switching rule-making thing that we're actually going to have for reciprocal switching, and then it is a real thing. Like Amy Klobuchar somehow gets her idea of, let's break up the big railroads, which actually I think would be a step in the wrong

direction, but it would be funny. Yeah, bigger is better with railroads. It's just that you need to balance the big betterness with adequate protections for the public interest. And for workers. Yes, absolutely. Yeah. Well, what did we learn? I really like the expedizer idea. I think that's really funny. We're going to send a guy to drive four hours in the dark in a truck to maybe help you. Maybe not. Who knows? Maybe not. This is not insulting. This will certainly not make you want to strike more than you already did. Definitely. Nothing bad will happen there. There is some movement in Congress right now to mandate two-man crews, not in Congress, in the FRA, which I believe can make that rule

arbitrarily, which is probably a good idea because Class 1 railroads are definitely not going to develop the infrastructure to do one-man crews safely. We should do that and we should also maybe like not break the strike. Yeah, just a thought. And if you're a leftist or a so-called leftist who believes that in strike-breaking but walk, absolutely go fuck yourself. Yes. And we'll say if you can become a solidarity member of Railroad Workers United, if you support their cause, I'll put a link in that in the description. I pay some monthly dues to further this cause, more left-wing railroad organizing. Anyway, we have a segment on this podcast called Safety Third. I never thought we'd get here.

Hello. Well, there's your problem, peeps. I've just gotten into your pod. I have a story to help add to the fact that my home state of New Jersey is a pile of trash. I like New Jersey. I also like New Jersey. Yeah, I enjoy the Bruce Springsteen song Atlantic City. I'm the one New Yorker. We're in the other the other Bruce Springsteen city. I worked for a plumber for a year or two as a general helper type with the hope of apprenticing under him. He did a lot of backfoe valve testing and a lot of standing contracts to be the on-call plumber for the buildings he did backflow tests on. One of these buildings was the Berkeley Oceanfront Hotel here in Ashbury Park. Oh, boy. Yes. It's one of the few

remaining old-fashioned New Jersey seaside hotels. I've been getting into Boardwalk Empire, so this is good. Nice, good choice. The boss called me around 8 p.m. after our regular work hours, it needs me to come in. I showed up and we had to the hotel. The boss tells me they have a pinhole leak in their heating system somewhere in the basement, and when we arrive, the hotel's handyman brought us down to show us the issue. The basement of the hotel had about 4 to 5 feet of water in it and one of the 13- That's the aquarium. That's the aquarium. Don't worry about it. Second flooded hotel of the episode. That's right. One of the 1500 dead tropical fish. One of the 13-inch water lines coming off of the main has a pencil-sized hole in it.

Shooting water out is at high enough speed that it acted like a water jet cutter and cut a hole through the HVAC dock next to it. Oh my God. Hell yeah. We got the pressure shut off at the main, cutting water to the whole entire hotel in the process, and we started investigating the system and come to realize a few things. The basement being flooded wasn't supposed to be possible, as this was after Hurricane Sandy, and most buildings had been retrofit with stronger sump pumps and such to handle excess flooding. When apparently this building had not been required to do so, we were told, because they were grandfathered in as a historic building. I believe you should still have to install a sump pump. The basement is generally not historically

protected. If you drown, right, it doesn't count if it's in a historic building. I guess so, yeah. Additionally, they had no shut off valves on any of their larger pipes. As again, they were grandfathered in and did not require them. You just stop grandfathering shit in. You don't grandfather in plumbing. You know, these are historic lead pipes. I have a historic water heater. Result was my boss and I working for 16 hours straight using our pumps along with the few pumps the building had in its basement to empty the basement and drain the system, which because of where the hole was like a sinking boat. Yes, sinking hotel next to the seaside.

Waterfront views for everyone. Which because of where the hole was required the draining of the building's boiler and radiator systems. That's going to be fun to refill. Cold in New Jersey. Yeah, it doesn't get cold in New Jersey. It doesn't get cold in New Jersey when trying to get to the shore in winter. Sun ice. It actually is very nice. Yeah, haven't been down there in a while. I think it was Christmas. When trying to get to the hole to diagnose the problem, we could not reach it with any of the ladders we had on the truck. And after fishing around in the water in the basement, we found one that could get us onto an adjacent pipe that we then had to shimmy along to get to the hole.

Oh, we're having to do like platforming segments at work. Yeah. Oh, I've got a platform today. I mean, Mario's a plumber. He does that every day of his life. We had to order a new pipe from a specialty pipe fitter that delivered it from Philly the next morning. And my boss actually said, don't do this in your plumbing career ever and fix the pipe with no safety equipment by himself in about 20 minutes. Oh, no. The hotel's manager, who was a 60-ish year old Trinidadian woman, spent six of the 16 hours trying to urge us to fix it with pressure in the system, entirely ignoring the explanation of that being impossible by my boss. Then she explained to us how Donald Trump would be the savior of American society and a return to

Christian values. Okay. Okay. I mean, that's perfect, like sort of like small business tyrant, right? It's like, no, I really need you to like die. But by the way, also, this Donald Trump guy, amazing. Amazing. Yeah. Hell, Satan. Nobody was hurt. No real damage was done to most of the property besides the HVAC and some of the tools and parts they had in the basement. But a bunch of people dealt with no running water or working heat in a hotel overnight in 20-degree Fahrenheit weather. And my boss billed them for 20 hours in all parts of the highest hourly fee he could get away with because to quote him, fuck that lady. Love the pod. Solidary forever. New Jersey fucking sucks.

It's not that bad, guy. Yeah. I love New Jersey. All right. Ooday. If the people want more Ooday, where can they? Oh, I'll get the next episode. It's going to be on Chernobyl. It's going to be on Chernobyl. No, we're keeping it under three and a half. Ooday. If the people want more Ooday, where can they find more Ooday? I have a blog home signal. I'll send a link along in case you guys want to put it in the description. I'm on Mastodon and on Twitter at A320LGA. I think I'm on Mastodon.social. Yeah. Perfect. Great. Bye. Please do not eat that. Okay. Bye. Wow. Bye. Feel better. Thank you. All right. Do you think you can split this into like two episodes for release?