One idiot survives this bout of idiocy

Watch this little video to see just how close the trucker got to being just another statistic.

H/T to "jtMc".

Update: According to Tom Kelley, my usage is incorrect here:

Just an FYI. The term "trucker" refers to full-time, over-the-road professional drivers. The vehicle in the train video appears to be an ag vehicle, likely driven by a driver with no special training or commercial license. Minor detail, but important distinction.

GO Transit's new (old-looking) locomotives

I don't pass near the GO Transit rail line along the lakeshore very often, so seeing a new locomotive on the end of a train was a mild surprise to me. What I originally thought when I saw it was that GO had somehow decided to rebuild the old Ontario Northland TEE trainsets:

The newly delivered locomotive on delivery in June 2007. Built by MotivePower Industries, formerly known as Morrison-Knudson.	The former TEE trainset used by Ontario Northland for their Northlander service.

The railway renaissance

According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, American railways are enjoying a bit of a renaissance:

The upgrade is part of a railroad renaissance under way across much of the U.S. For the first time in nearly a century, railroads are making large investments in their networks — adding sets of tracks, straightening curves that force engines to slow and expanding tunnels for bigger trains. Their campaign is altering the corridors of American commerce, more so than any other development since interstate highways spread to the interior.

For decades, railroads spent little on expansion, even tore up surplus track and shrank routes. But since 2000 they've spent $10 billion to expand tracks, build freight yards and buy locomotives, and they have $12 billion more in upgrades planned.

The buildout comes as the industry transitions away from its chief role in recent decades of hauling coal, timber and other raw materials in manufacturing regions. Now, increasingly, railroads are moving finished consumer goods, often made in Asia, from ports to major cities. Their new higher-volume routes, called corridors, often serve the South, where the rail system is less developed and the population is rising.

Noticeably absent from the discussion are two of the largest surviving North American railways: CN and CP, each of whom own substantial networks south of the 49th parallel. That might just be because the article is focussed on US-based railways, or it might indicate another situation where Canadian business is failing to invest to keep up with their American competitors.

Government subsidies distort the market

In a post about shilling for environmentally friendly energy subsidies, Radley Balko touches on one of the biggest boondoggles of the 19th century, the building of the Union Pacific and Central Pacific railroads:

In 1862, Congress justified passing the Pacific Railroad Act as a way to forestall a secessionist movement in California during the Civil War. The government subsidized the Union Pacific and Central Pacific railroads at $16,000 per mile over an easy grade and up to $48,000 in the mountains. In addition, the government offered substantial land grants along the right-of-way. Despite these government subsidies, both companies were bankrupt in the early 1870s.

As an example of how government subsidies distort incentives, both railroad construction crews worked past each other building an extra 200 miles of parallel rail lines grades (and some parallel tracks) instead of linking up so their companies could earn more subsidy payments and land grants. The fact that government subsidies were not necessary for building a transcontinental railroad was proved when James J. Hill built the highly profitable Great Northern Railway from Minnesota to Seattle completely without them or land grants.

The UP/CP are an excellent example of how injecting government money into what should be a private endeavour will seriously distort the market, creating a huge incentive to "game the system" to maximize the unearned profits from the government, rather than by serving the public by actually running a business.

If you've read any of the histories of the Union Pacific¹, you'll very quickly discover that the company spent far more time and effort lobbying for subsidy, manoevering against potential competitors (by legislation, bribery, and political obstruction, not by actually serving their customers), and hiding the mind-boggling levels of waste, corruption, and incompetence of their day-to-day operations.

That's not to minimize the difficulties of actually building and running the railroad, which cost the lives of many men (disproportionally immigrant Irish and Chinese labourers), but the fact is that the railroad itself was a very distant second to the government largess to be diverted for private profit by the executives of the two corporations. The excesses and criminality of the various officers of the company had an even more important legacy: after the scandal broke, leaving both companies bankrupt, successive governments felt totally justified in heavily regulating all railroads, introducing economic burdens which would cripple most of them for nearly a hundred years (some of the worst regulatory burdens weren't lifted until the 1980's²).

^1. Except for the sanitized versions produced for children, which only cover the engineering achievements, not the grubby reality of the UP & CP in their early years.

^2. See the Staggers Act for information on the deregulation which belatedly allowed the revitalization of the American railroad industry.

Studies of the rail industry showed dramatic benefits for both railroads and their users from this alteration in the regulatory system. According to the Department of Transportation's Freight Management and Operations section's studies, railroad industry costs and prices were halved over a ten year period, the railroads reversed their historic loss of traffic (as measured by ton-miles) to the trucking industry, and railroad industry profits began to recover after decades of low profits and widespread railroad insolvencies.

Road safety at a grade crossing

Here's what happens when a truck driver forgets how long his vehicle is and pulls into (but not through) a grade crossing: Boom.

Video taken last week in Salisbury, North Carolina.

"This is my railroad"

One of the most interesting railroad promotional films ever made: This Is My Railroad, Part 1 and Part2. It's portentious, hokey, and triumphal, yet tells more about both the Southern Pacific and the regions it served than anything I've ever seen. If you want to know why the 1940's and 50's were the golden age of railroads, this film will give you a bunch of clues.

One of thousands of public domain short films now available from the Prelinger collection at the National Archive.

H/T to Jeff Scarbrough.

When coming in to the office seems too much like work

. . . imagine coming in to a job like this every morning:

Frankly, I have to admit in general that push systems are to working steam railways what pornography is to real sex, both are great in moderation but neither is quite as good as the 'real thing'. The 300mm (!) gauge colliery railway at the top end of Sichuan's Shibanxi railway is, however, a little bit special. I make no claim to originality, others like Hiromi Masaki have been here before. Being extremely committed in other directions, I had not bothered to check their sites before I came, I just noted some advice from John Raby to check it out during my visit. Thanks are due to all concerned for pointing me in the right direction.

Makes the old 9-to-5 seem positively sybaritic, doesn't it?

Electrical gremlins

In part two of the saga of transferring my son's layout to Burlington, I discover that gremlins are real . . .

To recap (or you can read the original post): I took the original 4'x6' section of Victor's HO scale model train layout down to Burlington to install in my sister's basement. Part one went very well, the layout (aside from some scenery) arrived and co-operated when set up in the new space. Nephew's state: very happy. Some time passed, during which I was going to check that the second section, a 2'x4' module containing the turntable, was still operable.

That was delayed an extra couple of weeks, as I couldn't find my multimeter, and there clearly was an electrical issue with the section: no power appeared at track level when applied to the under-table wiring. This is where it got complicated: my nephew had been eagerly awaiting the arrival of the turntable section and was very disappointed when it failed to show up on schedule. And I couldn't even diagnose what the problem was without having a meter to find out where the power was going (I had a brief urge to tell him that there was now a puddle of electrons on the floor underneath the layout, but common sense prevailed).

My meter has gone into hiding, and has not yet turned up, so I borrowed a meter from Jon (my virtual landlord, who, by happenstance, had just bought a new one . . . because his original multimeter had gone into hiding a few weeks earlier). Using Jon's new meter, I discovered the following:

• a loose connection to the turntable bridge track itself — a screw connector, easy to remedy
• a loose connection to one of the six turntable stub tracks — also a screw connection, fixed very easily
• otherwise excellent connectivity on all the rest of the track surrounding the turntable.

The turntable is one of the Atlas 9" models, and the switches controlling power to the stub tracks are all Atlas slide switches. In spite of the abuse they'd received during multiple moves, the turntable still works (manual, not powered), and the slide switches all still work fine. What doesn't add up is that tracks 2, 4, and 6 (counting clockwise) don't run. That is, the multimeter reads the same voltage on tracks 1 through 6, but a locomotive is only able to actually move if it's sitting on the turntable itself or on tracks 1, 3, or 5. There are no breaks in either the wiring or the actual physical rail to account for this. It's the same locomotive (a Kato NW2 — Kato has a very good reputation for product quality), yet it runs happily on 8 volts DC on one track, but refuses to acknowledge the same voltage on the adjacent track.

Gremlins are the only possible explanation.

Still, when my sister's family arrives later today, I'll at least be able to give my nephew a partially working turntable section, which is better than nothing. :-/

Update, two hours later: Apparently, Gremlins have nationality. . .

In first part of this post, I mentioned my frustrations with trying to troubleshoot the wiring. What I forgot to mention, because I'd completely forgotten about it, was that not all the track was Atlas. Some of the track was from one or another of my son's various train sets . . . no brass, but some steel and some nickel silver. It's all been painted and given the beginnings of weathering (but no ballast), so it wasn't immediately obvious which sections were Atlas code 100 (made with nickel silver) and which were Brand X code 96.733333 (made from the bones of imprisoned dissidents).

When I belatedly recalled that, it was a simple matter to swap out the (Japanese-made) Kato locomotive for a (Chinese-made) Bachmann. The original run of the Spectrum GE 44 ton diesel, to be precise. It had no problem running on any of the track . . . in other words the problem wasn't the track or the wiring: it was the frickin' locomotive. Kato NW2's don't condescend to run on mere "trainset quality" track. It has to be brand name or better before the Kato will stop sulking and actually run.

So, in addition to the turntable module, my nephew is also getting an old, noisy, but still serviceable GN 44-tonner. At least I know _that_ will run on the "new" section.

Public transit boondoggles

There's a post up at Hit and Run, talking about the problems with high-profile, low-return-on-investment projects like light rail:

A front-page story in yesterday's New York Times noted that politicians' transportation vanity projects drain money away from the sort of maintenance work that apparently was needed on the Interstate 35W bridge that collapsed in Minneapolis last week. I was pleasantly surprised to see the Times put light rail lines in the same category as boondoggles like Alaska's Bridge to Nowhere [. . .]

The scenario is very common — just about every city larger than 500,000 has probably built, planned to build, or been wined-and-dined by potential bidders for such projects. The projects are almost always economically ludicrous (but not as far-out as publicly funded sports venues for professional teams), basing their revenue projections on literally unattainable levels of use and minimizing or ignoring the crowding-out of other activities.

Light rail projects are very popular with politicians, because every politician wants to leave "a legacy" of their time in office. That means they want to spend as much of your money as possible to ensure their own "immortality". Light rail projects are popular with the public because they appear to offer a way to reduce congestion and speed up transit times . . . for other people . . . in other words, get some of those slowcoach commuters the heck out of my way by making them give up their cars and use a new light rail system instead.

Trains to Burlington

On Saturday, Victor and I took his old model train layout down to Burlington, to pass it on to Victor's cousin, who has recently become a model train fanatic. Below the break is the version of the story I sent to one of my model rail mailing lists:

Friday night and Saturday

It sounded like a good idea: my son hadn't really been interested for several years, and he was willing to donate the layout and some of his locomotives and rolling stock. My nephew, who is mildly autistic, is going to be over the moon. At least he will be once we get it transported down to his home and set up for him.

I cleverly anticipated this need when purchasing my current vehicle . . . a 4'x6' layout wouldn't have fit comfortably inside a Honda CR-V. I have a Toyota Tacoma pick-up now. Except . . . and here's where my plan had a critical flaw . . . it only has a 5' bed, so the layout won't be able to travel in relative comfort inside the bed with the cover down. I'll have to drop the tail and wrap the 1' of projecting layout to try to keep the (few remaining) trees, bushes, and clumps of ground foam from decorating a 1:1 scale road.

But before I can do that, I have to find a few key parts: some working locomotives and cars. Which were randomly packed up with my stuff when we moved into this house four years back. I've had to a) find all the boxes, which were not conveniently located in one spot; b) open each box to verify that what the label on the outside says has some relationship to what's actually in there; c) having located some (but not all) of the boxes filled with other boxes of the Athearn, MDC, Accurail, Kadee variety, then d) realize that the labels on the little boxes have no connection with the actual contents.

So I spent much of the afternoon opening all the little boxes inside the big boxes, sorting out my son's collection from my own. I thought it would be pretty easy: his stuff would all have X2F couplers (very unrealistic looking things: View image), while mine were all Kadee or other knuckle-type couplers (which both look more like real couplers, but also work better). That quaint notion was abandoned about the fifth box, when I discovered that I'd started converting some of Victor's collection over to using knuckle couplers round about the time we decided to incorporate his layout into my TH&B layout.

Oh, and I forgot to mention that I'd been generous with the packing material inside each of those little boxes. So it wasn't just a case of opening the lid . . . it then required further unpacking to actually see what was hidden within.

Two hours in, I had a horrible sinking feeling: we couldn't find any of his locomotives. A quick trip to the LHS was suddenly on the agenda.

All of you folks who are continuing to add to your marination stashes will laugh when I say I'd hoped to find a decent quality diesel in HO scale for around Cdn$50 or so. I seem to recall the Proto 1000 line having some models in that price range the last time I checked. The locos in stock started at nearly twice that price. But you guys already know that.

So do I, now.

Okay, so he's now got at least one working locomotive (others came to light . . . all together now . . . after I'd dropped a C-note at the LHS). He's got a variety of rolling stock (about 50/50 X2F and knuckle couplers), including a couple of passenger cars. And of course, he's got the layout. With five years of dust and crud and spider webs and mouse poop and other less easily identified things covering it.

Fortunately, I have an air compressor. Not one of those piddling little airbrush compressors: a real power-tool air compressor (insert Tim-the-Tool-Man-Taylor-style grunting here). Did you know you can peel entire strips of scenery off a model train layout and hurl them across the basement with an ill-judged gust of compressed air?

I do now.

I still have the leg assemblies and plenty of L-girders lying around (see here for what I'm talking about), so that'll be no problem. What I don't seem to have are any of the cross-braces to set between the legs and the girders. Oh, well, Pine 1"x2" is pretty cheap. I also couldn't find the gussets to secure the cross-braces to the legs . . . but I do have some roughly triangular cabinet-grade oak cut-offs which will probably do the trick. I'll just need to remember to take along some 1 1/2" screws instead of the 3/4" screws I'd normally use.

Sunday

Mission accomplished. All parties are satisfied with the relocation, ownership transfer, re-assembly, and initial operations on the layout.

Travel to Burlington was a bit more fraught than I'd expected: the layout was too wide to sit between the wheel wells in the back of the truck, so I had to set it up on a pair of cross-bearers . . . which put the top of the scenery too close to the bed cover for the cover to close. This meant I had to drive with the whole assembly in the open position for 150km . . . at highway speed:

Arriving in Burlington

I expected that the wind would finish off what my compressed air had begun yesterday, but to my surprise, only a few bits of scenery failed to arrive at the end of the journey still connected to the main layout. Even the Woodland Scenics plastic trees withstood the trauma (we had to replant three after setting up the layout, and it looked like another four or five had gotten off before the truck came to a complete stop. Other than that, the layout was in pretty good condition.

Victor helped me to re-assemble the benchwork in a cleared area of my sister's basement, and the layout was back in service within an hour of arriving. My nephew spent the rest of the day running trains and making up stories about the trains and their cargo. (Literally . . . my sister had to pry him away from the layout to come upstairs and say goodbye to us as we left).

All in all, a pretty good result, I think. ;-)