Author: David Schanoes

Commentary

A Little Schadenfreude Goes a Long Way

You’re feeling bad? All alone? Misunderstood? Picked on? Unfairly accused of being completely selfish, self-aggrandizing and self-serving? Losing faith in your lobbyists? In your lobbied legislators? In the omnipotence of the market?

Commentary

Hazardous Reading Material

A co-worker of years gone by sent me a link to the ProPublica article “The True Danger of Long Trains.” ProPublica advertises itself as “an independent, nonprofit newsroom that produces investigative journalism

Commentary

Cheap At Twice the Price

“Better to be lucky than good” is usually attributed to legendary New York Yankees pitcher Lefty Gomez. I don’t believe it, the aphorism, most of the time. What I do believe is

Commentary

Single-Person Crews: Happy, Unhappy or Somewhere In-Between

While we’re all waiting for the carriers and the unions to agree or not on the recommendations of the Presidential Emergency Board, I thought I’d probe a bit more into the issue of the single-person crew for main line freight train movements in these United States.

Commentary

Who Watches Out for the Watchman?

We, the railroads, have established certain principles of safe train operations that we wish were absolute, positive, inviolable. We apply one such principle in the enforcement of train separation: the principle that

Commentary

Single-Person Crews: Go Slow, I Say

Sorry for the bother, but while you were out, away, on vacation, taking your first trip in 18 months, or otherwise engaged, someone dropped the other shoe and from a significant altitude. The bigger fish was dipped, battered and tossed into the deep fryer. The wolf was at the door with a muzzle full of jokes.

Commentary

PSR: A Bit More Scrutiny

Regarding the “point-counterpoint“ debate originally published in Fortune about Precision Scheduled Railroading and reproduced in Railway Age, with Brannon and Gorman on the “for” PSR side, and Rep. DeFazio (D-Ore.) not exactly on the “against”

Commentary

Tickety-Boo to You—Not Your Computer

I’m not worried that human beings working on artificial intelligence are going to produce machines that are smarter than us, and certainly not smarter than my three grandchildren, ages 15, 9 and 5, all of whom are definitely smarter than I. I’m afraid that human beings designing artificial intelligence are, in doing so, going to make most other human beings using the artificial intelligence more stupid.

Commentary

Consistency Conspicuous in its Absence

Have you every missed something so completely that you question your own connections to reality? Like maybe missing the year or more of notices and communications from the Federal Railroad Administration regarding its “Miscellaneous Amendments to Brake Systems Safety Standards and Codification of Waivers” (Docket FRA-2018-0093)?