Call it the Twilight Zone of reality when three rail labor unions embrace the convictions of extreme-right public figures Tucker Carlson (Fox News), Republican Governors Greg Abbott (Texas) and Ron DeSantis (Florida), and Republican Senators Ted Cruz (Texas) and Rand Paul (Kentucky) and oppose vaccine mandates intended to protect society against the deadly COVID-19 virus and its Delta variant.
Leveraging/improving the role of freight railroads during the 2020-2021 supply chain crisis: What can be done better or at least differently?
In an unusual twist of circumstances, there are three events ongoing at this writing that have a lot to say about Amtrak corridors and trains in the Midwest. All were scheduled to take place within a three-day span.
I’ve received some comments, what is called “feedback” these days, on my most recent post regarding NTSB’s report on a fatal incident on Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor. Some of the commentators agree with
Never before in our recent memory has so much focus been put on “supply chains.” The popular press has added the term to the language of the everyday person. We hear things like: “I went to the store today and the items I wanted were out of stock. Must be a supply chain problem.” Railroads are part of the supply chain, but few people realize or understand it.
For many years, Albert L. Papp, a longtime transit advocate in New Jersey, has referred to the river that separates New York and New Jersey geographically as the “Hudson Ocean.” Today, a conflict between the transit providers in the two states (with Connecticut also playing a minor role) provides the latest example of a feud that bestows credibility upon the moniker that Papp conferred upon the river.
ASLRRA PERSPECTIVE, RAILWAY AGE, OCTOBER 2021 ISSUE: In 2017, the previous Administration dubbed the week of June 5 as “Infrastructure Week” as part of an effort to promote its $1 trillion infrastructure plan. Seven times in the following three and a half years, that Administration declared that infrastructure would be the theme of the week, only to see those plans thwarted in one fashion or another each time.
THE STEAM LOCOMOTIVE ENERGY STORY: How These Locomotives Used Energy and What Was Done to Make Them More Efficient. By Walter Simpson. The Chesapeake & Ohio Historical Society, Inc. Hardcover, 144 pages, $44.95. Available from
Karen J. Hedlund’s quest to be confirmed to the five-member Surface Transportation Board (STB) and give Chairman Martin J. Oberman a Democratic majority hit another speed bump Oct. 6 when Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) objected to Hedlund’s Senate floor confirmation.
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
