Believe I worked with her 30+ years ago. That wasn't the song she was singing then. However, since she has been ensconced in Board Rooms for the past decade it would appear that the saying about 'power corrupting' is in full force and effect with her.

The further and longer one gets away from ground level railroading the more Us versus Them people tend to get.

I noticed this interesting line in an August 19, 2022 paywalled article on Trains dot com:
Link: CSX and NS optimistic as operations slowly improve with new conductors entering service

Last year, NS had around 18,500 employees according to NScorp.com's Corporate Profile.

260 new conductors + 800 conductor candidates in training ==> 1,060 new conductors in less than a year (assuming they all stay)

1,060 / 18,500 ==> Those 1,060 new conductors are approximately 6% of the entire company's workforce.

Keep in mind, they are touting how many employees they've HIRED. They fail to mention how many of these conductors did not show up or quit during training, or how many rostered employees have resigned or retired. I have heard that when you factor that in, the net increase in T&E employees is less than 200 people.

Of course there are people proposing socialism. There's no shortage of economic illiterates. That's the one thing that seems to evade the law of scarcity. The existence of economic imbecility motivated Bastiat to write That Which Is Seen and that Which Is Not Seen in 1848. Of course, idiots think another 1848 work will bring every little girl a pony, just because she wants one, irrespective of the cost of the birth, oats and stable.

Interestingly, it's not just a weak mind that consistently ignores the myriad of socialist perils, but a weak body:

https://www.brunel.ac.uk/news-and-event ... y-suggests

Do you even lift, bro?

And given the pandemic of low T in males today..

Now as to the issue of regulation. Ever since 1887, When the Interstate Commerce Act was passed, the federal government has been regulating railroads. Although the Elkins Act of 1903 gave punitive power to the ICC, Henry Carter Adams finally had his wettest dream fulfilled with the Hepburn Act of 1906, wherein he now had the authority to set rates. For good measure, they added the Mann Elkins Act in 1910 Within a decade capital starved railroads were unable to respond to World War I and so the the federal government seized the railroads in 1917, because clearly William McAdoo, a lawyer who lost most of his money attempting to electrify the Knoxville Street railroads would surrely be capable of running all the railroads.

Decades of ICC control, including ignoring the calls in the 1950's to abandon "betterment accounting" finally brought the railroads to their knees, resulting in Conrail. It was no accident that attempting to run railroads resulted in the Staggers Act of 1981 and the ICC Termination Act of 1995.

But federal regulation didn't go away. The economic side of regulation is now handled by the STB and the safety side by the FRA.

And there's no shortage of regulation. The Rail Safety Improvement Act of 2008 gave us an unfunded mandate in the form of Positive Train Control. This report shows the staggering costs involved. An economically astute person will immediately have questions about opportunity costs.

https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R42637


There's also Conductor Certification (all 80 pages or so) that requires Conductor Certification that somehow was unnecessary for a century and a half, and the rat's maze of 49 CFR Part 243.

And yet here's "stolen valor" Dick Blumenthal remarkably remaining continent while damn near turning his face time for promoting railroad safety into a snuff film.

"safety as you know, is paramount", (so let's watch dipstick stand in the yellow as the P-42C races by)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMnXxPOLBg0

So after 135 years of federal involvement, we don't have "adequate regulation"?

Well of course not. What for example was Sarah Feinberg's qualification for FRA administrator. She had no engineering, no economic and no legal background. But she did work for former Senator Daschle. Nearly as useless, Elaine Chao as the Sec of Transportation who had prior cabinet experience and a better resume. Her principle qualification? Being Mrs. Turtle McConnell .

On the flip side, you have predators like rent seeker Warren Buffett buying BNSF (saving all those Sarbanes Oxley costs) and predator Bill Ackman and "The Children's Investment Fund" not being stopped by any STB or SEC regulation, despite it's copiousness.

Now this will urinate off PMC, ever on guard for such sentiments, but maybe what we need is Dagney Taggart.

More directly:

One of my coworkers is married to a former conductor. It was a short career.

initially worked for Norfolk Southern, until they realized that would make an absentee parent due to constant calls for trains near Baltimore (they live well North of the PA/MD border).

Faced with constant absences- began working for a short line, but an injury resulted in a somewhat problematic employment status.

Now outside the railroad industry, and I'm guessing won't go back.

Railroads are fascinating enterprises; but so is public accounting. Both industries are constantly lamenting the lack of employees.

But hey, keep filling up your Boards with politicians and keep managing the way you've been doing it. Surely, the morale will improve with continued beatings.

The ironic thing about cameras is that somebody with a Pre-2005 MBA (before everything was diversity and sustainability) should be saying haven't you idiots ever heard of the limitations of the Hawthorne Effect?

For the uninitiated, the Hawthorne effect was first identified during a series of productive experiments at the Hawthorne plant of Western Electric in the 1920's, where employees reacted to differing and often opposing changes in the work environment by increasing production. It was eventually reasoned that when employees believe they are being observed/monitored- they increase productivity.

But there are limits to the nature and extent of the observation. Excessive or invasive monitoring creates resentment and can alter work performance, causing people to conspicuously exhibit adherent work practices while hiding deviations. There's also the aspect that when people are concerned about how they appear on camera; it insidiously affects their performance as their actions are delayed or altered by that concern.

Cameras are a gut reaction to accidents, often promoted by the political and chattering classes; i.e., the "useless eaters" that have never run anything but their mouths. Like most of what they promote, it's emotional and conspicuous, without the guidance of experience and reason and mindless of hidden or deferred costs and effects.

Let's see:

The Interstate Highway System is largely paid for by the national coffers, but actual construction and maintenance is done at the state level. Maintenance is supposed to be paid for through highway fuel taxes, but the raising of such taxes, even to adjust for inflation, remains a politically suicidal "third rail."

Similarly, the maintenance of the less than half of the navigable waterways of the U.S. administered by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (about 11,000 of the 25,000 miles, including the locks on many major rivers), is (supposed to be) paid for through marine fuel taxes paid by users.

And one of the national pastimes that has replaced baseball in the USA is insisting that everyone's home-state roads are the "absolute WORST in the nation!"

That's interesting. For years people used to say my state of West Virginia had some of the worst in the nation.

But travel revealed that to not be true, at least not as I would consider it.

Yes, West Virginia has more than its share of winding, twisting, steep mountain roads; we are the Mountain State, after all!

But what has stood out for years is that maintenance is normally to a pretty good standard. Hilly and twisty these roads may be, but in general they are mostly pretty smooth. There is a section that is (or was, since retirement I haven't been out quite so much) that felt like driving in a park, the overall maintenance and the scenery were that good.

In contrast, there were roads in Ohio and particularly Pennsylvania that could almost take the wheels off your car. We're talking Interstate highways here, and particularly in the case of Pennsylvania I can't help but think someone took shortcuts in materials or construction standards. I particularly remember a stretch of I-70 between Wheeling, W.Va. and Washington, Pa., that even when new had what could be called "low joints," giving you a galloping ride. That was before it became one of the most potholed pieces of road in the Interstate system. It was featured in national news broadcasts for this reason in the late 1970s.

This stretch has since been rebuilt at what must have been horrendous expense. It's a good road now, or was the last time I was on it some years ago. It was a job that took years, with half the road being closed by turns while the other half was torn out down to subgrade level and rebuilt to new.

Right now West Virginia is rebuilding I-81 where I live to six lanes, another job that's taking forever, but I also notice that maintenance is still at a higher level than that in Virginia, which is supposedly richer. You should see how high the weeds and grass grow because of a lack of mowing! Yeah, mowing might not be the most important thing, but it does tell you someone is having to shave on maintenance dollars.

One other point--I always found those twisty mountain roads to be more challenging, and as a result, more fun to drive. Interstates are b-o-r-i-n-g as far as the travel experience goes, and are also more annoying when you have too damned much traffic because our driver licensing standards are probably about the same as they were in the 1950s!

Oh, want to put a little more fun back into driving? Get a car or truck with a manual transmission. It's more fun to drive, and it helps keep you alert because you have to pay attention to the vehicle and the engine in a way that's absent from anything with an automatic!

Ha! I heard a stand-up comedian at the local comedy club once. He said how much he enjoys coming to Lancaster County in the winter. All of the ice and snow helps to smooth out the roads!

It's too bad he hasn't traversed West on 30/283/83 and picked up I-81 North. A certain chunky little 0-6-0 is well into the stretch between MP 104 Pine Grove and the last Hazleton Exit MP 145 that is battered every winter by the enormous volume of trucks headed North/South and the curious set of conditions that ensure a really severe freeze-thaw cycle.

Of course our roads were supposed to be solved when former Governor Corbett decided to slit his own political throat in 2013 by supporting the menagerie of gimmees that was the "transportation bill". The sales pitch was as always "crisis" (in this case, roads that were a mess and bridges that inspectors found serious issues with).

https://lancasteronline.com/news/gov-to ... 2b669.html

I have to laugh that the writers of LO thought it was a feather in his cap.

Of course a good chunk of this money didn't go to fixing roads and bridges. No, some was used to buy SEPTA those Sprinters, and some to subsidize municipal transportation authorities' bus service.

Because it's only fair that the people of Potter Country pay extra gas taxes so Philadelphia commuters have cheaper train and bus tickets.

I generally find Bismarck to have been an odious megalomaniac who was the mason who laid the foundation for the Third Reich - conditioning generations of Germans to do whatever the government said, to the point that they didn't question shoving people into boxcars, but his metaphor of the legislative process as a "sausage factory" unfit for viewing by the consumer was apt.

Don't forget the huge chunk of "Transportation" revenue that is diverted to the Pennsylvania State Police.

This revenue also supports:

http://rideata.com/potter-county

And

https://www.gobesttransit.com/

BeST Transit is a public transportation provider that features routes in three northern Pennsylvania counties. It provides bus and paratransit service for Bradford, Sullivan, and Tioga Counties.

I'm also fascinated to learn that the millions of residents in Philadelphia and it's surrounding suburbs do not pay fuel taxes, and are subsidized by the 16,685 residents of Potter County PA.

Brian

I'll be completely fair and honest about this, unlike most people who engage in such "debates."

People in rural areas do help subsidize urban transit through motor fuel taxes, when such subsidies are paid from said tax revenues. (Whether they should be or not is another discussion.)

People in urban and suburban areas also help subsidize major highway access to rural areas.

Every time you see one of the arguments that "Red states consume more federal dollars than blue states and are moochers off the federal teat in complete defiance of their anti-government sentiments," take a hard look at the real numbers.
The "rural red states" have, among other things, interstate highways passing through they have to maintain,which handle much of the freight to urban areas (such as foods from the "breadbasket"); military installations that few people want in their urban area and whose presence is often a result of political patronage (a U.S. Navy facility in Oklahoma?); expansive National Parks that can't be relocated but which attract millions of visitors from around the world; and more.
Extrapolate for those factors, and most of the supposed "mooching" disappears.

Everyone screams about Mississippi being top of the list for getting Federal dollars back. Well that state has the Ingalls Shipyard in it. What is built there only every single surface combat ship in the US Navy. Every single Aegis Destroyer comes out of that place alongside with all the Navy ships used by the Marines to land their troops if needed. That right there is why MS gets so much cash. Hell Virginia gets more than MS but when you have most of the government in your state living there it adds up.

Hmmmm…. We’ve gone from employees to roads to transit funding. It’ll be interesting to see how this circles back.

Well, this thread begins... "OT"....