THE TIME FOR HECTORING IS PAST.

Red State's Brad Slager is on to the con.  "Hint: anytime a Democrat wants a 'conversation,' they intend to deliver a lecture, and you need to zip up your donut vacuum and listen."  Well, yes, and it's grown tiresome.

That's where Our President having none of the usual drive-by narrative is so refreshing.

"If I was a king would I be talking to you."  Classic.

WATCH THIS SPACE.

A partially completed model railroad still offers plenty of play value if the right bits of trackwork are in place and functional.  I can while away close to an hour simply exchanging hot metal cars at the steel works, and running a passenger train around the milk train likewise keeps the operators busy.

That's a highlight reel of what was running during the recently-concluded March Meet.  I tend to have a short train running continuously on the powered display track up high.  The drive units on the rebuilt old-style Atlas F units require more tweaking.

The continued early spring weather suggest more opportunities to carry on with heavy construction and sessions at my workbench.

STILL NOT GETTING THROUGH.

It wasn't even Friday the Thirteenth, and Amtrak's Chicago to California trains were the medium-sized trains that couldn't.

Late arrivals are, to a degree, preordained for Amtrak’s long-distance trains on the first weekend of Daylight Saving Time — but not to the extent experienced by the California Zephyr and Southwest Chief.

When clocks advance by one hour every spring (except in Arizona, which does not observe Daylight Saving Time), Amtrak trains that may be on time at 2 a.m. local time become one hour late, unless a special schedule is implemented, using a different train number, that accounts for the time change. In that case, times are adjusted by one hour at stations the train serves after 2 a.m. Sunday.

Service marginally impacted by last weekend’s hour loss includes eastbound of the Empire Builders arriving Tuesday, March 10, and today (March 11) in Chicago. Both had their already-short 5½-hour equipment turnarounds reduced by an hour, reflecting tardy westbound arrivals that dealt with high wind warnings and freight congestion. Both departed two hours behind schedule; Tuesday’s arrival in Chicago was at 8:14 p.m., 3 hours, 29 minutes late.

The spring clock change was incidental.  The dependability of those trains has been questionable all winter, and the same problems surfaced again last weekend.

Southwest Chief No. 1003 that departed Chicago on Saturday, March 7, was another story. The train was given an extra hour to get to Los Angeles, with a scheduled arrival of 8:57 a.m. Pacific Daylight Time on Monday, March 9. The fact that it arrived at 10:40 p.m., 13 hours, 43 minutes late, is symptomatic of increasing issues of breakdowns en route for the long-distance trains.

Troubles began at Albuquerque, N.M., according to alerts shared with passengers. The lengthy stop, a 1,500-mile inspection point, is where “equipment adjustment and removal” took place. The resulting 90-minute pause, however, was dwarfed by a five-hour, 15-minute stop at Gallup, N.M. Another two-hour delay came between Gallup and Winslow, Ariz., and three hours more were lost at Kingman, Ariz., while the train waited for an operating crew to relieve compatriots whose federally mandated hours-of-service limits had expired.

That was the worst outing, but not the only bad outing.  Conditions were little better for the California Zephyr.

An Amtrak alert also revealed that an “ongoing mechanical concern” befell the westbound California Zephyr departing Chicago on March 6. The train was delayed four hours between Green River and Provo, Utah, “and will be met at Salt Lake City by the mechanical team who will further evaluate this concern,” according to the unusually candid alert. The train arrived Sunday morning at 4:55 a.m. and departed at 8:15 a.m., by then seven hours, 35 minutes late.

While the beleaguered westbound Zephyr was in the Salt Lake City station, its eastbound counterpart No. 1006 arrived early, but departed two hours, 20 minutes late,  following “equipment adjustments and removal.”

Trains asked Amtrak for more specifics on the issues of both trains on Monday, March 9, but the railroad has yet to respond.

I wonder if the online trainwatchers who like to hang out on the Galesburg channel stayed up to watch these moves, which included at least one bad-ordered car cut at Galesburg.  It's frustrating enough when a westbound California train leaves Chicago with low water in the dining car (take care of other things during a foreshortened turnaround in Chicago and top up the water at Galesburg) and if anything the troubles are getting worse.  There's only so much the yard crews can do to keep aging stock rolling.

The fact the vast majority of Amtrak trains leave their terminals in good shape and operate on time is a testament to mechanical forces that keep the company’s aging rolling stock in motion. But last weekend’s events show that an increasing number of significant breakdowns en route are disruptive on a far-flung network that has few current options for equipment substitution.

But Amtrak hope to scrape together enough stock to strengthen formations for the summer.

Adding one car to every Southwest Chief, for instance, requires five cars of that type. The 30- to 45-year-old equipment typically gets cycled through periodic maintenance when demand is lighter. The Chief, which has been running since the New Year holiday with a single sleeping car plus roomettes in the train’s transition sleeper, has been a tough ticket. Chicago-Los Angeles roomette fares through March 15 range from $806 to $1,438 (four rooms were left at this price for March 14 as of Thursday). There is also one date where roomettes are sold out.

But later this month, another full sleeping car is being added to every Southwest Chief through the summer, along with a full baggage car. A third coach will be added in April, once Colorado’s Winter Park Express finishes its season. This will help accommodate campers destined to and from the Philmont Scout Ranch, a bus ride away from the train’s stop in Raton, N.M.

The Scouts travel in patrols and troops and there's not enough sleeper space, nor does "Be Prepared" include "to pay sleeper fare."  Thus they ride coach.

WATCH THIS SPACE.

Two months ago, the benchwork for the staging peninsula circling the workbench was in place.

Here come the tracks.

First, ensure that the tracks line up without any annoying kinks or seriously tight curves.  Trust me, I've learned about that second challenge the hard way, more than once!

Here, a few sections of tie strip cannibalized from older Atlas flex track will serve as anchors for the handlaid turnouts to be built.  A curved 83" with a 63" diverging route and two conventional N^o. 10 will bring the four staging tracks into one to cross the liftout section.

Here we are two weeks later, with the points and throw bars installed and most of the spiking done.  Note that I use two strips of circuit board, one for the throw bar and another to hold the alignment.  There is more fettling to do yet.  I have hand-powered some cars through the special work, sometimes without incident.  Good cars will run on questionable track, and questionable cars will run on good track.  I'd rather get the track good as it's installed, and deal with the questionable cars from swap meets, of which there are many, later.

The connecting curve and lift-out section in place.  There will be additional terrain to the right of that curve, to keep anything from going on the floor should the worst happen.  There's another month of working time in advance of the Lombard O Scale show.

WATCH THIS SPACE.

The early snows are good reason to go down cellar and work on the railroad.  Fortunately, I was able to mow the yard and give it a Thanksgiving Milorganite feeding before the snow fell.

Contemporary model railroading practice treats the layout as a stage upon which a cast of scripted performers (the timetabled and extra trains) perform.  Thus, track plans include provisions for staging the trains awaiting their cue.  Many of the photos and videos from our documentation of construction show the staging along the west wall, which is under Rockport at the north end.  Here comes a staging peninsula that will be under West Gloucester and Gloucester in the center of the basement.

We're looking toward the northeast corner of the basement.  Four staging tracks are already in place about halfway around the peninsula.  In the background is the steel plant that has also featured in several posts.

Looking southeast, the four staging tracks will narrow to one.  Yes, the peninsula goes around the workshop.  A post from a year ago looks at what is in place between the steel works and the staging peninsula.

Yes, that's still a cluttered workshop.  And yes, that is a gap in the benchwork.  The four tracks narrow to one where they do in order to cross a single, lift-out track permitting easier ingress to and egress from the workshop.  I'm not as flexible as my younger self was.

THERE IS NO END TO THE ENVIRONMENTALIST WACKO LUNACY.

Now footie's World Cup has to go.  For the polar bears.  "We’re football fans who see no alternative: The CO2 party must end."

Never mind that footie has been enough of a leftist virtue signal that "soccer mom" became a political category.  Never mind that Rush Limbaugh called attention to the adverse health effects of heading the ball with his "Keep Our Own Kids Safe" campaign.  The latest compression of the intersectional singularity is Urgently Necessary.

Football is more popular than Jesus of Nazareth and John Lennon combined. And at first glance, it seems like a pastime that doesn’t harm the environment: Players just need a ball, some space, and the desire to run. But the data are shocking: Football is directly responsible for 0.3-0.4% of the world’s annual carbon dioxide emissions, equivalent to Denmark’s emissions. The Wall Street Journal reports that in 2024 the sport generated more than 30 million metric tons of carbon dioxide from fossil fuels as a source of energy, equivalent to 150 million barrels of oil. Every match at the men’s World Cup finals emits between 44,000 and 72,000 tonnes of greenhouse gases, the same as 30,000 to 50,000 cars on British roads each year. Recent studies estimate that emissions from the cup will range between 1.65 and 3.63 million tonnes of carbon-dioxide equivalent between 2000 and 2026.

Let’s also consider football’s basic equipment: boots and balls. Generations of kangaroos have been slaughtered, with the blessing of the Australian government, as raw material for “k-leather” boots, while balls from Pakistan are made from petroleum-derived synthetic leather, rubber, and cotton extracted from plant species, and leather and glue obtained from animals slaughtered before their natural lifespan. The 60 million balls sold in 2010 travelled from the sewing workshops in Sialkot to the professional football pitches of Europe and the Americas. The balls emerge from these frequently clandestine sewing workshops to a carbon cycle of transport companies, customs administrations, equipment, the advertising industry, sporting goods retailers, and department stores. The chain turns a ball costing 63 rupees (€0.62) into a product retailing for over €100.

No, that is not parody, it's offered In All Earnestness.

Sponsorship by companies with high CO2 emissions alone is responsible for 75% of sports emissions, as it stimulates demand for highly polluting products and lifestyles. The large eco-laundering multinationals use football to cover up their environmental shame. For example, shortly after Repsol spilled thousands of barrels of oil on 1,400 hectares of Peru’s Pacific coast in 2022, killing native life and destroying the livelihoods of thousands of people, the company signed a sponsorship with the national team. The motto of the project, also associated with supporting youth and women’s representatives, was “Let’s look to the future.” In Spain, Repsol and Petronor have signed an agreement to supply renewable energy to Athletic Club de Bilbao that supposedly demonstrates the multinational’s commitment to decarbonization. But the UK’s Advertising Standards Authority found Repsol distorted its environmental commitment by highlighting production of synthetic fuels and biofuels, which only account for a small fraction of its core business—fossil fuels.

The accounting doesn't bother to fret over that larger fraction of the fossil fuel use accounted for by all those minivans schlepping all those aspiring Carli Lloyds and Leonel Messis to practice and camp and the games.  That's because they have much bigger things to fret about.

The 2026 men’s World Cup is expanding to include 48 national teams. For the first time, matches will be held in three huge countries: Canada, Mexico, and the United States, across four time zones, in 16 venues separated by several thousand kilometers, each with derisory public transport. Five and a half million spectators are expected, who will need to use the map to locate the venues: Mexico City will mark the southernmost point, Vancouver the north, Boston the east, and San Francisco the west. In terms of logistics, practically all travel will be by air due to a primitive railway infrastructure. Radio France refers to this as a “very carbonated cocktail.” The New Weather Institute with Scientists for Global Responsibility estimates that aviation emissions “will increase by 160% to 325% in each of the three tournaments in 2026, 2030, and 2034” compared to recent World Cups.

The horror!  But environmentalist wackos, like any other puritanical sect, are people perpetually fretful that somebody is having fun.  Have no fun, they urge.  "We’re football fans who see no alternative: The CO2 party must end. Abolish the World Cup!"

I have no plans to attend or to watch any World Cup games.  Where can I sell carbon offsets?

FROM RAINING MEN TO HEMORRHAGING MEN.

No, that's not a Hallowe'en makeover of a Weather Girls hit from 1982.  Rather, it's Hill contributor John Mac Ghlionn having none of the Donks' latest effort to secure enough votes from guys to win a presidential election (perhaps that will spill over to the local elections that matter as well) without antagonizing the fractious Weimar coalition that comprises their base voters.

The Democratic Party is hemorrhaging men. Across the U.S., they are leaving in waves — from the unions that once powered the party’s muscle, from classrooms that once echoed with idealism, and from a movement that now talks at them rather than to them. Polls show young men flocking to the right in numbers not seen for generations.

The trend isn’t a blip but a brutal reckoning. And no amount of branding or beer ads will stop it.

The party’s latest efforts to woo men are almost painful to watch. The Democratic National Committee has poured money into influencer partnerships, podcast cameos and clumsy “masculinity” campaigns filmed in gyms. Spokespersons drone on about “kitchen-table issues,” as if men are sitting there waiting to be emotionally validated between spoonfuls of reheated stew.

Party elders have recognized that they were pushing men away for some time, although turning Olivia Julianna into their "male outreach coordinator" gave Townhall and Pajamas Media types lots of ways to mock her, but ultimately it was that fractious Weimar coalition that got her to call it a day.

“It is one of the most heartbreaking and difficult lessons you have to learn when you’re working in this space, especially as a young person, is that people are inherently imperfect,” Julianna said in an interview with The Texas Tribune. “Sometimes that imperfection means doing selfish or mean-spirited things with the intention of making positive change.”

She says problems included nepotism, a push for rigid agreement on a set of standard policies, and internal Democratic Party squabbles over strategy. Julianna also says she recognized that she needed to move beyond her political bubble.

Now, Julianna says she is stepping back from campaign work in hopes that speaking out in her newsletter and social media posts can help fix the problems and enable Democrats to eventually flip Texas blue.

Not much chance of that as long as the Donks have their intersectional purity tests that pretend to be inclusive and yet exclude anybody normal.

Partisan critics come with the political spotlight, but Julianna also gets attention from Democrats saying she was too supportive of Biden and that she has sacrificed some of her original progressive positions in order to fit in with the mainstream party.

While Julianna still describes herself as having progressive views, her positions are nuanced. She thinks that there should be a secure border but also that the government should expand pathways to citizenship, add more immigration judges and protect DACA recipients. Some people have criticized her for that stance, arguing that it is more aligned with Republican positions.

There's a lot more in the article, which runs in the Donk-friendly Texas Tribune.

CALVINBALL ONLY MAKES THE GRIDLOCK MORE AMUSING.

I usually present that position using more restrained language.

Dalibor Rohac, who writes for The Bulwark, provokes the reader.  "Too Much Democracy Is Killing Democracy."  His wish?  "A more boring politics, populated by forgettable yet basically competent figures instead of fame-craving clowns and provocateurs would be a great place to start."  These days, politics is anything but, whether in Hungary or the United States or ... France or Canada???

Darren of Right on the Left Coast reminds us, "Our governmental system is designed to ensure that passions are moderated."  That might be a good way to start a fight with political scientists.  Over the years I have had a few frank and open exchanges of views with political science types about things like voting efficiency and representation.  I've not yet figured out where positive political science leaves off and normative policy prescriptions begin.  Nevertheless, I maintain that political bundles are too big, and disequilibrium the most likely outcome.

It's amusing, though, to watch Democrats attempting to use the normative political science of their court intellectuals to rig the rules in such a way as to be able to rule forever.  "The Democrats have plans to expand the Supreme Court, eliminate the filibuster, and more."  Their latest It Girl without irony hopes Team Donk can prevent any more wild swings in policy from occurring.

Jasmine Crockett tells a crowd in Martha’s Vineyard that “once the Democrats get control,” they must “get bold” by expanding the Supreme Court, passing “ethics” reform, and eliminating the filibuster.

Translation: The Democrats will run the same playbook — undermining the… pic.twitter.com/QOhBQJUf8f

— Carrie Severino (@JCNSeverino) August 15, 2025

It hasn't occurred to her, has it, that boldness plus overreach plus loosened restraints on changing laws will lead to course corrections far beyond what is possible now.  You think jamming changes through on bare majorities using reconciliation is annoying?  Try jamming all possible changes through on bare majorities.

WATCH THIS SPACE.

The peak model railroad show season is past for this spring, although model railroad construction season never ends and there's always a swap meet somewhere.

For this year's showing of the Gloucester Branch the recently-configured locomotives with onboard power and radio control did most of the work.  They'll go through their paces for you to close April out.

The steam locomotive might be eighty years old; it has a 21st century motor in it, and the battery and control module are in the tender.  The road-switcher is an extensively reworked Lionel "Train Master" that is more accurate as an H16-66.  The cab unit is from an Atlas starter set of the early 1970s that I bought with some food service job money and brought home on my bicycle.  It has new trucks, a new drive train, and a beefier motor.  The booster is the battery car, just like the big railroads are experimenting with.  As these units go through their paces you might see some of the Atlas mill gondolas of that era that have been going through upgrades.  You'll also see a few of the cars lettered for model railroads.

WOMEN'S HISTORY MONTH.

March is for the Wisconsin women to capture hockey championships, yesterday bringing the eighth.

Yes, the championship game took place at Minnesota's rink, and yes, the Minnesota women were among the frozen four, being excused by Wisconsin in the semifinals.

WATCH THIS SPACE.

Swap meet season continues, with the big Chicago area O Scale show scheduled for Lombard, March 20-23.  The Gloucester Branch offers an open day as part of the layout tours, and this year's feature will be locomotives with onboard power, dead rail if you will.

The power in the video began as a Lionel "Train Master."  A previous owner converted it to two-rail operation, fitting it with a Central Locomotive Works drive and an ingenious reuse of the Lionel side frames, and an open-frame permanent magnet motor.

The motor mount is exactly the right size for a can motor taken out of an Atlas F unit from the 1970s, and there's plenty of space for a Ring Engineering onboard power module and the battery, and a speaker for sound.  Sounds and lights are yet to be installed.  The drive train is in good order.  Enjoy.

THE BIDEN PRESIDENCY IS A DRAG ON THE BRAT VIBES.

A vice-president is supposed to be able to continue the administration's policies in case the president is incapable of continuing in office.  That makes the job of the current vice president harder, as she campaigns as a candidate of change whilst serving as acting president without the formalities of the 25th Amendment.

“The challenge” of having so little time left in such a short race, one adviser to the vice president told CNN, is “when you’re trying to reach undecided low-intensity voters, how do you actually communicate difference with Biden?”

Running as an extension of the president is not a strong position, Harris aides know, while asserting what she stands for is.

Neither aides in the Harris campaign nor the Biden White House would commit to another joint campaign event between now and the election.

Harris wants to create space, top aides say, but not too much space. She wants to be loyal — but she also wants to win.

You mean all that "landmark" legislation Buckwheat and the House of Stephanopolous keep rabbiting on about really isn't a selling point, and Flibbertigibbet can't say "let us continue" or offer some tweaks at the margin?  Maybe the simplest argument is the Trumpian "they didn't do a good job."

Part of leading Democrats’ focus on Biden is seeing him as the albatross embodiment for the unsettling feeling spreading among Democrats that the vice president is not — or at least, not yet — where she needs to be to win in just over four weeks. Still haunted by the 2016 election, they’re frustrated and despairing that even now, seemingly no number of Donald Trump’s offensive statements, lies, lack of plans or legal problems can shake his support.

For my part, a president who doesn't have a lot of plans for me sounds good, and irrespective of who is in the Whitehouse, a divided legislative branch is not without its appeal.

FRIDAY short TAKES.

There was a Democratic nominating convention in Chicago, or at least the simulacrum of one.  "Have those who lectured us about democracy in danger now decided to save it by destroying it?"  Democracy only applies if it means Democrats win.  Thus far, though, the long emergency has not included a reprise of 1968.  "Recent years of degenerate USA life have produced a youth cohort with a staggering rate of mental illness."  Yes, and there might be enough of the freakazoids inside the convention to keep the lid from blowing.  The long con continues.  "Democrats are relieved that Joe’s out, but their enthusiasm for Kamala depends on keeping her a blank slate to most voters." Oh, we're noticing.  "The convention has been a testament to Sanders’ legacy too."

It is going to be on us, the Militant Normals, to call attention to what's on that slate, and to keep the Trump campaign on its messages, which should be borders, crime, inflation, and peace.  The Democrats are likely to help us, unwittingly.  "The Democrat-dominated establishment amounts to a coalition of insufferable narcissists with authoritarian instincts."  They're likely to huff their own supply. "The last 3½ years have been filled with nothing but an unbroken series of triumphs, to hear the president tell it."

Speaking of insufferable narcissists, "Watching Obama speak, I am always reminded why I dislike him so much. I resist his churchy cadence, his haughty tone, and his gauzy rhetoric — the gauzy rhetoric in which he buries his earnest leftism. He enunciates his words as though he is speaking to a slow child."  Tuesday night, he Just. Couldn't. Shut. Up.

The ditzy valley girl has her own annoying tics.  "Harris probably hates how they keep telling her to talk less nasally, smile more, and soften herself for the cameras."

It's nevertheless going to be necessary to make a Trump presidency, should one take office, behave itself.  "Harris and Trump represent variations on a theme of big, fiscally irresponsible, hyper-interventionist government."

Let us take stock of the ways things suck.  "The bar for the presidency is so low it's been buried."  It's Our Democracy^(TM) don't you know?  "Americans may be getting precisely what they want out of politics in 2024."  This contest has no redeeming features.  Be uncouth.

The weekly round-up of mostly pithy elaborations on traditional Cold Spring Shops themes follows.

CREDIBILITY GAPS AND LOST TRUST.

Lyndon Johnson's presidency was the tragedy.

The term "credibility gap" dates to my early adolescence, when it referred to the divergence of Expert Opinion on how well things were going in Vietnam to what any serviceman on the ground could tell his neighbors once, if, he got home.  "[Reporter David] Halberstam, who had covered the war since September 1962 (he left Vietnam in December 1963), did not dare to state flatly that the Viet Cong were winning."  Things were going badly long before the "body count" reports or the Tet offensive.

Back then, it wasn't only State Department briefers making statements that would later be declared "inoperative."

As if a flack at a peacenik organization has anything other than an informed layman perspective to offer on government agencies creating credibility gaps.  Perhaps Mr Johnson's jape about "deny the evidence behind climate change" tells you everything you need to know about his agenda.  At the time of the original Earth Day, the projection was that there might be mass starvation or no humans at all by 2020; later the projection was that the snows would melt on Kilimanjaro or no longer fall on New York City (guess what, it's still there.)  But people like Mr Johnson would still rather hector us.  National Review's Ellen Carmichael is having none of it.

Joe Biden's presidency is the farce.  Conceal the senility, market the candidate as a centrist Democrat, suppress inconvenient stories about his family's corruption.

But again, it wasn't only the White House and its palace guard media making statements that were later deemed "inoperative."  As the corona tyranny went on and on, it became clear that all the experts stunk.

AMTRAK, THIS IS NOT GOOD ENOUGH.

Late last month, I had to be the cranky economist at the Borealis party, which should have served as a warning to Midwestern Passenger Rail advocates.  It did not take long for John Phelan of the Center of the American Experiment to fact-check that operating profit.  "The Borealis isn’t doing as well as you’ve been told."

I wasn’t the only person to notice the strange air of delirium around these data. “I’ve been covering rail transportation in the region since the 1990s,” Adam Platt wrote for Twin Cities Business a week later, “and the drumbeat of nonsense got so thick on social and mainstream media that I decided to do some of my own ciphering.” What he found presents much less cause for celebration.

Count me as another cipherer, if perhaps more optimistic about adding frequencies between Chicago and the Cities.

There are opportunities for further research here.  A return of a second train to the Cities has long been on Passenger Rail advocates' wish list, and an observation I made six years ago is germane to that research.  "That works out to about 225 passengers on each train, or three Horizon coaches and a business class car apart from peak season. The skeptics are likely to be out in force.  It doesn't help any that the "corridor" relies on an overpurposed Empire Builder subject to delay."  The Borealis as operating these days is four Horizon coaches and an Amcafe with business class seating on one end, and it might be that passengers are opting for dependability keeping those four coaches full.

An observation I offered a few days into Borealis operations remains, regrettably, germane in the dog days of summer.

With Amtrak having trouble assigning sufficient serviceable stock to protect its existing schedule, sooner or later somebody is going to take a close look at the Hiawatha and Borealis diagrams.  I had an opportunity to watch the turnarounds in Chicago on the second and third days of service.  Wednesday last week, the stock that arrived, about an hour late, on 1340 from St. Paul went out, about twenty minutes late, on the final Hiawatha to Milwaukee.  Thursday, 1340 arrived again about an hour late, and a different rake went to Milwaukee, about twenty minutes late.  I have not yet worked out the rotations by which stock for 336, which used to turn off 333 before 333 became 1333 for St. Paul, lays over in Milwaukee.  The enforced idleness of an entire rake in St. Paul, overnight, when there's plenty of time to add a sleeping car and run an overnight train for and from Chicago, also offers food for future thought.

For now, let us enjoy the opportunity to make day trips along the Mississippi River and through Wisconsin.

Last weekend, I had the opportunity to check out Business Class on the eastbound Borealis.  The Harley-Davidson riders and the Italian Air Force precision flying team were entertaining Milwaukeeans while Oktoberfest season got under way at German Fest.

I've learned my limitations, particularly on hot days, and being on an early evening departure from Milwaukee in preference to the last train out, is more my speed these days.

WATCH THIS SPACE.

I was taking videos up high for a future Trains of Summer upload, and while there took an aerial view of the West Lynn and Revere industrial complex.

At center is the Open Hearth shop of Midvale Steel, with the hot metal track below and the upper level tracks for delivering scrap, refractories, alloying additives, and coal tar, here delivered in two large tank cars.  The box cars occupy the Outward Exchange Siding, which sometimes receives transfers from the New Haven and sometimes serves as a time being track when one crew is working both sides of the Eastern Route Main Line.  The crossover at left middle between Outward and Inward tracks helps those operations. Coming closer to the camera, we see the Inward Exchange Siding, and two spur tracks serving General Electric's River Works.  That will be an access hatch in the foreground.  Two tracks of the Saugus Branch and the Lynn Common Industrial Lead are at right.

Now that the switches at West Lynn Junction, where the Saugus Branch joins the Eastern Route Main Line, are in place, there's enough headroom to work all those tracks from either the Saugus Draw or the West Lynn end, and that alone is enough to keep one or two crew members busy for several hours.  Work continues on extending trackage into the area under the garage.

EVERYTHING IS JUST FINE.

Years ago, The Washington Monthly took issue with the Carter administration with the hopes of continuing the "got a problem, get a program" ethos in the Federal Capital, and even a botched surrender of Afghanistan to the Taliban didn't disconcert them.

It should therefore come as no surprise that they're all-in on continuing his faux dictatorship of populist error.

When European heads of state look at Joe Biden, they see an accomplished world-historic leader.

An aging world-historic leader, to be sure. Joke: How old is Joe Biden? He’s so old that when NATO leaders gather at their July summit in Washington, Biden will be the only one born before the organization was founded 75 years ago.

But as Biden’s age has advanced, so too has his clout and respect within the alliance. It was Biden who warned European leaders in early 2022 that Vladimir Putin was going to send his military into Ukraine, a warning many of them initially refused to believe. When the invasion happened as predicted, it was Biden who rallied Western and other allied countries to Ukraine’s defense. It was also Biden who authorized a dramatic increase in U.S. natural gas exports to Europe as Russia cut off supplies. It was Biden who picked up the phone and called the heads of Finland and Sweden with a quiet suggestion that they join NATO. And it was Biden and his team who overcame the resistance of Turkey and Hungary to make NATO expansion a reality, thus turning Putin’s military quagmire into a geo-strategic disaster for Russia.

No president since Ronald Reagan has more successfully wielded influence in the Western alliance. Yet Biden has also overturned one of Reagan’s greatest legacies, Reaganomics, and replaced that free market “neoliberal” ideology with an economic vision of his own, Bidenomics. Instead of cutting safety net programs, Biden vastly expanded them during the pandemic. Instead of encouraging corporate monopolies, his administration is charging them with antitrust violations. Instead of “letting the market decide” all matters of economic development, his government is providing hundreds of billions of dollars to encourage private investment in green energy and microchip manufacturing on American soil.

We still have no idea what the end conditions for Ukraine will be, let alone whether that will lead to a "geo-strategic disaster for Russia;" nor does the return of "got a problem, get a program" promise something other than Carter era stagflation and malaise.  And restoring the structure-conduct-performance paradigm to antitrust enforcement?  Spare me.

The Monthly, though, offer what might be a serious case for the continuation of the Biden presidency, one based on traditional, if wrong, notions of What Governing Is, and it rewards careful study.

THE CORRUPTION GOES BEYOND THE MINIMAL PUBLISHABLE UNIT.

I endorse D. McCloskey's claim that academicians are participating in a conversation, and that the sole test of research is whether it is useful or not.  In academic economics, the job market has not so deteriorated that the obsession with the minimal publishable unit has ruined the discipline.  "Economics has a pretty good match of tenure-line openings and Ph.D. completions. But there is very much a pecking order of departments and journals, and the strategy of getting a lot of Minimally Publishable Units into archival journals will not win you tenure at the fifty departments claiming to be among the top twenty."  That's not to say that Minimal Publishable Units lack value.

It's not so much that the emphasis on research and publication is "excessive" is that in the absence of solid metrics for the quality of the research being done, professors think in terms of the "minimum publishable unit," and the cynic advises the tenure-trackers that deans can't read, but they can count.  Thus emerges the vanity press and archival journals and electronic publication, and the best efforts of faculties to rank journals or to calculate "impact factors" can be for naught.  Or they can lead ambitious professors to cut corners.

I've been retired ten years, and if anything, conditions have not improved.  "I have called attention to the administrative usurpations turning the calling of professor into the chore of special education teacher whilst requiring the sort of input-measurement useful in crafting a control panel in such a way as to encourage derivative scholarship of the minimal publishable unit form, rather than engaging in creativity."

How bad has it gotten?  Worse than faked minimal publishable units.  It goes beyond mockery now.  Read on.

THE LAW, IN ITS MAJESTY.

Washington Post columnist Robin Givhan attempts to inject Victim Studies into Anatole France's old observation.

It’s been a long time since a tent was simply a tent. Today, it almost certainly represents an issue, a problem, a population with which society would prefer not to contend.

The tents are unseemly. They need to be. They’re flimsy structures staked on uneven ground surrounded by the stately architecture of the academy, capitalism and power. Their flapping scrims of nylon and plastic clutter up the landscape and serve as a rebuke to the grandiosities of polite society. The tents shame countries, cities and individuals for their failures even when the voices of the activists fall silent, when the chanting stops and the sun sets. The tents are still there.

Most recently, tents have become fundamental to the pro-Palestinian encampments constructed in college yards and on plazas from New York to California. In the nation’s capital, an encampment has taken root on the campus of George Washington University, where a few dozen tents have been pitched on the street and in the courtyard. All of it encompasses a one-block span of downtown Washington over which police officers keep watch with modest interest rather than alarm.

It came to this years ago, when Our Progressive Betters condemned the flophouses in the name of Urban Renewal and emptied the insane asylums in the name of Humanity.  The column offers an amusing interpretation of those developments.

The tents are always telling us something that we don’t want to hear.

The tents of the homeless fill parks, clutter walkways and sprout in the shadow of freeway overpasses. So leaders of western states across the political divide have gone to the Supreme Court to have those tents declared illegal. Under current law, they can’t just summarily clear the tents if those who are living in them have nowhere else to go, if there are no beds at a shelter in their city. Officials in Grants Pass, Ore., don’t want homeless camps on their streets or in their parks. But asking the Supreme Court to allow them to remove the tents doesn’t remove the problem; it doesn’t make a weak social safety net any stronger.

That's what we mostly hear about Californian cities, if without the details of the open sewers and discarded needles, although Denver is trending that way as well.  It's to the tents pitched to Make a Statement that the column focuses upon.

The activists who settled into New York’s Zuccotti Park back in 2011 drew attention to income inequality, joblessness and the outsize political influence of financial firms. Occupy Wall Street spread from Manhattan across the country and around the world. The protesters marched and rallied but mostly what they were remembered for was rolling out their sleeping bags and setting up tented tarps and creating their own little squatters camp in the midst of capitalism’s Emerald City. They were belittled as jealous of the success of others, as anti-capitalist and as vaguely un-American.

In the midst of a city where money is considered the great equalizer, the men and women who slept outside under bright blue tarps through rain, wind and even a nor’easter were an insistent reminder of a society turned ugly and heartless for a cash payout.

No, Robin, encampments have long been a manifestation of guerrilla theater.  Faux shantytowns were props the Concerned Students set up on the quad to call attention to apartheid conditions in South Africa.  The sanctions had their effect, the apartheid conditions ended, and now everyone in South Africa is miserable.  Sometimes, the cardboard box is a prop; it's much more effective on a chilly winter evening to call attention to "the homeless" whilst avoiding any serious conversation about the effects of urban renewal and closing the asylums.

WATCH THIS SPACE.

It has been over three years since we featured an "On My Workbench" post, and one could easily see in that post that the workbench was, to put it charitably, cluttered.  The most recent "Watch This Space" post featured the addition of staging tracks in a central peninsula.

Inside that peninsula is space for a workshop.  Once the March Meet wrapped up, that space started getting organized.

All the workbenches and machine stands are in one place, and the clutter on the bench tops is being sorted through, discarded, or put in a proper place, and there might be some progress reports of actual work on those actual workbenches in the near future.