MIXING FREIGHT WITH PASSENGER. In some ways, using the same tracks, let alone the same accounting and marketing departments, to provide both freight and passenger service is akin to using the reheat furnace at the slabbing mill for a pizza oven. Destination: Freedom a few weeks ago ran a report on resistance by the freight carriers to faster passenger trains.

Federal officials argue that investment to improve and expand the rail infrastructure would be a huge benefit to the freight railroads. But “John Gray, senior vice president of policy and economics at the Association of American Railroads, says the stimulus funding pales in comparison to the $460 billion railroads have sunk into their own infrastructure over the past 30 years.”

The article notes it's relatively easy to mix passenger trains running at 80 mph with freight traffic, and under current safety standards passenger trains are permitted up to 125 mph on shared tracks.

Perhaps one way to overcome the freight railroads' resistance is to soup up the freight trains. Another article in that edition suggests a possibility.

The Berlin passenger railroad equipment show had a worthy successor to the E units and the FL-9 was on display. Here's a candidate for such a project.

Destination: Freedom photo courtesy of David Beale

Gotta love this description, from a different photograph.

At 132 metric tons of weight (145 US tons) on just four axles, the monster locomotive posed some logistics difficulties with its trip from Kassel, where it was assembled, to Berlin, since relatively few rail lines in Germany and the rest of Europe are rated for 30 metric tons per axle, much less 35 tons, which is nearly what this beast weighs. More typical across Europe is 25 tons per axle capacity. The ALP-45D is believed to be the first ever series produced dual mode locomotive which can operate from high voltage AC railway electrification.

Somewhere in Europe there is a rail professional lamenting, "why can't we have freight railroads like the North Americans?"

The caption describing the locomotive makes one regret it was not developed and assembled in La Grange. (Now that Caterpillar own Electro-Motive, is anyone in authority listening?)

The locomotive is a derivative of the ALP 46 electric locomotive, but fitted with two Caterpillar V-12 diesel engines which provide the propulsion power to the traction motors when the locomotive operates beyond electrified tracks.

Wouldn't a pair of these on a TrailVan or NE-98 with 100 reefers be impressive? That silver and blue has to go, though: Tuscan red with five pinstripes, or gray-and-green with yellow lettering looks so much better.

CONSENSUS. A Common Dreams essay asks, "When Did Teachers Become Bums?"

When did it become okay to vilify an entire occupation — three million college educated professionals working as hard as anyone to make the world a better place?

It wasn’t that long ago that teachers occupied a quasi-secular-sainthood. It was the underpaid, overworked teachers who guided, inspired, succored, and cajoled every one of us to find in ourselves that bigger person we all long to be.

But lately it’s become acceptable, even sport, to blame teachers for all of the ills of American education.

Let Facts be Submitted to a candid World:

In the past thirty years:

• Most mothers have joined the workforce. No more Mrs. Cleaver at the door with warm cookies and milk and help with Beaver’s homework.
• We’ve surrendered our children’s socialization to television, video games, the Internet, and on-line social media.
• America jails more of its population than any country on earth — a sign of an almost psychotically violent society. One in thirty children has a parent in jail!
• We’ve absorbed the largest wave of immigrants in our history, many speaking no English and with little educational background.
• Many of the best teachers, especially women, have found opportunities in other fields that were not open to them before.
• Forty-five million Americans live in poverty; one of five American children are raised in poverty; one out of every eight Americans are on food stamps. The middle class is dying.

It’s pretty hard to teach a kid who has been raised by the television, when he hasn’t eaten breakfast, when the family has been kicked out of their home, when he has to work a job to help feed the siblings, when the parents have just gotten divorced or lost both of their jobs, when no-one at home speaks English, or when their most alluring role models are dope dealers, pimps, or gangsta rappers. Imagine, then, trying to teach a room full of such trauma cases.

Regular readers will recognize the effect of the Say Aggregation Principle when economic opportunities expand for women, manifesting itself in fewer June Cleavers and ambitious women once confined by social norms to nursing or the secretarial pool or teaching becoming the doctors and controllers and heavy equipment operators. Surely we're not seeing nostalgia from the left side for the social norms of the 1950s? Throw in no-fault divorce and a misplaced interpretation of discipline as a social construction and a form of oppression and don't be surprised when the schools break down.

In Newsweek, Mickey Kaus considers a different aspect of the rising incidence of poverty, one in which the same social breakdown has a different cause.

Do we really want a society in which the stigma of going on the dole has been erased? In this sense [Newt Gingrich is] speaking, not to the 25 million who were on food stamps at the beginning of the recession but the 15 million who've now gone on the rolls and maybe feel guilty about it--and their relatives and neighbors and friends. Us. And not, I think, a black "us" or a Latino "us" or any kind of underclass. He's speaking to veteran middle class polyglot American workers, now in bad economic shape--and asking them if they really want to get comfortable on the dole. And he's playing on their guilt--that lingering stigma.

That is, the habits of the middle class, vanishing or not, matter.

Respecting work means disrespecting non-work, and if food stamps are available to nonworkers they will always be a little unrespectable. People can make their own choices about whether their need overcomes this stigma, without the government egging them on one way or another. The real issue isn't whether food stamp use goes up during a vicious economic slump--that's what they're there for. The issue is whether, thanks to the justified stigma, food stamp use goes down again when the recession ends.

Matt Yglesias concurs, with reservations.

To an extent, the viability of social democratic public services depends on a cultural context that maintains a modicum of bourgeois distaste for dependence upon them. In other words, you want people to have the attitude that these services are available for people who are really in need, but that it’s preferable to earn what you need through work when possible.

Patrick Buchanan also concurs in part.

What we have accepted today is a vast permanent underclass of scores of millions who cannot cope and must be carried by the rest of society – fed, clothed, housed, tutored, medicated at taxpayers' expense for their entire lives. We have a new division in America: those who pay a double fare, and those who forever ride free.

To the extent that policy wonks of varying persuasion sound the same message: the bourgeois habits have the potential to reduce poverty, there is the possibility of developing income policies, and school policies, that might reinforce rather than undermine those habits.

WHERE HAVE ALL THE STREETCARS GONE? Long time readers of Cold Spring Shops know. Professor Munger recommends an instructive analysis by from Market Urbanism.

But if the suburban bug had infected America long before 1938 and failures of government were the real culprit, then why is the myth of the Great American Streetcar Conspiracy so pervasive? Martha Bianco has pointed to the universal desire for a clear villain/victim dichotomy in her study of the myth, but I think the reason is that politicians and progressive academics have too much at stake in the status quo explanations. American politicians have hitched their wagons too tightly onto the automobile to admit that it was a mistake. Progressive economists, historians, and planners, on the other hand, have invested so much intellectual capital into the idea of state regulation and control that they cannot admit that the urban planning profession in America is rotten to the core, and that the mere granting of these powers to government was the original sin. With car-borne constituents and an economic ideology to defend, modern day liberals have apparently found their own culpability in the rise of the suburbs too tough a pill to swallow, and so they’ve settled on General Motors, Standard Oil, and Firestone Tire as scapegoats. But just because they can’t face their history doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t.

That's preceded by a debunking, for the uninitiated, of the National City Lines canard, and a reminder that the network of public roads is anything but self-supporting. Yes, infrastructure enhances productivity, but streetcars and rapid transit lines are infrastructure also.

DEFEATED IN ROCKFORD. The 5. SS Wiking reenactors, who have recently achieved some notoriety because Ohio Congressional hopeful Rich Iott was at one time a member, did perform at the 2009 World War II Days at Rockford's Midway Village.

I didn't record the German units too carefully, although it's possible Wiking provided some of the German motor vehicles.


There are a few authentic Kubelwagen, precursors of Volkswagen's Thing, still in running condition.

As is usually the case in North American reenactments, the Germans have to lose. Here, a Scots unit pipes the last Germans out of Midway-sur-Kish.

Military reenactments have umpires, including members of the 82nd Airborne Division Association. The Mid-Michigan All-Airborne Chapter has posted a statement on its website.

Any person or political group who believes there is some bizarre hidden Nazi agenda by reenactors is not only ignorant of the facts but using false representation to foster their own political ambition and beneath contempt. Would these same accusers point a finger at Civil War Confederate reenactors and say they are all racially prejudice?

Reenactors reflect every nation involved in WWII. We have seen not only American and German reenactors, but British, Dutch, French, Polish, Russian, Japanese, Italian and a host of others. To use an educational hobby which provides a teaching tool for all Americans in some twisted political game is not only omitting the true facts, but a blatant lie by conversion of the truth.

That is all.

SURVEY SAYS ... I have continued to use two questions from a National Association of Scholars survey on student attitudes toward business ethics in a survey of public policy class. It's been a while since I posted a summary. There are comparison surveys of students in a January 2005, August 2003, and August 2002 opening day of the class. Here's what I obtained during calendar year 2010. The first figure in parentheses is the August 2010 response, followed by the January 2010 response.

1. Here are several examples of business practices that are generally regarded as good. Which one of these business practices would probably rank as the most important?

a. recruiting a diverse workforce in which women and minorities are advanced and promoted. (2,4)
b. providing clear and accurate business statements to stockholders and creditors. (16,21)
c. minimizing environmental pollution by adopting the latest anti-pollution technology and complying with government regulations. (3,2)
d. avoiding layoffs by not exporting jobs or moving plants from one area to another. (2,8)
e. not sure. (14,1)

There is a strong accounting program at Northern Illinois, which might contribute to the continued strength of "accurate business statements" in the voting. Despite the weak economy, "avoiding layoffs" received relatively few votes.

2. Do you (a) strongly agree, (2,3) (b) agree, (13,12) (c) have no opinion, (6,3) (d) disagree, (12,15) or (e) strongly disagree (5,2) with the following statement: “The only real difference between executives at Enron and those at most other big companies, is that those at Enron got caught.”

I did explain that Bernie Madoff and some of the big hedge funds might be substituted for Enron. The approximately even split between agreeing and disagreeing is a robust result.

This fall, I added a third item, motivated by a notorious finding that appears to have come from the Columbia Law Survey.

3. “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”

a. The United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, (4)
b. Abraham Lincoln, Second Inaugural Address (5)
c. Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto. (23)
d. The Bill of Rights of the Constitution of the United States (3)
e. Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope. (0)

That's not bad, even allowing for a self-selected population in a survey of public policy course.

DEPRESSING OBSERVATION OF THE DAY. Joanne Jacobs: Start in remedial ed, end in remedial ed.

On Community College Spotlight: Unprepared for the college placement test, high school graduates start — and often end — their community college education in remedial classes. Some 60 to 80 percent of students are told to take basic-skills classes. Half of those referred to remediation never take a single college-level class.

Disabuse K-12 of the notion that developing the habits of the middle class is oppressive, and perhaps more graduates of K-12 will develop the habits of the middle class, including studying.

SOMEBODY HAS TO LOSE THE BATTLE. An Ohio candidate for the House is being criticized for doing World War II reenactments. Somebody has to play the role of the Germans (or the secesh, in the case of Civil War reenactments). There have to be enough German reenactors to have a believable battle, even if that involves a shortsighted, thin man as Hermann Goering, at the 2009 World War II Days at Rockford's Midway Village.


Whoever he is, he'd better not run for public office in Illinois. Bribe-takers, office-sellers, serial adulterers, no problem. Portraying the Reichsmarschall? Ganz unmöglich.

Inside the kommandantur, this Hauptmann explains to one spectator that he became a German reenactor because organizers of one such event told him the events required more Germans.


If you look closely, that's an honest-to-Bletchley Enigma machine at left. The dispatch he encoded is already being deciphered for the evening summary to Winston Churchill.

In the United States, reenactments tend to feature the western front, and there isn't much use for Waffen SS units, which makes the creation of the Wiking division, which was on the eastern front, over the top. The former Soviet Union is apparently well-off enough now to do reenactments, and the Germans have to be nastier, although the Gawker editor, by linking the performance to the Ohio Tea Party, is himself over the top.

Our political class is forever going to be out of touch with the populace, if people who have unusual hobbies or family outlets become figures of fun. Community theater, yes; military reenactment, no. Sailing yachts, yes; snow machine racing, no. What's next: HO scale, yes; O scale, no?

GET THE POLICY RIGHT. Destination: Freedom finds reason to agree with New Jersey governor Chris Christie, who would like to cancel the North River Tunnels To Nowhere.

In the case of the ARC project Governor Christie of New Jersey has come under withering criticism from The New York Times, first in an editorial September 30 with rumors that he was considering cancellation, and then over the past few days from columnists Paul Krugman and Bob Herbert. At no time in those denunciations did The New York Times editorial page or its columnists disclose the true size of the current project’s looming cost over-runs, and, more importantly, at no time did The Times report that the original ARC alignment had been switched from a less expensive one that went to and through Penn Station --- allowing for transportation capacity growth serving New England and Eastern Canada to the North, and allowing one-seat ride through commuter service for example Stamford-Trenton, Newark-New Haven, etc. --- in favor if an alignment ending in a deep-cavern dead-end tunnel under Macy’s Basement which would literally be a terrorist’s dream, and serve only New Jersey Transit riders.

The same issue of Destination: Freedom includes a statement from David Peter Alan of the Lackawanna Coalition, making a case for additional North River tunnels, with a connection to Long Island, and via the Hell Gate Bridge, to Connecticut.

Are any freight trains still running on the Hell Gate Bridge? If not, there's the makings of a four-track railroad from Penn Station all the way to New Haven free of freight train interference. The mind boggles at the thought of a commuter train originating at Scranton, Pennsylvania and running through to Montauk or to New Haven.

10-10-10 FOR RESULTS. Scatter the fertilizer in the spring. Plant the seedlings and the seeds after the last frost.


If growing conditions are good, the habaneros are still producing well into October. The okra pod will be the source of next year's seeds.

THE AXE REMAINS IN MADISON. Again. This time, Wisconsin kept some separation from Minnesota (motto: ten thousand ways to surrender the Axe), including going for two with a double-digit lead late in the game. The conversion was a pass attempt. That was a mistake. Everybody knows it's Run the ball 'round Minnesota, touchdown sure this time!

Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel photo by Tom Lynn

The money Minnesota has been putting into football isn't buying much defense, and there is no evidence that the academic programs are less etiolated now than they were in July.

The North Shore Line gained permanent possession of the Electric Traction speed trophy after winning it in three consecutive years. The Axe has been in Madison for seven straight years.

It was a busy football afternoon at Cold Spring Shops, with Northern Illinois taking control over conference favorite Temple (Hey Hey Hey, love to play tackle) in the second half. That game was televised locally, Wisconsin's game was on the radio, and summerlike conditions prevailed.

THE BRAIN COACHES ARE OFF-BUDGET. University Diaries links without comment to an Oregonian investigation of a Nike Ducks claim to have a self-sufficient athletics program.

For the better part of a decade, University of Oregon officials have touted the athletic department's economic self-sufficiency, a rarity in the world of big-time college sports. But for at least nine years, athletics has used hundreds of thousands of dollars annually from the university's general fund to cover the cost of academic support for athletes, according to files obtained by The Oregonian.

The general fund has paid nearly $8.5 million over the past nine years for academic support for athletes, which includes exclusive tutoring and counseling, increasing sixfold from less than $300,000 in 2002-03 to a budgeted $1.8 million this academic year.

The qualifier, exclusive tutoring and counseling, means Oregon is not hiding the costs of its brain coaches in the budget for university-wide access-assessment-remediation-retention, a more clever way of burying the incremental costs of big time sports.

The article includes a defense of the creative accounting that only an academic administrator could love.

Jim Bean, Oregon's senior vice president and provost, who also oversees academic support for athletes, said it is appropriate for the university to pay for academic support for athletes, and honest for the school to maintain that athletics is self-sufficient despite that support.

"I actually insist that that be funded from the academic side to make sure that we have the right academic control," said Bean, who oversees academic support for athletes.

Bean said that because a large majority of Oregon athletes come from out of state, the athletic department pays more tuition for them on average than the average non-athlete student pays, effectively offsetting the cost of athletes' academic support.

The logic of out-of-state tuition rates has always been to cover the fully allocated cost at standard volume of educating a student. There is probably a cost allocation formula under which money transferred from the athletic department to the bursar as tuition is divided in such a way as to cover the full cost of the athletic department's brain coaches. It's easy enough to equate full cost to incremental cost or to assert that some incremental costs are zero, thus Mr Bean is probably able to sleep with a clear conscience.

The article contrasts Oregon's policy with those at Michigan and Kentucky, where the athletic department budget includes the brain coaches.

The error is in treating some incremental costs as zero. Brain coaches exist inter alia to solicit progress reports from professors. These progress reports might be paper forms for professors to fill in, or they might be stored on a secure server that professors log onto to file reports. Professors are not compensated for filling in these forms. Keeping the basketball team eligible is therefore a subsidy from the faculty to the athletic department. Time spent filling in forms is time not spent on grading or class preparation or keeping current or proving a theorem or perhaps attempting to carve an hour or two of private time out of a 55 - 60 hour week of too much form filling.

WHERE IS ALEXANDER CASSATT? New Jersey governor Chris Christie cancelled, then rescinded the cancellation, of the new North River Tunnels that will bring New Jersey Transit trains to Penn Station Under. Inside the Beltway has a roundup of commentary on the decision, summarized as penny-wise, pound foolish. How often do you find self-confessed liberal Paul Krugman using libertarian-leaning Dave Barry to make a point?

[U]rban transportation is an area in which we know that market prices bear very little relationship to true social costs. Even if you ignore environmental impacts and the national security implications of oil imports, the fact is that driving in an urban area, especially in rush hour, imposes huge congestion externalities on other people. And I mean huge: Felix Salmon had a nice piece last year putting the external cost you impose on other people by driving into lower Manhattan at $160 a day. (I can’t find the reference, but Dave Barry once had an “ask Mr. Question Authority” about how long it takes to drive across Manhattan during rush hour. The answer was that nobody has ever succeeded in driving across Manhattan during rush hour.)

The road network is neither self-sustaining financially, nor does it provide means for drivers to compensate other drivers for the delay they impose on each other.

That's standard transportation economics stuff. The fun stuff begins toward the end of Inside the Beltway's post.

Funding transportation infrastructure of this sort is enormously complicated. The benefits to people living in Montgomery, Alabama or Missoula, Montana are not obvious. So, why should they pay for this? At the same time, the benefits certainly go beyond New York and New Jersey and yet people in the immediate surrounding states are essentially free riding on the project.

Here's where pork-barreling begins. If Mike Mansfield is Senate Majority Leader, and there's a bill for Amtrak funding, Claiborne Pell and Joe Biden get their Metroliners and Turbotrains, but there had better be a North Coast Hiawatha through the populated tier of Montana including Missoula to supplement the Empire Builder that combines a day train across the Northern Tier with deluxe service to Glacier Park. Highway bills follow a similar logic. (There's probably a transaction cost argument under which federal monies for commuter rail infrastructure make the operation of a national financial center on Wall Street and in Hoboken possible, with a smaller administrative burden than using some of the management fees of Montgomery 401K holders to contribute to a transportation tax assessed on each security firm in the financial center.)

The real astonisher is in the concluding paragraph.

Another issue is that these projects take decades. That means costs are impossible to project with any accuracy. And politicians are forced to either keep throwing good money after bad or waste all of the sunk costs. There’s got to be a better way. But damned if I know what it is.

The Pennsylvania Railroad wanted a Manhattan station from sometime during the Grant Administration. Planning, meaning engineers putting pencil to paper, for a through station, tubes under the North and East Rivers, and a coach yard in Long Island City began in 1902. Excavators began work in 1904. Pennsylvania Station opened in August, 1910.

THE PROFESSIONALS AND THE AMATEURS. One University of Wisconsin legend claims that Playboy once omitted Wisconsin from the list of top party schools, noting the unfairness of ranking the professionals with the amateurs. It's a great story, even though it's made up, and it puts $86,000 in fines in context.

Madison Police Officer Brian Chaney, who was involved in breaking up the party at a two-story brick house on N. Brooks St., said officers were more concerned about safety than racking up fines. The problem was that the hosts didn't work with the officers.

The three students were charging most partygoers $5 per cup to get in and get drinks from half-barrels, according to police. Many of the attendees were freshmen in just the second weekend of classes.

There's even a professional mixed in.

One of the three students [fined] is Kevin Tracy, 20, of St. Paul, who starred in MTV's "College Life." Tracy was one of several UW-Madison students given cameras to document their lives.

On the show, Tracy got kicked out of the residence halls after repeated violations, according to the Minneapolis Star Tribune.

I'm not enthusiastic about the entertainment business selling the "Animal House" version of college life. I suspect, however, that when we convinced Wisconsin that if we were old enough to be drafted, we were old enough to buy a beer, we had the right idea. The risk of fines for underage drinking has a lot, economically, in common, with the pay-one-price system at amusement parks, in that the best response to the price is to consume intensively.

AN ILL-DEFINED FAULT LINE. Angelo Codevilla wrote an essay, "America's Ruling Class -- And the Perils of Revolution" for the American Spectator. Rush Limbaugh quoted enthusiastically from the essay on his radio show, and subsequently wrote the introduction to a book-length (once it's padded with The Declaration of Independence and The Constitution) version, The Ruling Class: How They Corrupted America and What We Can Do About It. If, in fact, we are at a breaking point in our politics, or in a Fourth Turning, it's useful to know where the fractures are. Mr Codevilla is attempting to identify that fracture, suggesting that there's a Ruling Class, notionally the old Eastern Liberal Establishment plus the Country Club Republicans, and a Country Class, not so easily defined but combining some parts of homeschoolers, intact families, and economic libertarians, loosely the Tea Party coalition. Book Review N^o. 22 recommends readers read the American Spectator essay: it's not yet behind the pay wall, it makes many of the same arguments, and it's shorter.

People who attempt taxonomies necessarily must make some arbitrary choices. Creating broad categories, as a division of the body politic into a ruling class and a country class, takes on the flavor of Jeff Foxworthy's "You Might Be a Redneck" stuff. You might be a member of the Ruling Class if ... you have a degree from an Ivy League or Big Ten university. It's true that the Ivies and the Big Ten provide a lot of technocrats, CEOs, Deputy Assistant Secretaries, and Diversity Boondogglers. On the other hand, you might turn up a lot of graduates who agree with the Tea Party for reasons that are subtle. A manifesto that includes the following is unlikely to encourage more such crossovers.

America's pro-family movement is a reaction to the Ruling Class' challenges: emptying marriage of legal sanction, promoting abortion, and progressively excluding parents from their children's education.

Does that last include school boards that mandate the untestable special creation hypothesis as holding equal intellectual standing to the testable evolution hypothesis?

Close friendships, and above all, marriages, become rarer between persons who think well of divorce, abortion, and governmental authority over children and those who do not.

Self-selection, assortative mating, seeking soul mates?

The home-school movement, for which the internet became the great facilitator, involves not only each family educating its own children, but also extensive and growing social, intellectual, and spiritual contact among like-minded persons.

That's not conducive to understanding the intellectual basis of the Eastern Liberal Establishment or the Country Club Republicans. (Such bases exist, they have weaknesses, but it takes persuasive argumentation to offer anything other than Not of the Establishment as a way of turfing that Establishment out.)

In the stack of books to be reviewed are several dealing with the financial markets melting down, the fault lines in politics, and visions of the world to come. Works that attempt to make sense of the Establishment's sudden loss of credibility tend to be less convincing, in part because they attempt, as Mr Codevilla has, to construct too broad a category of In opposed to Wanting In.

(Cross-posted to 50 Book Challenge.)

LIBERTARIAN FIREMEN? A Tennessee township offers its neighbors living in unincorporated sections the opportunity to buy an annual subscription of fire protection. One such neighbor chose not to buy a subscription. Then he had a fire, and the fire department eventually came to ensure that the fire would not spread to his neighbor's property. Econ Log's David Henderson notes the fire department that prevented the fire from spreading was a government enterprise.

You would think at some price, the fire department would show up. After all, a private for-profit fire company could make some good money doing so and, by charging high enough, could limit the incentive for people not to pay in advance for protection. Rural/Metro in Arizona is the example we libertarians often point to of a company that charges a fee. I remember reading, although I can't find the source, that if someone didn't subscribe and his house is burning down, Rural/Metro will show up and charge a fee that is a high multiple of the annual fee.

It turns out, though, that the fire department in Tennessee was not a private for-profit fire department. It was a government-run fire department. You read that right: the fire department that refused to show up and refused to name a price at which it would show up was run by the government of South Fulton.

The government-run fire department, standing on principle, refused to accept a side payment from the unfortunate householder, who offered to cover the fire department's expenses in limiting his fire to his shed. Presumably, it has a monopoly on selling fire protection to its neighbors. I'm imagining a new sales pitch from the township government. "Nice shack y'all got hereabouts. God forbid something should happen to it."

PRESERVED AS IN AMBER. Instaputz gives us the old time religion from Theodore, Franklin, and the Croly Ghost.

Where to start?

I guess the GI Bill for one. That big gumnit program worked pretty well in producing a middle class, yes?

See also the tax rates for the wealthiest Americans from 1941-1981, which further subsidized the greatest expansion of the middle class in world history.

Probably fair to say both were successful.

Post hoc, nec ergo propter hoc.

That greatest expansion of the middle class, particularly as that expansion applies to relatively low-skilled workers in unionized factories, might have been a division of monopoly rents among bourgeois and proletarians that at the time caused some industrial economists some concern.

Perhaps I'm showing my age, but at one time the populist political economy saw those large manufacturing firms as building blocks of a monopoly capitalism that practiced conscious parallelism, which reduced efficiency by restricting output and raising prices, and the unions as accomplice residual claimants to the monopoly profits thereby obtained. The retailers of the era were complicit in that monopoly capitalism, with a concentrated food packing industry and often vertically integrated supermarkets profiting by the inflated price of bread, although, again, food and commercial workers' unions participated as residual claimants. Because firms could practice conscious parallelism without calendars to keep track of the phases of the moon or meetings in the back room at Dirty Helen's, antitrust action could do nothing about the resulting inefficiencies, although Wal-Mart could.

The creation of an educated middle class, courtesy of the G.I. Bill? Without the foundation of a knowledge-intensive economy in which the comparative advantage rests in advanced technology goods (Bessemer steel, American System assembly lines, aircraft and freight diesel locomotives, microchips and software, do you see the pattern?) the aftermath of the G.I. Bill might have foreshadowed China's college bubble.

THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH. I could be referring to Ringling Barnum, or I could be referring to North American freight railroads, or I could be referring to Union Pacific occasionally listing 3985 on a revenue train.

Let's just go for all three.

AN INFRASTRUCTURE BUILT FOR CAB-FORWARDS. The previous installment of the summer train report left off at Santa Clara and the O Scale National Convention. Some projects found their way home, either with me, or with a little help from UPS, and there might be some modelling pictures come winter. Time to head home.

The Santa Clara station is not a bad walk from the hotel, unless one is toting a kit bag and a few extra items. There are some pictures of the station, which you wouldn't want to build in Stanley, North Dakota, and the rapid transit service, which has stops that are not bad walking distances from the hotel and the station, again, unless one is toting ... (The taxi service is prompt and reasonably priced.) In February 2009, I did use the rapid transit to get from the airport to the hotel. That post offers pictures of the rapid transit and the Santa Clara station. The picture here shows how the overpass has been strengthened for the rapid transit.


Amtrak Capitol Corridor service 724, 3 July 2010: Leave Santa Clara 8:05; Fremont 8:21:38 - 8:22:31; Hayward 8:36:38 - 8:37:14; Coliseum 8:45:46 - 8:46:34; Jack London Square 8:54:22 - 8:56:40, Eleven out on adjacent track 8:55:40; Emeryville 9:04:12.

It's Saturday, but the train is comfortably full, and the Emeryville station is full of passengers, many for Six, some for points west, those for 724 All Aboard.


Here's Sacramento - San Jose Saturday train 727. I did well with sunny days in places like Portland and the Bay Area better known for their fog and rain.

Advertising on the sides of cars isn't just for War Bonds campaigns anymore.

There's a coach yard west of the station. The station itself has enough space free of road crossings that Six can roll in and make a leisurely boarding, with sufficient time to get the consist and photograph the train in the act of loading.

Amtrak 6 California Zephyr, Emeryville - Elko, 3 July 2010: Genesis diesels 19 - 151 running elephant style, baggage car 1216, transition sleeper 39006, Superliner sleepers 32047 - 32042, diner 38043, Sightseer lounge 33030, coaches 34096 - 34054 - 34012. The train is properly marshalled for coach passengers to reach the lounge without having to pass through the diner.

Leave Emeryville 9:49:17 (timetable 9:50; my watch not set to a standard clock.)

Before Southern Pacific built its bridge across the upper bay, it ferried trains from a terminal at Port Costa. One of the ferryboats burned at the terminal sometime after the bridge opened. Its remains have never been removed.

Martinez 10:23:07 - 10:28:52, one detraining passenger missed the stop, will ride to Davis. With more frequent service in the corridor, that mistake will not ruin his whole day. East of Sacramento, a missed train, or a late train, means a serious change of plans.

Six is on the other side of the split-grade track configuration east of the bridge. The mothball fleet is closer, and the eastbound track is higher than the autorack yard, offering a view of the ships.

Davis 11:08:14 - 11:10:24; arrive Sacramento 11:24:35.

The sleeper attendant warns me not to go too far from the train. No worries, as there's a Starbucks in the old express building just the other side of the rapid transit. That's not a bad cross-platform connection to the rapid transit, either from the east end of the train, or from cars spotted closer to the station building.

Leave Sacramento 11:48:58, time for lunch. The rapid transit line parallels the Southern Pacific on the north side, in full sun. The air conditioning is useful with outside temperatures in the low nineties. (It's a dry heat.)

Roseville 12:12 - 12:16. The station and platform have been rebuilt, but much of the trackage laid for multiple sections of the Overland Limited and for adding eastbound helpers has been removed.

Colfax 1:16 - 1:17; Sightseer Lounge filling up for a good view of the Sierra crossing. There's a National Park Service guide aboard, but the sound system isn't working well.

I've not been able to figure out from the maps and books I have what this abandoned snowshed is. It's on the western slope, but a considerable distance east of the summit, where there once was an enclosed turntable.

The concrete relay cases date to the era of General Railway Signal semaphores. Those are long gone, but the triple searchlight signals that replaced them still cycle from green through yellow to red as the train passes.

Outside temperatures are still high, but last winter's snowpack hasn't all melted.

Pass Norden 3:06; Summit 3:14. The eastern slope follows the Truckee River to Reno. It's a pleasant Saturday and the fishermen and rafters are out.

Further downstream is an honest-to-Paul Bunyan flume.

Truckee 3:36:42 - 3:39:38; enter Nevada at Verdi (pronounced vair-dye, nuh-va-duh) 4:20; arrive Reno 4:40:24. Union Pacific has entrenched through Reno, freeing up the road crossings the trains used to block. The crew change also takes place at Reno, no more hitting the slot machines in the waiting room at Sparks.

Leave Reno 4:50:18; pass Sparks 4:56; pass Lovelock, also once a stop 6:37. Dinnertime. Food included in the fare, never mind the diet: steak medium rare.

The stacks are coming off the west end of the paired tracks at Winnemucca. Winnemucca 7:38 - 7:48; Elko 9:55:06 - 10:10:25, set watch to Mountain Time; bedtime.

(to be continued)

READING, READING, READING. Here's the third quarter book report. Please follow the link for the date the report was posted to read the diary entry, or book review, at Fifty Book Challenge. I evaluated some books as particularly good (+) or particularly bad (-).

14. The Book on the Bookshelf, 8 July 2010.
15. Stealing the General: The Great Locomotive Chase and the First Medal of Honor, 12 July 2010.
16. The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily, 1943-1944, 24 July 2010. (+)
17. Small Things Considered: Why There is No Perfect Design, 30 July 2010. (+)
18. A Darker Place, 1 August 2010.
19. The Future in Plain Sight: Nine Clues to the Coming Instability, 19 August 2010.
20. The Hunger Games, 28 August 2010. (-)
21. Toxic Talk: How the Radical Right has Poisoned America's Airwaves, 20 September 2010. (-)

The bookworm has added a few more segments. Still no promise of making fifty by year's end, although there is a sizeable pile of books read and awaiting review.

Oooooooooooooooooooooo

(Cross-posted to Fifty Book Challenge.)

CHINA'S COLLEGE BUBBLE. Where there's an industrial reserve army, the value of credentials is greater.

After graduating in June from a university in Henan Province, Qiao Li had difficulty in finding work, in rural areas or in Beijing where she now lives. “I’m from the countryside,” she told the newspaper. “My parents have no wealthy social network of contacts to help me secure a job in my hometown. They tried to ask around to help me, but received no response. There are too many famous universities in Beijing. When we attend interviews, we often meet students from leading universities. Employers prefer to hire them.”

The Chinese government, according to the Socialist Equality Party, has created the equivalent of the proprietary diploma mills in the United States, without the high stock returns.

Until the 1990s, a college education all but guaranteed a job in one of the state-owned enterprises or the state bureaucracy, but this career path has since been destroyed for most new graduates. The civil service, traditionally a large employer of graduates, recruited just over half a million from 2006 to 2009.

In 1998, the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) effectively introduced a “user pays” system for tertiary education, ordering a trebling of university student numbers without adequately increasing government funding. This ultimately led to a dramatic rise in student fees. This expansion of education was bound up with the transformation of China into a cheap labour workshop for global corporations.

Students are now being forced into fierce competition for jobs, with employers quick to capitalise on the resulting desperation.

That desperation is likely to get worse. Perhaps the United States government will not be able to talk the Chinese government into revaluing its currency. Financial markets, with or without The Masters of the Universe running hedge funds, are another matter.

Any downturn in China’s growth, as a result of the continuing global economic crisis, would result in social and political upheavals. That is the CCP regime’s biggest fear, as can be seen in Premier Wen Jiabao’s reply last week to US demands for a faster revaluation of the Chinese currency. Wen warned that a 20-40 percent revaluation would cause large-scale factory closures and “there will be major turbulence in the Chinese society”.

A college friend, also an economics major, used to react to news about countries that kept their currencies cheap to gun their export sector with "if they're willing to tear up their economies to provide me with cheap stuff, fine." The bill, however, is steep for the countries that engage in the tearing up.

The US-based Forbes magazine warned on September 9: “We certainly should be concerned about poor people from a humanitarian standpoint, but if China starts to suffer from real social instability, it will most likely come from a disenfranchised middle class unable to realise its dreams. From the French Revolution to the Chinese one, most revolutionary leaders have been university-educated, middle-class people who were marginalised by society and had their hopes thwarted.”

How often does one get to see the capitalist tool quoted approvingly by Leon Trotsky's intellectual heirs?