HABIT CAN GET YOU KILLED ON THE RAILROAD.

The Strasburg Rail Road have a web camera with a view of the Leaman Place runaround track (which permits observation of the Keystone Service on Amtrak as well) and on November 2 there was a disruption to Strasburg's train service.

The practice of "pointing and calling" should be implemented in the US anyhow, and this is a perfect example.

Switch stand target is aligned against engineer. He could have spotted that and never gone foreword. Also negligence by MoW crew too. Takes two to make an accident. https://t.co/HF3aE6pAP4

— Interurban Era (@InterurbanE) November 2, 2022

The crew of the locomotive expected the crew of the maintenance equipment to align the switch properly, but you still keep an eye peeled for bad iron.

A combination of a misaligned switch — apparently left open when a maintenance crew tied down the trackhoe on the spur — and the engine crew’s failure to operate the engine at ”restricted speed” contributed to the collision.

Damaged were the smokebox front and door, some auxiliary metal pieces, and the headlight, as well as the bucket, piston, and hydraulic hoses on the trackhoe. The trackhoe arm did not pierce or deform anything vital to steam operation, such as No. 475’s flues or front flue sheet.

Operating rules define restricted speed not as a set velocity, but a method of observing the track ahead while in motion, in such a way as to be able to stop in half the distance to an obstruction, broken rail, misaligned switch or other irregularity.

There is no turntable at Leaman Place, and the customary practice is to run tender first downhill from Strasburg to Leaman Place.

As is customary, the train departed the station at Strasburg with its engine running tender-first on the 4½-mile trip to Paradise. There, the train was left standing while the engine cut away and ran around to couple to the west end of the cars for the return trip. It was during this routine swapping of ends that the incident took place.

Contributing further to the situation is that, during the runaround move, the engine crew typically waves to the passengers on the standing train, potentially diverting attention from the track ahead.

Strasburg have a steam shop good enough to do major repairs for Class I carriers not named Union Pacific, and that includes an Amtrak GG1, but I digress.  The shop crew have returned 475 to service.

The major visible repair work was threefold, as the excavator’s boom punched a hole in the smokebox front and door, both of which shattered into pieces, and damaged the headlight beyond repair.

SRC mechanics replaced the smokebox front with three-quarter-inch-thick steel plate, using the damaged item as a template. The smokebox door – the hinged round center of the smokebox front – likewise broke into shards, and [chief mechanical officer Brendan] Zeigler said, “We elected to braze-weld that. We put a reinforcing steel ring inside to hold it together.”

That smokebox door will retain the excess brazing, as a reminder to operate safely.

The result is a door with visible spiderweb-like scars where the sections were rejoined. Zeigler addressed the question of why those braze marks weren‘t ground down to restore a smooth appearance: “I elected not to have them do that,” he said, “to leave it as a ‘witness mark’ to remind our crews” of the need for vigilance.

Didn't Boston Bruins goalie Gerry Cheevers do something similar with his masks, painting stitches where the pucks hit to pass the word that getting stitches on your face wasn't pleasant?

The General Notice is not in the front matter of the Book of Rules for the benefit of the legal department.  Kindly be advised accordingly, even if your business is hauling tourists.

THE GALES OF NOVEMBER, REMEMBERED.

Our annual Edmund Fitzgerald retrospective.

Paul Michaels photograph.

This week has featured late-summer-like weather, good for outdoor activities such as putting the garden to bed or taking walks to polls or coffee house, here at the south end of Lake Michigan, while cold air lurks in the Dakotas.

Radar image from Northern Illinois University.

That map, from a few years ago, depicts the sort of clash of air masses that can spawn the Gales of November.

The 2015 post includes a roundup of previous posts and tributes, including Gordon Lightfoot's song.

A RIGGED GLASS BEAD GAME?

I suppose that's one way to get around the current practice of perpetual review and revision in which young scholars hope to get a few acceptances in ahead of the tenure clock.

"This issue isn’t new: academic publishing has long been a delicate system that operates—tenuously—on goodwill, in the form of comprehensive, unpaid article analyses from expert volunteers."

No, it isn't new, and the collision of "publish or perish" job descriptions with a proliferation of new journals that might be Glass Bead Game outcomes and ever more nitpicky refereeing, with multiple referees and multiple revisions isn't helping.

There are a number of institutional reforms under consideration in the column, including limiting the rounds of revision, asking authors of submissions to do some reviewing, and (gasp!) paying reviewers.

Now, though, there are people who get around the perpetual revision with home-call referees.

After months of investigation that identified networks of reviewers and editors manipulating the peer review process, Hindawi plans to retract 511 papers across 16 journals, Retraction Watch has learned.

The retractions, which the publisher and its parent company, Wiley, will announce tomorrow in a blog post, will be issued in the next month, and more may come as its investigation continues. They are not yet making the list available.

It's not limited to Hindawi and Wiley, whose list of retractions has not yet come to Retraction Watch's attention.  Now it's academic publishing giant Elsevier.  "Elsevier is retracting 500 papers from a journal dedicated to conference proceedings because 'the peer-review process was confirmed to fall beneath the high standards expected,' Retraction Watch has learned."

KEEPING THE TRAINS OUT OF EACH OTHER'S WAY.

That's the role of an interlocking tower, and Classic Trains have made available a recollection by David Marcham, keeping the Lehigh Valley fluid at Athens, Pennsylvania, which is between Wilkes-Barre and the shop complex at Sayre.

Sometimes, trains run as planned.  "Train 7 passed Athens at 1:32 while its counterpart No. 8 sped past the tower at 1:56, both on time. Towanda reported the extra west by about 2:05 a.m. and FFW-1 could be heard passing the open microphone about 2:10.  Seven and Eight are the New York - Toronto Maple Leaf, while the freight trains have to keep clear of the window trains in both directions and otherwise be shepherded by the dispatcher and the tower operators.  The extra is dead freight, following Seven, but FFW-1 is a new piggyback train (Fast Forwarder West, maybe) following both Seven and the dead freight.

Then, the complications begin.

About 2:45, the Wilkes-Barre dispatcher called to ask if I’d seen the westbound extra. My answer was no. Soon the local Towanda line phone began ringing. To my surprise, it was the extra’s engineer asking to speak to the dispatcher.

Once connected, the engineer said he’d stopped his train at Milan (4 miles east of Athens) because of a hotbox on the tender. It couldn’t move until the journal box cooled and was repacked. He added the crews would “outlaw” in 15 minutes. The dispatcher told him he’d get a relief locomotive and crew as soon as possible.

You can't just play tiddlywinks with those trains, and if there is no relief locomotive or crew around, you get a plugged railroad.

The dispatcher immediately called the Towanda operator and instructed him to stop FFW-1, then called the Sayre yardmaster and asked him to send a crew and engine east as soon as possible to bring back the disabled train. The yardmaster answered he would have neither available for more than an hour as they were busy switching the just-arrived, hour-late BNE-2 eastbound freight. More manpower was tied up assembling four merchandise trains including the night moves to Auburn and Cortland, N.Y., the high priority Delaware & Hudson train to Binghamton with cars for eastern New York and New England, plus an extra eastbound freight destined for Coxton.

The dispatcher had to decide whether to let FFW-1 run west from Towanda to Athens via the eastbound main or have it wait for BNE-2’s arrival. The latter was one of the highest priority freight trains, carrying cars for delivery to destinations on several connecting regional railroads at Coxton, Lehighton, and Bethlehem. The LV had competition from the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western and Erie for much of this traffic. BNE-2 was scheduled to arrive at Oak Island Yard in Jersey City at noon.

Will the railroad be plugged? Will the supply chain be disrupted?  Is the engineer in trouble at home, or does the conductor on the relief engine have a personality clash with the tower operator at Towanda.

Read it, enjoy it, and see if you can embellish the story with the expected railroad fiction elements!

WHAT IS THE ROLE OF INTERNAL MIGRATION?

In the course of the election night channel surfing, I caught an MSNBC analyst suggesting that the Republicans had created enough safe districts in Florida alone to flip control of the House of Representatives (even with Lauren Boebert being turfed out?) and his stratification of districts included less contested districts that might be in play, depending on how much of a Republican surge there was, or not.

I later caught a Fox analyst suggesting that those new safe districts in Florida were being populated by people fleeing corona tyranny and crime in New York, and thus no longer being able to vote in New York against corona tyranny and crime, meaning the remaining voters in New York were more likely to have a different bundle of policy preferences, creating a Democrat island of sorts that would withstand any Republican tide.

It's possible that something similar is at work in the Midwest, where the corona tyrants of the Great Lakes (Evers in Wisconsin, Pritzker in Illinois, Walz in Minnesota, and Whitmer in Michigan) were returned to office, as were the free state governors to their west (Noem in South Dakota, Reynolds in Iowa).

So it goes.  My neighbors have voted.  I do not agree with their choices.  It's on me to continue to persuade them to think differently, and perhaps the expiration of the temporary suspension of grocery sales tax and the cost of living increase in the motor fuel tax will help change some minds.

The reactions among the populists who were hoping for a major rebuke of the Jarrett regency are instructive.  Stephen Kruiser's Morning Briefing has an ill-advised headline.  "We're Done–American Voters Are Idiots."

Losing skippers blame the crew.  It's a mistake when Marxist vanguardists accuse the proletariat of false consciousness.  That's the kind of wordnoise a gender studies professor might use to sound erudite, but when you attempt to explain it to a six year old (False consciousness is when you're not seeing what you think you're seeing) it breaks down.  It backfired on Hillary Clinton, when her attempt to make her donors feel good about themselves went public, with the deplorables more inclined to vote against her, rather than shamed into supporting her.

SO MUCH LOSING, YOU'RE GOING TO GET SICK OF IT.

At the beginning of October, I had the opportunity to watch the Green Bay Packers play on the hallowed turf of Lambeau Field.

That's the aftermath of an Aaron Rodgers pick six, and that might have been a harbinger of things to come.  At the end of the game, a Packers win in overtime, though, things looked good, with the team at 3-1 and a promising stretch to get to the midpoint of the season.

Since then: go to London, give up a second half lead and lose to the Giants; return home and underwhelm the Jets; go to Washington, D.C., give up a second half lead and lose to the Redskins Commanders; go to Buffalo, which no doubt the schedulers anticipated was going to be a highlight game between contenders, stage a second half rally and cover the point spread; then go to Detroit and score all of nine points against a Lion defense that had been giving up thirty.  It got to the point that one of the sports clips I heard on radio was on the theme that Jordan Love and a simpler playbook with more runs would have been more successful.  So it has become with Aaron Rodgers.  "He is the face, he does the rallies, he makes himself the center of attention, and he is the quarterback. He has now failed in that role for three straight seasons."

I've been calling attention to the succession for some time.  Yes, it's possible that the rot is deeper.

Davante [Adams] is gone, Rodgers is commanding a huge percentage of the salary cap, and the rest of the kiddie pool roster isn’t producing.

3 and 4 has been brewing for 5 years, and it falls on the shoulders of the general manager, himself.

The kiddie pool is not quiet, either.

Packers players Dallin Leavitt and De’Vondre Campbell made some bold statements about Jordan Love.

Both players spoke glowingly about what Love’s been able to do in practice and called him a starting caliber quarterback.

Campbell went as far as to say that Love is better than a lot of starting quarterbacks currently playing in the NFL.

Apparently, in football, you're only as good as your last championship.

At 3 and 6, the Packers aren’t going to bench Aaron Rodgers.

They still believe they have something to play for.

But if this thing gets to 3 and 8 or 3 and 9, it will be time to see what that “something” Jordan Love has is all about.

Put another way, Aaron Rodgers has gone from MVP to albatross more quickly than Donald Trump has gone from titular head of the Republican Party to boat anchor.

But that's coming.  That "he is the face" is in quotes because I borrowed it from Red State's Bonchie, on Donald Trump.  "He is the face, he does the rallies, he makes himself the center of attention, and he is the kingmaker. He has now failed in that role for three straight elections."

He concludes, "All I ask is that people step back, look at the whole picture, and think critically about how we got to where we are. Changes have to be made because I’m tired of losing, and I hope you are too."

We know what the standard is in Green Bay, and how far from that the team has been, despite all those playoff appearances and a quarter-century of Hall of Fame caliber quarterbacking.

In Republican politics, that standard appears still to be evolving.

IT'S CALLED MAKING DO.

A New York congressman who is in an unexpectedly tight race essentially told voters to deal with the high heating oil prices.

“Yeah, well, I grew up in a family where, you know, if the gas price went up, the food budget went down,” Rep. Maloney said. “So by this time of the week, we’d be eating Chef Boyardee if that budget wasn’t gonna change. So that’s what families have to do. Here’s what we should do,” Maloney said before discussing actions that he says would lower inflation.

It's a pivot back to the creation of a new monopsony power for Medicare, which we have dealt with previously.

What the representative misses is that what "making do" during the American High was is a step backwards sixty years later.  I write as a child of Depression babies for whom Franco-American canned spaghetti and Chef Boy-ar-Dee (which was the label back in the day) ravioli, and occasionally his pizza kit (sauce and cheese, you had to provide everything else, now a $20 offering with pepperoni) were the treats.  Spaghetti sauce was generally home-made, with home-grown tomatoes put up each fall.  Here I thought the Victor E. Garden wasn't political.

There's a Victor E. Garden behind Northampton Grange, and this has been a very good year for habaneros, okra, and tomatoes. But it's a garden, gosh darn it, not a political statement. The zoning code and the subdivision's covenants preclude a chicken coop. I suspect the neighbors wouldn't take too kindly to the cock crowing first thing of a June morning anyway. Although I joke with the neighbors that my electric lawnmowers and rototiller, whose power source is recycled nuclear warheads, are the quintessence of swords into plowshares, they're for quieter tools and for exercise.

For the representative, though, it's probably staying on message.  Years ago, the editors of the Northern Illinois University weekly newsletter liked to throw in stuff to keep the common room comfortable with their prejudices.  During Desert Storm, there was a comment from somebody to the effect of Republicans thinking Americans had a constitutional right to cheap gasoline, in that way placating the environmentalist wackos and the pacifists.  In the sixty years since Franco American spaghetti at lunch, though, factory prepared foods have been improved or upscaled in a variety of ways: you have to look hard to find a TV dinner or a basic pizza among the international cuisine and low-calorie and all the rest) and the representative wants us to turn the clock back at supper.

Perhaps that's the plan.  The way I closed that post about my non-political garden is instructive.  "The real rewards will go to the people who develop backstop technologies, possibly using renewable energy sources, including breeder reactors. Reversion to the world of Pieter Bruegel the Elder is a second-best choice."

It appears, however, that the Jarrett regency would rather have the reversion.  Turf them out.

NOW IT'S IN THE VOTERS' HANDS.

Our reality, these past two years, was based on false premises.

Recall that a non compos mentis Biden was nominated solely as the thin veneer to a hard Left agenda whose avatars were unelectable. Biden was to feign being the colorless, stand-in “moderate” who would “unify” the fractured country, tone down the Trump rhetoric, and let the Trump record sort of proceed on autopilot.

Then when he played out that part and won, the leftist minders in this Faustian bargain took over to push through, on a one-vote senatorial margin, the most radical left-wing agenda in U.S. history.

Biden, however, took his role too seriously. He reverted to the mean-spirited, pre-senile blowhard Joe—the obnoxious messenger thus now making the noxious message even more toxic.

A retiring, silenced, good old Joe from Scranton was the script, not a doddering, incoherent, ”get off my lawn” old man shouting for the need of socialist policies that were the exact opposite of his previously supposed convictions.

The Left got their Biden. And yes, he turned over the reins of government to them. And yes, they got their neo-socialism for two years. And yes, they are destroying America as we knew it. But in doing this, the people had the rare occasion to see fully and experience the nihilist Left. And they are now about to express their loathing for what the Left has wrought.

The problem with the ossified Democratic Pantheon is that they are of no use to the Left in the midterms because it is their own radical ideology over the past two years that was finally enacted and wrecked the country. And all the shrieks about abortion, semi-fascists, and democracy dying cannot put back together what they shattered.

That might be so, although the rump remnant of the Democrats are likely to hold sway in Illinois, as well as in Minnesota, despite Mitch "Shot in the Dark" Berg making a case for turfing them out. His examples are Minnesota but substituting in Illinois counterparts is straightforward.

I’m voting GOP for everyone wondering how the hell they’re going to heat their house AND buy food this winter.

I’m doing it because of all your “SAVE DEMOCRACY – VOTE BLUE!” buncombe. The left is, year in, year out, the actual threat to our constitutional order, to “democracy”, to freedom.

I’m voting Republican to stick it to the Electoral College denialists and the Supreme Court Conspiracy Theorists. And because Democrats are inflation deniers, crime deniers, American History deniers and, here in Minnesota, fraud deniers.

I’m voting Republican for everyone that lost their job due to the Vaccine mandate.

That's the tame part, dear reader. By all means savor the rest of it.  Toward the end, it gets cathartic.

I’m voting GOP with the “Rocks and Cows” – all the people in Greater Minnesota who are sick to death of being condescended to by chirpy little 20-somethings from Macalester with poli sci degrees and “mushroom head” haircuts and resumes of short careers spent chasing DFL non-profit bucks.

For every Iron Ranger who’s tired of being told “stocking shelves at Shopko is just as good a career as mining, and all that money’s probably pretty bad for you, really” by Metro-area “environmentalists” in 2 million dollar houses in Kenwood.

Might the margin of victory, should it come, be provided by people victimized by the latest get rich criminally trick? "I’ll be doing it for every poor family scraping by wondering how they’re going to replace a catalytic converter on top of all the other bills and crap piling up these days."

We'll see, starting later this evening.

THE END OF THE WORLD IS POSTPONED AGAIN.

Global Heating Has Made Ice-Free Summers in Arctic Inevitable by 2050.  By my reckoning 2020 + 12 = 2032, which means we got another stay of execution.  Whether the actuarial tables will be in my favor and I can post a "told ya so" in ten years, or 28, is out of my hands.  But this scaremongering is predictable.  "You'd think, after fifty years of doomsday predictions, the true believers would be more modest about tying the End of Life As We Know It to any human action."  It's also something we've seen before.

Unfortunately, the Millerites ye shall always have among yourselves.  "'If everyone could see what I see coming,' said [Peter Kalmus], 'society would switch into climate emergency mode and end fossil fuels in just a few years.'"  Wouldn't that event be evident in the futures prices?  Oh, never mind, don't let logic get in the way of a good virtue signal.

But it's never been about protecting the polar bears. Julia Conley even gave it away in her choice of a closing quote.

The report was released less than two weeks after the U.N. Environment Program (UNEP) warned that there is currently no "credible pathway" in place to a planet in which temperatures rise by only 1.5°C above preindustrial levels, the goal outlined in the 2015 Paris climate agreement, and called for a "rapid transformation of societies."

For "rapid transformation," read more indicative planning and technocracy.

DECK THE VIRTUAL HALLS.

Sometime early on November 1, the Music Choice seasonal channel switched from its Hallowe'en rotation to its Christmas rotation.  Premature?  We report, you decide.  "You either listen to Christmas carols the day after Halloween or wait until after Thanksgiving."

I'm not sure "carols" is quite the right noun, not with the preponderance of young ladies wailing about unrequited love, but there's apparently an audience for a long run-up to the Festive Season.

"Start listening now. You only get two months of Christmas time. You need to make the most of it," reporter James Groh said, who is also the one writing this article.

He did have an expert weigh in on the matter. Groh interviewed Michele Zelenak who is the general manager of Callister's Christmas. It's an ornament and decorations shop in Brookfield.

"Well, if you are a Christmas fanatic, I say July. But normally I think right after Halloween is the best time to start listening to Christmas," she said.

That's also the thinking at Music Choice, as their Independence Day rotation gives way to Christmas in July even before the echoes of the last fireworks have died away.

One of those bewailers of unrequited love might have good reason for starting the Festive Season now.

As the calendar flips to Nov. 1, [Mariah] Carey is instantly seen dressed in a festive outfit as the opening of her iconic Yuletide track “All I Want For Christmas Is You” plays in the background.

“It’s time,” she teases in the clip, officially marking the end of the spooky season and the unofficial start of the festive one.

The hit song has already found its way back into the US iTunes Top 100 charts just hours after midnight.

In some circles, the popularity of that song is evidence of the way music has declined.  It has made Ms Carey a lot of money.  It also might not be the best representation of her seasonal skills.  The Music Choice Christian music channel played her version of O Holy Night, and that was well done.  There could be other proper carols on her Christmas album, none of which are in the seasonal rotation.

On Music Choice Seasonal, hockey mom Carrie Underwood's version of Hark! The Herald Angels Sing is in the rotation, and it's well done.

The few times I've dipped into the seasonal programming, there have been a few changes in the visuals that accompany the music.  There used to be a St. Basil's with a Christmas tree in Red Square, but that's not appeared yet.  So go the times.

FOR YOU, THE LIVING, THIS CHOICE IS MEANT TOO.

Hallowe'en is done, but not the spooky music or the creepy voices.  (Or, arguably, people claiming to be handing out treats.)  The final rounds of attack advertisements are out, and whenever you hear about a "right to choose," that's not endorsing Milton Friedman's old book, let alone the call for school vouchers that he endorsed in that book.  It's euphemism, and I suppose that "right to choose" is recognition that terminating a pregnancy is something that ought not be done lightly (apart from among the crazies); and that it's in the Congressional and State House races now is preferable to it being the Most Important Thing in Supreme Court confirmation hearings, to the exclusion of more fundamental things such as Living Constitutions and Surveillance States.

As an election issue for Democrats, though, it suggests some unwillingness to engage, oh, empty shelves, or street crime, or falling test scores, or the failure to develop energy resources.  It's also at the point of diminishing returns to voters who care about those things.  "The reason that Democrats have f**ked this up is that they won’t stop talking about abortion."

My stance is still what it has been all summer.

Democrats will continue the corona tyranny.

Democrats are soft on crime.

Democrats would punitively tax productive people even more if we let them.

It's only "Our Democracy" when Democrats win.

Turf. Them. Out.  All of them, whether as senator or governor, or as county clerk or dog catcher.  "The housecleaning needs to be as complete and thorough as free and open elections [permit]."

HELP MAKE THE GRUMPY ECONOMIST LESS GRUMPY.

That's Stanford's John "Grumpy Economist" Cochrane, with two constructive posts advocating academic freedom.  The first is an open letter soliciting signatures from scholars.  I'm thinking about it, but my "emeritus" status is more a courtesy title than anything else, as opposed to my active status as model railroad influencer.  The letter's message is intended for universities and the professional societies that have become handmaidens of craven careerists.

We include professional societies. That means you, American Economic Association and American Finance Association: With all your committees on improving the profession, you need one big one to defend the most important and imperiled part of the scholarly enterprise, academic freedom.

There's an instructive emendation to the post.

A special plea. I have several responses from left/liberal/democrat colleagues who say they would sign, but don't want to have their names on a letter that doesn't have enough other left/liberal/democrat names on it and does have well known deplorables. (How you know 626 people's politics is beyond me, but ok.) That reaction tells us a big part of the problem. All along we have tried very hard to reach out to self-described left/liberal/democrat colleagues, who privately bemoan what's going on but are too afraid to be seen in public. But why not fix it: if some of you sign perhaps that will give courage for more of you to sign. Take it over, get together with your friends, add lots of signatures, make this your cause, prove that we can stand together for freedom!

The statement itself follows that paragraph, and there is a script for adding, subject to moderation, your signature.  In the statement is a passage that addresses the sort of craven cowardice the careerist clique creates.

An atmosphere of fear and self-censorship pervades academia. Many faculty and students believe they cannot voice their views, question dogmas, investigate certain topics, or question the loss of academic freedom without risking ostracization and damage to their careers. Knowledge is lost, and many talented scholars are leaving academia.

That's No Big Surprise to regular Cold Spring Shops readers. "It might be more accurate to recognize that the Censorious Style in academic discourse is real."

He follows that call for participation with his opening remarks at an academic freedom conference in Palo Alto.

We are not here to have a philosophical discussion whether academic freedom is important, and whether it is threatened. We here start from the premise that the core mission of the scholarly community is to uncover new knowledge, to debate and refine knowledge, to pass on knowledge to the next generation, and more importantly to pass on the habits and norms of critical inquiry and scholarly debate that produce true knowledge. We here start from the premise that we are losing academic freedom, and that threatens this core scholarly mission. If those of you listening on zoom or the critics of this conference wish to debate these issues, go ahead and run a different conference. Every biology conference does not start with an evolution vs. creationism debate. Time is short, and focus will make us more productive.

This is a conference on academic freedom, with a lesser emphasis on free speech of political opinions. Cancellation, ostracism, and disciplinary action for political opinions, and canceling outside popular speakers are in the news. But our core question is limitations on the scholarly enterprise of research, teaching, publication, fact-finding, logical analysis, and criticism. This enterprise is damaged when scholars are canceled for political opinions, or opinions on matters like university hiring and admissions. But our focus goes beyond this to emphasize less visible but perhaps more insidious restrictions on academic activity, including direct institutional actions, by self-censorship in fear, or by good people being driven out of the academic enterprise.

You'd think that those sentiments would be taken as self-evident, but they're not.

The cowardice and cliquish behavior in the common room stems from sources outside the academy.

This is a conference on academic freedom, and not free speech and censorship in the media, on twitter, and in the general society. That is an important political problem in our democracy, but it’s not the focus of our conference.

This is a conference on academic freedom, and not centrally on the substance of contentious issues. We have some noted speakers who have been criticized for their views. But we’re here primarily to learn from their experience of censorship, not to debate the merits of the particular views and research findings that got them in trouble.

Academic freedom is a problem of institutions. Twitter-mob students are visible. But the key restrictions on academic freedom lie with university leaders, university bureaucracies, hiring and promotion procedures; and beyond universities to funding agencies, professional organizations, and journals. I hope we can discuss and remedy dysfunction in all these institutions.

Although the focus of the conference is on the internal discourse of the academy, the pernicious role of social media in fostering the craven cowardice and cringing conformity is real.  The leaders and bureaucracies (deanlets and deanlings) are often part of so-called academic Twitter, and given over to appeasing the loudest voices there.  "One. Critical. Tweet. Chickenshits. 'Academic history is now worse than a waste of time nearly everywhere.'"

The biggest chickenshits?  Precisely those faculty members who agree with the concept of academic freedom in private but fear they will be shunned by their trendy colleagues.

I REALLY SHOULDN'T BE CLUBBING BABY SEALS.

On the other hand, when somebody puts forth a manifesto ambitiously headed "How Progressives Would Handle the Current Energy, Inflation, and Climate Crises" maybe we should take it seriously.  The subheading continues, "The multiple crises are encouraging consensus on the need for public ownership and socialised management and control of energy sectors in the short and medium term."

ADVANTAGE, COLD SPRING SHOPS.

A model railroad doesn't have to have a real railroad name, although it is easier to model a portion of a real railroad as a lot of the work developing timetables and arranging the tracks in town has been done for you.

Never mind all that, in the basement of Cold Spring Shops headquarters you will find the State of Maine Northern, whose motive power and rolling stock sometimes ventures off line.

That's a switcher, buggy, and hopper car working Marquette, Iowa, on The Milwaukee Road.

Note, there is no law requiring that the ROLLING STOCK on your model railroad has to be lettered for real railroads, although that makes acquiring interchange freight cars and through passenger cars easier.  There's enough stuff lettered for model railroads out there, as well as the opportunity to swap decals with other modellers, to have a freight train lettered entirely for model railroads.

There is also no law requiring that the model cars be lettered for model railroads in the same scale, although crossing scales poses challenges.  For instance, Bill Navigato's Chicago Peoria & Southern, which, if you are a long time reader of Railroad Model Craftsman, you will recall from the "Look Both Ways" column he and Mike Schafer wrote, is a late steam, or perhaps transition era, HO scale railroad, and he provided me some decals with which to letter hopper cars.

Mike's Illinois and St. Louis as modeled is a diesel era HO model railroad, set in time just before the Post Office cancelled all the railway post office cars.  There are, however, enough earlier image cars on the layout that getting a believable representation of a transition era box car is straightforward.

That's my State of Maine Northern, Bill's decals on a Chicago Peoria & Southern boxcar, a few alphabet sets cut up to letter an Illinois & St. Louis boxcar, and the Canandaigua Southern boxcar from an O Scale convention a few years ago.

Now the fun begins.

Remember this story?

Milwaukee Racine and Troy is the model railroad staff of Kalmbach, the publisher of Model Railroader and Trains, are building in the break room of their office.  That railroad is an HO layout set late in the second-generation diesel, pre-Staggers Act era.  I got a little advice from Model Railroader staff on what a transition era hopper car would look like.  The herald is based on the New England Coal and Coke herald, and it foreshadows the contemporary MR&T herald that looks a little like something Robert Indiana might have come up with.

Although the project layout is still contemporary, of late Kalmbach have been coming out with HO and sometimes N scale models in order that transition or steam era modellers can support Kalmbach's hobby store.  Look what just hit the virtual shelves.

That lettering scheme won a reader poll conducted among subscribers of Model Railroader.  I didn't see that poll and have no idea whether something based on my concept was among the choices.  As it's an offset, rather than straight side, car, in a different numbering series, there's no conflict, or reason to reletter my car.

Do I get to claim to be a model railroad influencer?

FRIDAY short TAKES.

The midterm elections conclude on Tuesday.  Democrats have delivered nothing but misery.  The doddering ficus delivered a pep talk.  "Rise above your petty personal grievances over the multifarious harms inflicted by the Dems and vote Democratic!"  No, you can't deplorable-shame me.  "Were democracy actually under attack, Democrats would have sought consensus instead of contentiousness."

Something there is about the Donks closing message that reminds me of the psychotic HAL 9000 computer, or perhaps the abusive spouse.  "I know everything hasn't been quite right with me...but I can assure you now...very confidently...that it's going to be all right again. I feel much better now. I really do."

A plea by Brown economist Emily Oster captures it perfectly.  "[M]ost errors were made by people who were working in earnest for the good of society."  You'd think an economist who is an economist's kid would remember that line about not much good being done by people who affected to trade for the public interest.

How about "no" to moving on?  "They refused to see what was right in front of them. And, in almost every case, they refused to apologize."  So it always is with narcissists.  "We can only move forward when people like you and Randi Weingarten and Leana Wen fully realize the PAIN and HARM you caused."  But like that abusive spouse, or HAL, they're confident everything will be fine.  "The only remorse I can sense is the panic of the progressive activists as they see the scale of the retribution for the over two years of bureaucratic bullying and media misinformation that Americans have been treated to. Being sorry for receiving the just punishment to which you are due is NOT remorse."  We're on to the scam.  "What they are hoping, is that their female base will believe the lie that Dr. Oster is peddling, that it was all just an unfortunate mistake, and could never happen again. It’s in the past!"

No, it's reality dawning.  "Because there’s an election coming up that Democrats might lose?"

The authoritarianism of the lockdown years must never be forgotten.  The reckoning has not yet begun.

After that lengthy prologue, the usual roundup of pithy elaborations of traditional Cold Spring Shops themes follows.

IT COULD BE THE PERFECT STORM.

Two of the railroaders' unions have already rejected the contract the bargaining committees, railroad managements, and federal officials put together.  Now come the shippers, praying for Congressional action.

Agricultural shippers have urged Congress to prevent a national railroad strike or lockout, which they said would have “devastating consequences to our national and global food security.”

A railroad network shutdown would exacerbate agricultural shipping challenges, which include rail congestion on the big four U.S. systems, record low water levels that have brought Mississippi River barge traffic to a halt, and a shortage of trucks, the National Feed and Grain Association and 192 other members of the Agricultural Transportation Working Group told Congress this week.

If that correlation of forces isn't adverse enough, the aviators also want a life away from the extra board.

The Allied Pilots Association (APA) said on Wednesday that its board of directors rejected a tentative agreement (TA) for a new contract with American Airlines by a vote of 15-5.

The proposal would have increased pilot pay by 12 percent on the date of contract signing with a 5 percent raise the next year and a 2 percent raise the year after. However, after pilots have been working for three years under the old contract with no wage increases during the coronavirus pandemic, and with annual inflation topping 8 percent, this 19 percent raise is insultingly low.

“We cannot vote to approve a [tentative agreement] that does not adequately address the quality-of-life items of our airline pilots,” APA officials at Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport said in a letter to pilots. “The Company has returned a proposal that is not only subpar in these areas, but it also demonstrates a complete lack of understanding how important these issues are for you.”

There are growing signs that a significant movement is underway among airline workers and pilots, in particular. The APA, which covers approximately 15,000 American Airlines pilots, rejected the TA only one day after United Airlines pilots voted down a TA by 94 percent, and two days after 15,000 Delta Air Lines pilots voted to go on strike by 99 percent. Earlier this year, pilots at Alaska Airlines also voted to authorize a strike, although they voted to accept a new three-year contract earlier this month.

Earlier this year, pilots and flight attendants held informational pickets at airports across the country. Internationally, strikes by air crews have also taken place at Eurowings in Germany and Ryanair in Spain.

The main issue for AA pilots is overwork and unpredictable working schedules. These have worsened over the course of the pandemic, which has compounded a pilots shortage that has been building for years. Over the summer, American saw the number of pilot fatigue call-ins increase to quadruple the normal rate, APA spokesman Dennis Tajer told AINonline.

What that story won't tell you, because it steps on the Zero Corona Is Attainable Under Trotskyism narrative still on offer by the World Socialist Web Site, is that the staffing problems on the flight deck reflect in part the reluctance of pilots to keep being injected with a vaccine of dubious efficacy.  It's not as if the air carriers have a large reserve army of unemployed aviators to draw on.

Staff shortages were already a chronic problem before the pandemic but were exacerbated by tens of thousands of workers leaving the industry and not being replaced.

Workers are also pressing for their demands in other critical transportation industries. On the major US railroads, 120,000 workers are pressing for strike action and the rejection of sellout contracts reached with the involvement of the White House. As with pilots, erratic scheduling and overwork is the number one issue for rail crews, who are on call 24/7 and have no guaranteed sick days. Workers in three out of the 12 rail unions have already rejected their tentative agreements.

Both the railroad and airline industries are under the jurisdiction of the notorious Railway Labor Act, which severely limits the right to strike and prohibits contracts from expiring.

If the next month of labor relations in transportation aren't going to be challenging enough, that "incredible transition" has so disrupted domestic crude oil extraction that inventories of the heavier crude used to produce diesel fuel, which the trains and trucks use, and heating oil, which is still in use in the northeast and New England, are in short supply going into winter, and a problem with the refineries that extract those grades of fuel will have unpleasant consequences.

"COMBINED ON A NO-HITTER" ISN'T SOMETHING FOR THE RECORD BOOKS?

But the way pitchers are throwing harder these days, and thus on a pitch count of some kind, maybe it's time to create a new page.

During the regular season, didn't three Houston pitchers combine on a no-hitter against the Yankees?

That, by the way, makes for a compelling story.  Isn't any story involving the Yankees with a gaudy record and a home-run hitter on the way to three score and some home runs compelling?

Now five Houston pitchers have combined on a no-hitter in the World Series, and the Guardians of the Illuminated Manuscripts are in full cry.

The Houston Astros threw a combined no-hitter en route to a 5-0 win over the Phillies.

The World Series is now tied at 2 games a piece.

What an incredible moment in baseball history that we should all be celebrating.

Instead, we’re arguing about whether it’s a real no-hitter.

Who gives a crap?

These are the same sad sacks that complained about how Corbin Burnes and Josh Hader’s no-no wasn’t real.

Did the other team get a hit? No?

Then, it’s a no-hitter.

End of story.

The statistical purity tests are so vigorous because the stakes are so small, to steal from a quip about faculty politics.

THE ENVIRONMENTALIST WACKO TRICKLE-DOWN FANTASY.

I noticed, somewhere, someone observing that there's a strong correlation between people who use "trickle down" as a pejorative to describe lower tax rates and people for whom productive people never pay enough taxes.  Something else recently occurred to me: the same president of these United States who thinks "mega-ultra-MAGA-trickle-down" is an argument-winning sound bite is also of the view that the immediate stifling of domestic oil and natural gas production will midwife an incredible transition. “[When] it comes to the gas prices, we’re going through an incredible transition that is taking place that, God willing, when it’s over, we’ll be stronger and the world will be stronger and less reliant on fossil fuels when this is over.”  It might be that there will be an incredible transition, back to the nineteenth century; although the policy of making fossil fuels dearer is deliberate.

Nearly every piece of climate legislation championed by Democrats, from cap-and-trade to Green New Deal, has been a deliberate effort to make energy less affordable, either by creating scarcity through fabricated markets and inhibiting fossil fuel production (banning fracking or stripping leases) or by trying to spike prices through gas taxes and mandating expensive alternative sources.

That, dear reader, is where the environmentalist trickle-down fantasy begins. The first element of the policy is to destroy the incentives to develop oil and gas.

Policies that undermine future production are baked into today’s prices. The administration and media tell us that Keystone wouldn’t make any difference in the oil prices, but then turn around and argue that we should overhaul the world’s largest energy grid, create millions of solar panels, rid the nation of most existing cars, retrofit nearly every building in the country, and ask us not to treat them as if they’re not insane.

That part of the policy worked.

Biden initiatives hampering U.S. energy output are “higher tax rates; additional regulatory burdens; the suspending of needed energy infrastructure, such as pipelines; prohibitions on drilling on public lands and off-shore; and . . . the political risk of investing billions of dollars only to have operations shut down by this administration,” [Casey] Mulligan and [Stephen] Moore note.

Then the Jarrett regency chickened out.

Biden has sold more than 30% of the U.S.’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR), which is intended for emergency use. “The SPR is at its lowest level since 1984, when U.S. oil consumption was considerably less and the reserve was initially being stocked,” the piece by Alexander Zemek notes.

According to Mulligan and Moore’s study, the U.S. “would not have had to sell a single barrel of oil” from the SPR had the Biden administration maintained Trump’s drilling policies.

Biden’s SPR releases have done little to address the sheer magnitude of the domestic oil production that he has suppressed by executive fiat, according to Mulligan and Moore. They estimate that Biden’s policies have forsaken 600 million barrels of oil, compared to the 150 million emergency barrels that he has released from the SPR (as of July 2022).

If you're going to force that incredible transition, dear reader, aren't you relying on some combination of rising prices to induce invention, perhaps nudged along by technology forcing rules such as California's prohibition of new internal combustion vehicle sales after 2035.

NEVER MIND MOCKERY, MAKE THE RUBBLE BOUNCE.

Matt Walsh, who understands that a woman is an adult human female, brought that message to the University of Wisconsin in Madison, and the freakazoid fringe freaked out.

The university’s Memorial Union building, where Walsh is scheduled to speak, as well as various other structures and a statue of the school’s mascot Bucky Badger were vandalized with graffiti.

Over the weekend, Dean of Students Christina Olstad and Gabe Javier, an associate vice chancellor, put out a statement on social media offering their support to the transgender students ahead of Walsh’s speech.

“To the trans members of our UW-Madison community, we see you and we value you,” they wrote. “We will continue to do our part to make this campus more welcoming and inclusive regardless of what speakers may counter this value.”

Because nothing says "welcoming and inclusive" quite like tagging the Memorial Union, which used to be hands off, even during the most vigorous of Vietnam era protests, including a terrorist bombing of Sterling Hall.

PREDICTION IS DIFFICULT, ESPECIALLY ABOUT THE FUTURE.

At Labor Day weekend, we flagged the early weather forecast for winter.  "By Christmas, we should have early returns on whether a polar vortex is forming."

October is premature.  At mid-month, there was a cold snap that included measurable snow and the coldest recorded high temperature for that day ever in Rockford, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (OK, that's technically accurate, but isn't "weather bureau" descriptive enough?) was doing what bureaucrats do best, namely, straddling the fence.

In other words: Not unusually warm, and not unusually cold.

According to the prediction, from Dec. 2022 through Feb. 2023, temperatures in the Chicago area and for much of Illinois are neither expected to be warmer-than-average, nor colder-than-average.

The western part of the state though may see some frostier days.

It's a La Niña year, which calls for more hedging. "The winter outlook does not project seasonal snowfall accumulations, as those forecasts are 'generally not predictable more than a week in advance.'"

And yet, the doomsday environmentalists will tell us we are in trouble ten years, or fifty years, or a hundred years out.

That NBC article at least got one thing right.  "The good news is, it's not quite time to put away your flip flops just yet. This coming weekend in the Chicago area is expected to be in the 70s, according to NBC 5 Storm Team."

That's been more the case than not the case for the past two weeks, providing favorable conditions for late fall yard maintenance, including some projects that had been deferred for a little too long, and took a little more time than usual.  The favorable weather favored trick or treating on Monday, and the little kids were out and about, although it appears as though people favored waiting until sunset, which meant a busy final hour passing out treats.