wood burning ..

We're off here next year - Loon Mountain in New Hampshire. Not just for the skiing but also because one of the main ways to get to the cable car stations is by two foot gauge train - and the locomotive is wood burning steam. So I'll be doing some research for the New S&D as well as hitting 100 mph on the slopes ...

the fate of freight

As promised some of the images of the sheer variety of freight wagons etc available on the railways in the 1950s. There was no assumption back then that railways were only suitable for certain very specialised loads - the railways could and would carry anything. The idea that railways were some sort of inflexible mode for niche freight was a POLITICAL idea, not an economic one. As Warren Buffet says once you've got your track and equipment in place almost every dollar goes to the bottom line.

From these pics it looks pretty clear that in the 50s this weird politics had not yet infected the railways, and that they were there to do a job.

What happened to all these wagons, and all these jobs? No doubt scrapped, with the traffic, still growing, forced on to ever more crowded roads!

But remember, in Europe and even in the transport backwater of the USA MOST freight, even before the energy crisis, goes by rail. In Switzerland all large lorries in transit have to switch to rail. In the poor old UK the majority of freight is still moved in inefficient, polluting and lifespan-limited lorries, clogging our roads and leading to the ludicrous situation - as at Pensford or on the A34 - of a slow-moving road clogged with lorries running alongside CLOSED railways!!

The deliberate running down of the rail network to favour the pockets of one 'man', Ernest Marples, will soon be seen as the criminal act it was. And soon, in the teeth of severe climate change and the end of cheap oil, the railways will once again be free to do the job they do so well, carrying the nation's freight.

slap

I rather underestimated the jetlag, the pile of work waiting for me and the sheer amount of time a new kitten requires, so sorry for the lack of posts. Hopefully I'll be able to get on with them tomorrow!

There's plenty on modern transport, Bristol's upcoming fake trams and great news from Spetisbury to come!

back from new york

A few rail and transport related tasters from our fantastic visit to New York. More to follow - plus Spetisbury news! Need to just get over the jet lag first ...

street running US style

Just had to share this! Anyone who doubts that street running isn't an option should remember that the USA (supposedly anti-rail) has MANY places where this happens. This is Salem, Oregon, which sees 2 to 4 freights a day on this route. Hopefully I can catch some of this in real life either in December (New York City, Brooklyn) or next October (Florida, lots of locations!)

So who knows, we may one day see a 9F pulling a half mile long freight down the road somewhere in Somerset or Dorset!

'peak car' ....

Thanks to Anna-Jayne Metcalfe for this piece!

Are we reaching ‘peak car’?

anita elash

From Saturday's Globe and Mail

Published Saturday, Oct. 22, 2011 8:00AM EDT

Last updated Saturday, Oct. 22, 2011 11:52PM EDT

usa tries to catch up with the rest of us ....

Could the US crack high-speed rail?

14 October 11 11:07

By Tom Geoghegan
BBC News, Washington

A conference in New York is looking at plans to spend $600bn (£380bn) on a national network of high-speed railways, to rival continental Europe's. But how likely is it to happen?
The fastest train in the US pulls slowly out of platform 10 at New York's Penn Station, heading west.
Keeping a leisurely pace on the other side of the Hudson River, the Empire State Building sticks stubbornly to the horizon before eventually receding into the distance. Thirteen minutes later, the Acela Express makes its first stop, in Newark.
This is high-speed rail, American-style.
For many of the passengers packed on board the Acela Express to Washington DC, it is no voyage of discovery but a regular trip.
Train travel beats flying, says hotel executive Michael Shepard. "Getting a plane has become so unattractive, especially for short distances. The train is quicker and takes you right into the city."
But the 29-year-old New Yorker says the premium you pay for the Express does not represent value for money, with no more legroom than a normal train and not even a complimentary coffee or tea. And he questions whether it's fast enough (2hr 46mins between New York and Washington) to persuade drivers to ditch their cars.
"It's called 'high speed' but is it really? That's the question."
Other passengers say it's a reliable and comfortable service but those with experience of European trains say the American ones are a pale reflection - in terms of frequency, speed and relative luxury.
The Acela is the flagship line of Amtrak, the government-owned company that runs the US railways, a vast network which is reporting a post-war record for numbers of passengers.
Making enough money to cover its operating costs, but little more, it runs along the densely-populated, north-east corridor between Boston and Washington, using trains that briefly reach speeds of 241km/h (150mph) but average about 127km/h (79mph).
That's not fast enough to meet some international definitions of high-speed rail - though a forthcoming upgrade of a 24-mile section of track in New Jersey means the trains will reach speeds of 257km/h (160mph) by 2017.
"This is the first step of a larger programme for Amtrak's vision to get to 220mph (354km/h)," says spokesman Steve Kulm, adding that private firms have shown strong interest in helping to pay for it.
Despite the relatively high standard of the service in the north-east corridor, the architectural grandeur of some stations and some scenic journeys, train travel in the land of the motor vehicle is not a mass pursuit.
In a country that owes its economic strength to railways - the first transcontinental railroad linked east and west in the 1860s - most investment in recent decades has been on roads and aviation.
Rail industry experts meeting in New York next month are pushing for a reversal of that trend.
The US High Speed Rail Association (USHSR), which is hosting the event, has set out a highly ambitious, $600bn (£383bn) plan to build a high-speed rail network in four phases by 2030, which it illustrates on its website with an animated map.
"This really is the transport system for the 21st Century and there's no reason why we shouldn't build it," says Andy Kunz, president and chief executive officer of USHSR. "In fact we will have to build it. There are no other options.
"The oil supply and price is not sustainable and we will not be able to continue to run America with oil at $200 a barrel. If we are going to maintain our prosperity and mobility we have to build this rail system."
Using public and private funds, Mr Kunz argues the network could pay for itself within five or 10 years, because dependency on foreign oil currently costs the US hundreds of billions of dollars annually, and these railways would use cleaner energy sources. They would also generate hundreds of thousands of jobs.
When asked whether it's feasible to implement such a huge project any time soon, he points to two great American feats of engineering - President Lincoln's transcontinental railroad and President Eisenhower's interstate highways built over a period of 35 years a century later.
But there are considerable political and financial hurdles to overcome.
In 2009, President Barack Obama allocated $8bn in his stimulus package towards high-speed rail in 10 areas, but state governors in Florida, Ohio and Wisconsin said "no thanks" and the funds intended for their states were allocated elsewhere.
In February, when vice-president Joe Biden proposed a $53bn bill for what he described as the biggest investment in rail since Lincoln, he was derided by one influential Republican as "insane".
For some critics, the problem is not high-speed rail in principle but picking the right projects to invest in, especially when the country is facing a financial crisis and huge spending cuts.
A spokesman for a public policy think-tank, the Reason Foundation, questions the projected passenger figures that enthusiasts put their faith in, and says that beyond the north-east, there are very few places in the US where it could pay its way.
In Europe, where higher fuel prices and denser populations help make high-speed rail more attractive, there has been a frenzy of construction and planning. France and Spain aim to double their networks of bullet trains in the coming decades.
China, which already boasts half the world's high-speed lines, is making similar strides, although an accident that killed 40 people earlier this year sparked a debate about whether the government was moving too fast.
The country also operates a magnetic levitation train, which reaches staggering speeds of 430km/h (268mph).
In the US, California could be the first state to get a dedicated high-speed passenger rail system, with work due to begin next year on the first section of a line running the length of the huge state, which would carry 322km/h (200mph) trains.
Congressman Jim Costa believes building the railway will generate nearly 300,000 jobs and then another 450,000 permanent posts after it's built.
But Christian Wolmar, a transport expert based in the UK, has serious doubts.
"In California, the notion that they can build in one fell swoop a high-speed network that runs from Sacramento to San Diego is just too ambitious.
"Why not start with a high-speed line that stretches from one end of the Bay Area to another? Then extend it to LA? Instead they plan this massive high-speed line that goes from one end of the state to another."
While the US freight rail system is fantastically successful, the existing passenger service is decades behind Europe, he says, due to low investment and hostility from freight companies, which own most of the track.
"America has not been able to retain anything but a vestige of a passenger railway. Amtrak carries about 30 million [passengers] a year, which in Britain, a much smaller country, is about 10 days' worth of journeys," says Mr Wolmar, who recently returned from the US and wrote about the American railways in his blog.
"They haven't managed to achieve speeds, frequency or fares that would rival cars."
The fact that so many Americans have never boarded a train presents a significant cultural barrier, he adds.
But Mr Kunz disagrees. "People say Americans were born with car keys in their hands and driving is in our DNA - but if you look back to 1922 then 99% of Americans lived in cities and moved around on trains."
From that point on, the oil and motor industries pushed for road projects and American cities were developed with that in mind. But he believes the expansion of light rail and metro systems can help turn urban America into more "walkable communities".
Back on the Acela, the train pulls into its final destination, Union Station, bang on time.
"This is Washington DC. Final stop," says the announcement.
For the American dream of high-speed rail, it could be just the start.

the future of transport - at the whole world level!

The USA and Russia are seriously considering building a tunnel under the Bering Sea to link Siberia with Alaska, a rail tunnel obviously. The cost? A mere $100 billion, chickenfeed at the world level.

This is a fantastic move and suggests that at least at government level people are thinking beyond oil and the obvious demise of air travel. The intention is that we will be able to travel from London to New York by rail, not really that far fetched as the first stretch of water (the English Channel) already has a tunnel under it and the Bering Tunnel will only be about twice as long.

We're off to New York in December, by air of course, but I very much doubt our kids will be able to do the same thing, and their kids certainly won't be able to. But they will still be able to make (an albeit longer time-wise) trip around the world, train from London to New York, then sailing ship across the Atlantic. All is not lost! And it will be so much more fun doing it the modern way.

The journey across Siberia and Alaska will be fantastic. worth doing for the scenery alone. Perhaps it will incorporate the White Pass and Yukon Railroad (in the pictures) on its journey through North America.

the US ahead of the UK in modern transport - who would have believed it?

The USA, former home of the automobile has actually pushed AHEAD of the UK in developing 21st ce ntury transport. In addition to building dozens of new tramways in the last twenty years or so they have just now started building trams again.

It's time the UK woke up tpo the amazing opportunities opening up for the building and operating of modern transport solutions - both light and heavy rail - as the oil price escalates.

This is from the US Dept of Transportation's own blog.

United Streetcar putting Americans to work


When you watch our latest video, "Transporting America: United Streetcar," you'll see the next generation of transportation. You'll see transit investments from the Department of Transportation helping people get where they need to go without breaking the bank. And you'll see a company out-innovating and out-building its foreign competition while creating jobs for American workers.


The streetcars rolling through Portland, Oregon, are helping commuters beat the rising cost of refueling their cars and vans and trucks. And, as rising gas prices take a bigger bite out of family budgets, other communities are looking to ease that bite through similar transportation options.

As commuter Jim Winkle says in the video, "It's made a huge difference."


That's why the Department of Transportation has supported streetcar projects in communities like Portland across America. From Charlotte, North Carolina, and Washington, DC, to Tucson, Arizona, and Dallas, Texas, grants from the Federal Transit Administration are helping jump-start the American streetcar renaissance.


United Streetcar president Chandra Brown agrees: "The Department of Transportation has been a true partner as the streetcar industry has developed. Without their assistance, we could not have made the private investment to make this new industry successful."


That's good news for commuters and their families. It's also good news for American workers because, at United Streetcar, they're manufacturing the first American streetcars in more than 50 years.


And we mean "American." The cars rolling out of United Streetcar have the highest percentage of American parts and labor of any streetcar in the last 50 years. That means United Streetcar's innovation is creating an economic ripple effect, providing business for an all-American supply chain of more than 200 different vendors in 20-plus states across the U.S.


I love the idea of DOT grants helping create American jobs, and I love the idea of helping American families with options to ease the pinch they feel at the pump. But there's also the pride I hear in workers--like welder Steve Goodman and construction foreman Casey Peacock--who know that for the first time in more than 50 years America can build its own streetcars.


And not only build our own streetcars--this company is bold enough to take on its foreign competitors by planning to export the cars they make.


President Obama has challenged Americans to dream big and build big. United Streetcar has risen to that challenge, and they’re doing it all with American parts, labor, and ingenuity. That means less congestion on our roads, more jobs for American workers, and a future we are prepared to win.

Video <here

modelling

First apologies for no posts for a week or so - I've not been too well. But a lot better today ...

I'm sure a lot of you have been waiting for Bachmann's S&D 7F '00' gauge model. It's now with us and it looks fantastic.

Is there any other line apart from the S&D that would get this treatment? A specific model for our route and look at the pubicity shot with a classic S&D landscape behind. This shows the enormous power of our brand!

This post was inspired by this from Adrian Romano which covers S&D and modelling and a few other things ...

I don't know if you keep abreast of what is going on in the world of model railways at present, but there's suddenly a lot of S & D emphasis here and there, what with the excellent 00 gauge layout based on Blandford Forum station at the local museum starring as Railway of the Month in the "Railway Modeller", Bachmann's superb models of S & D 7Fs and Hornby releasing a set of Maunsell coaches as running on S & D metals and a 2P in that railway's Prussian blue.

Apropos Peak Oil, if the peak happens round about 2015 as they suggest on the Steel Interstate website, this would be around the time a century ago when, in Switzerland, there were serious coal shortages on their railways as a result of the First World War, and they ended up electrifying the major routes such as the Gotthardbahn in the 1920s by taking advantage of cheap electricity from hydro-electric plant. A similar scenario could affect the US of A in the coming years, possibly as an unwelcome addition to the in-tray of a Republican administration with Sarah Palin as Vice-President soon after coming into office!

Myself? I've just submitted an application to join the Mid-Anglia Rail Passengers' Association, to promote and protect rail services between Ipswich and Cambridge and Peterborough. It will be interesting to learn how seriously they and Railfuture are taking Peak Oil at present.

where the US leads we follow

(Orlando November 2010)

I made my first trip to the USA in November and I was VERY impressed. It was much cleaner, friendlier and, surprisingly, greener than the UK. Dozens of new tram systems have opened up there in the last ten years and rail is seeing a big revival. Most US freight is already carried by rail. The US did of course have a superb rail network - both steam and electric (interurban) until about the 40s, but then cheap oil and the car took over.

Cheap oil is now vanishing and the US is leading the way in the switch from road to rail. See below for a tangential view of this development.

This from today's Whiskey and Gunpowder (an investment site)


Auto-suburbia is losing its utility and its desirability. More from "The Echo Boom: A New Wave of Market Change":

One overlooked issue in particular about the Echo Boomers will have a meaningful impact on all forms of real estate…they don’t drive.

According to a report by Kiplinger, motorists aged 21 to 30 now account for 14% of miles driven, down from 21% in 1995. As quoted in that report, William Draves, president of Learning Resources Network pointed out, "This generation focuses its buying on computers, BlackBerrys, music and software and views commuting a few hours by car a huge productivity waste when they can work using PDAs while taking the bus and train."

This certainly doesn’t bode well for the automotive industry, but it also may not help real estate strategies that rely on communities and suburbs that can only be navigated by car. The Baby Boomers fueled the growth of cities that revolve around cars, but the Echo Boomers are likely to flock to places where they don’t have to drive every day. This could be a significant drag on low-density communities without mass transit and a boon to older, more compact cities.

back

SORRY ABOUT PICS - Picasa is being an absolute pain at the moment. Will try to upload tomorrow!!

Haiti.
Pool area at night on ship.

Discovery Cove, Orlando.

Monorail, Magic Kingdom.

Well, that was some holiday! It's taken a week to recover ...

A few tasters for you - obviously future posts will be solely, if occasionally tangentially, rail related!

kunstler time

The latest apocalyptic piece by James Howard Kunstler.

Many of you will not agree with a lot of this but I do like his no-nonsense writing style and he does make very good observations. Being American he may have a more jaded view of the future than we do, and he doesn't tend to volunteer solutions. That is, of course, exactly what we ARE about!

I think my main worry is that his view will become the prevailing view (at least in the USA) and that will lead to a sense of impotence to address, then correct, the numerous problems that Peak Oil will cause. I have always felt that providing we start planning now for a post-oil future, and that our governments are honest with us about the real reasons for 'energy efficiency' etc (rather than always resorting to the 'Global Warming' excuse) the transition need not be apocalyptic but actually life-enhancing. That is surely what the S&D is all about, and indeed always has been!

Going Broke Slowly, Then All at Once

I was plying the interstate highways of New England this weekend — there is no sane way to get from Albany, New York, to the vicinity of Middletown, Connecticut, by public transit — marveling at the vistas of normality all around me: the freeway lanes with their orderly streams of happy motorists, the chain stores floating like islands on the gray undulating landscape, the corporate towers of Springfield, Mass, and then Hartford, gleaming in the persistent pre-spring sunshine, as though they physically represented the wished-for dynamism of economies in recovery. “I see dead people...” said the kid in that horror movie. I see dying ways of life.

There was no denying the spectacular weather for us long-suffering northeasterners. A week ago, it was like living in a banana daiquiri around here. Now, it was sixty-two degrees in East Haddam, CT, along a very beautiful stretch of the Connecticut River somehow miraculously unmarred by the usual mutilations of industry or recreation. On a few hillsides facing south, daffodils were already up with blossom heads ready to pop. The mind could go two ways: into the past, when wooden sailing craft were built in yards along the river; or into the future, when it would be easy to imagine wooden sailing craft being built there again, only twenty miles or so from the great sheltered mini-sea of Long Island Sound.

Whatever else one thinks of how we live these days, it’s hard to not see it as temporary, historically anomalous, a peculiar blip in human experience. I’ve spent my whole life riding around in cars, never questioning whether the makings of tomorrow’s supper would be there waiting on the supermarket shelves, never doubting when I entered a room that the lights would go on at the flick of a switch, never worrying about my personal safety. And now hardly a moment goes by when I don’t feel tremors of massive change in these things, as though all life’s comforts and structural certainties rested on a groaning fault line.

It had been one of those eventless weeks when the world pretended to be a settled place. The collapse of Greece seemed like little more than a passing case of geo-financial heartburn. The 36,000-odd newly-unemployed were spun magically into a feel-good story for public consumption, and the stock markets ratified it by levitating over a hundred points. The news media was preoccupied with the Great Question of whether the first woman film director would win a prize, thus settling all accounts in the age-old gender war, and the health care reform bill lumbered around the congressional offices like a zombie in search of a silver bullet that might send it back to the comforts of the tomb.

All in all, it was the sort of quiescent string of days that makes someone like me nervous. I can’t help imagining what it was like in the spring of 1860, for instance, when so many terrible questions of polity hung over the country, and hundreds of thousands of young men still walked behind their plows or stood at their counting desks or turned their wrenches in the exciting new industries — not knowing that destiny was busy preparing a ditch somewhere to receive their shattered corpses in places as-yet-unknown called Spotsylvania, Shiloh, and Cold Harbor. Or else my mind projects to the spring of 1939, when men dressed in neckties and hats sat in a ballpark watching Joe DiMaggio and Charlie Keller play “pepper” in the pregame sunshine, and nobody much thought about the coming beaches of Normandy and the canebrakes of the Solomon Islands.

Everything we know about it seems to indicate that human beings happily go along with the program — whatever the program is — until all of a sudden they can’t, and then they don’t. It’s like the quote oft-repeated these days (because it’s so apt for these times) by surly old Ernest Hemingway about how the man in a story went broke: slowly, and then all at once. In the background of last week’s reassuring torpor, one ominous little signal flashed perhaps dimly in all that sunshine: the price of oil broke above $81-a-barrel. Of course in that range it becomes impossible for the staggering monster of our so-called “consumer” economy to enter the much-wished-for nirvana of “recovery” — where the orgies of spending on houses and cars and electronic entertainment machines will resume like the force of nature it is presumed to be. Over $80-a-barrel and we’re in the zone where what’s left of this economy cracks and crumbles a little bit more each day, lurching forward to that moment when something life-changing occurs all at once.

I gave a talk down in Connecticut to a roomful of people who are still pretty much preoccupied with such questions as how to fight the landing of the next WalMart UFO, or how best to entice tourists to purchase objets-d’art, or serve up weekend entertainments along with fine dining and accommodations. Meanwhile, I’m thinking: how many of you might be grubbing around the woods six months from now for enough acorns and mushrooms to make something resembling soup...? It’s an extreme fantasy, I know, but it dogs me. Elsewhere in this big nation, I imagine a laid-off engineer — a genial, capable fellow, once valued by his former employer — tinkering in his Ohio basement with a device designed to blow up the headquarters of the health insurance company that has just denied his wife treatment for cancer of some organ or other. Or my mind ventures into the rank “function room” of a Holiday Inn outside Indianapolis, where Tea Party recruits meet over chicken nuggets to discuss the New World Order, and the Bilderberg conspiracy, and the suspicious numbers of Jews in the bonus-padded upper echelons of the Wall Street banks, and what might be done about that.

On the trip back to upstate New York, my eyes couldn’t fix on anything in the landscape that seemed even remotely permanent. Even the massiveness of all that steel and concrete deployed in everything from the glass towers to the highway toll booths seemed insubstantial. I could easily envisage the Mass Pike empty of cars with mulleins and sumacs popping through fissures in the pavement, and sheets of aluminum on the vacant Big Box stores flapping rhythmically in the wind, and something entirely new going on in the hills and valleys along the way, where people labored to bring forth new life.

back to barcelona

Some shots from Barcelona's very new tramway, the Trambaix. These are shots from the northern network of lines 4, 5 and 6. There is also an unconnected (and slightly less new) network to the south of the city which is also 3 routes. Interestingly both routes terminate on the same diagonal road that intersects the city but with about 2 miles between the routes. No doubt the network will expand enormously in the future and the lines will link up. It would be great to see modern trams rather than buses running along La Rambla and the waterside.

Britain's lagging years behind continental Europe on the installation of modern, sustainable transport systems, but we won't always be so backwards! I suspect that as time goes by the distinction between tram and train will continue to blur and that the New S&D will meet tramways at many points on our route, and trams may even work over some sections of our network. Alternatively we may need to run rails in the streets where building work has blocked our line and the alternatives are too expensive to justify, which will mean running heavy passenger and freight trains through the streets, as in Switzerland and the USA. Who knows?

freight - us and recession style

Most people think of the USA as pretty much backwards transport wise, but in fact as rail freight goes it is cutting edge. Most freight in the USA is moved by rail, not road.

So this piece, in an investment newsletter, caught my eye. To me it shows that rail is beginning to push itself to the front of the agenda, and also really does provide an indicator of economic activity, something our clogged roads can never do!


The No. 1 Reason I Don’t Trust This Market

BY TOM DYSON

The train drew round the bend and approached the crossing. The warning bells rang, and the barriers fell across the road. Then the engineer pulled four long blasts on his horn. Two 4,400-horsepower GE locomotives rolled past me at low speed ... bending the rails with their weight. This was an express container train bound for Chicago..."Shorter than normal," I thought. "And more empties than usual." Last week, I was on vacation in California. While I was there, I took the opportunity to gauge railroad activity. We drove a hundred miles beside Union Pacific's southern California mainline. This is one of the most important stretches of railroad in the country. It links the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles with the eastern seaboard. I was expecting to see dozens of trains. We only saw two...

Then we stopped in Los Angeles to ogle the huge tangle of idled Union Pacific locomotives outside the Port of Long Beach. There must have been over 100 of them.

Freight trains move our most important basic materials around the country... like coal, fertilizer, steel, and container boxes. By watching the trends on America's freight railroads, you can get an excellent feel for the strength of the economy.

Right now, the railroads are hurting. Railcar loadings are down about 20% from last year's levels, railroads have abandoned half a million freight cars and idled over 5,000 locomotives. CSX Railroad has even closed a local freight yard near where I live in Florida and is using it entirely for storage.

Here's the thing: Since the stock market started rising in March, and the news from the housing market has improved, everyone's talking about economic recovery and the end of the recession. Last week, the non-farm payroll numbers came out. They were stronger than expected, sending the stock market to a new nine-month high... So why is business in the railroad industry still deteriorating?

This month's issue of Trains Magazine features a study of the number of locomotives held in storage by the major, "Class 1" railroads. The number of idled locomotives has swelled 57% between March and June...

Each quarter, Economic Planning Associates releases its Rail Car Overview report. In the second quarter, orders for new rail cars by railroads and shippers tumbled to 2,165 units from 2,374 units in the first quarter.And finally, the Association of American Railroads released its weekly report on rail car loadings last Thursday...

For the first seven months of 2009, total U.S. rail car loadings were down 19%, while container and trailer transportation fell 17.2%. All 19 major commodity categories tracked by the AAR saw car loads decline in July. The biggest declines were coal (down 9.9%), metals and metal products (down 47.7%), metallic ores (down 58.9%), and crushed stone and gravel (down 25.8%).The message from the railroads is, the economic recovery is a mirage. Things are going from bad to worse. Until you see the railroads turn around, you should continue to be suspicious of the rally in the stock market and the "green shoots" story in the news.

this week's helping

of James Howard Kunstler!

He seems to be becoming fixated on rail ...

Too Stupid to Survive

Coming home from the annual meet-up of the New Urbanists, I was already agitated from the shenanigans of United Airlines — two-hour delay, blown connection — when I waded into this week’s New York Times Sunday Magazine for further evidence that our ruling elites are too stupid to survive (and perhaps the US with them). Exhibit A was the magazine’s lead article about California’s proposed high-speed rail project by Jon Gertner.

The article began with a description of California’s current rail service between the Bay Area and Los Angeles. A commission of nine-year-olds in a place like Germany could run a better system, of course. It’s never on schedule. The equipment breaks down incessantly. A substantial leg of the trip requires a transfer to a bus (along with everybody’s luggage) with no working toilet. You get the picture: Kazakhstan without the basic competence.

The proposed solution to this is the most expensive public works program in the history of the world, at a time when both the state of California and the US federal government are effectively bankrupt. By the way, I wouldn’t argue that California shouldn’t have high-speed rail. It might have been nice if, say, in the late 20th century, some far-seeing governor had noticed what was going on in France, Germany, and Spain but, alas.... It would have been nice, too, if the doltish George W. Bush, when addressing extreme airport congestion in 2003, had considered serious upgrades in normal train service between the many US cities 500 miles or so apart. The idea never entered his walnut brain.

The sad truth is it’s too late now. But the additional sad truth, at this point, is that Californians (and US public in general) would benefit tremendously from normal rail service on a par with the standards of 1927, when speeds of 100 miles-per-hour were common and the trains ran absolutely on time (and frequently, too) without computers (imagine that!). The tracks are still there, waiting to be fixed. In our current condition of psychotic techno-grandiosity, this is all too hopelessly quaint, not cutting edge enough, pathetically un-"hot." The fact that it is not even considered by the editors of The New York Times, not to mention the governor of California, the President of the United States, and all the agency heads and departmental chiefs and think tank gurus and university engineering professors, is something that will have historians of the future rolling their ey es. But for the moment all it shows is that we are collectively too stupid to survive as an advanced society.

Ironically (if you go for gallows irony) a sidebar in the same issue of The NY Times Sunday Magazine featured the latest architect’s wet dream of an airport-of-the-future (p.35). Note to the editors and architects: commercial aviation is toast (we just don’t know it yet). We’re back in the $70-plus a barrel-of-oil aviation death-zone for airlines.

Also ironically proving that America is not alone in techno-triumphalist mental illness was another big article in the same magazine featuring French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s neo-Modernist fantasies for vast new construction projects in Paris. Note to Sarko: the developed world’s metroplexes are headed for shocking contraction, not further expansion. I know this is counter-intuitive, but a little applied prayerful research will bear it out. And, by the way, the last thing any city on earth needs is more skyscrapers — i.e. buildings that have no chance of ever being renovated when they reach the senility stage of their design-life. For really mind-blowing statements, this one from that article is a standout: "Paris’s current problems as a city can be traced to the very thing that makes it most delightful — its beauty." Right. So, the solution will be to make it more like Houston.

Actually, I doubt the French people consider these schemes anymore plausible than ur-Modernist Le Corbusier’s 1924 proposal to bulldoze half of the Right Bank and replace it with dozens of identical skyscrapers. The French people laughed at Corbu, and put their vertical slums outside the city center, but notice that we Americans actually did it, replacing our old human-scaled center cities with priapic arrays of glass-and-steel tubes surrounded by parking lagoons. Anyway, nobody in the OECD world will have the energy to carry out anything like this again, not even France with its nuke plants.

Which brings me back to the New Urbanist annual meet-up last week in Denver. Given the gathering conditions of what I variously call The Long Emergency or the economic clusterf**k, they have had to shift their focus starkly. For years, their stock-in-trade was the greenfield New Town or Traditional Neighborhood Development (TND), a severe reform of conventional suburban development. That sort of reform work was only possible when 1.) the continued expansion of suburbia seemed utterly inevitable, requiring heroic mitigation and 2.) when they could team up with the production home-builders to get their TND projects built. To the group’s credit, they realize that these conditions are no more. Suburbia is now craterin g, both as a re pository of wealth in real estate and as a practical matter of everyday existence. They get that the energy crisis and all its implications are real and that our response to it had better be deft. They understand that the capital resources we thought we had for Big Projects are flying into a black hole at the speed of light. Mostly they see that he time for "cutting edge" fashionista techno-triumphalist grandiosity is over.

To put it bluntly, the Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU) is perhaps the only surviving collective intelligence left in the United States that is producing ideas consistent with the reality. They recognize that our survival depends on downscaling and re-localization. They recognize the crisis we will soon face in food production, and the desperate need to reactivate the relationship between the way we inhabit the landscape and the way we feed ourselves. They recognize that the solution to the liquid fuels crisis is not cars that can run by other means but walkable towns and cities connected by public transit.

This is exactly what you will not find in the pages of The New York Times or the political corridors of power. Oh, by the way, the Obama administration contacted one of the leading lights of the New Urbanism in the weeks after the inauguration. He never heard back from the White House. I guess they’re not interested.

when even he gets it ....

David Bailey, our webmaster, has just sent me this gem on the death of GM in the USA.

Whilst Michael Moore is still using that old scapegoat Climate Change as the reason for this it is still 99% sound. Buses? Never! I never thought I'd agree with someone from the opposite end of the political spectrum to me, but perhaps this shows just how deep-seated this all is!


Goodbye, GM ...by Michael Moore

I write this on the morning of the end of the once-mighty General Motors. By high noon, the President of the United States will have made it official: General Motors, as we know it, has been totaled.

As I sit here in GM's birthplace, Flint, Michigan, I am surrounded by friends and family who are filled with anxiety about what will happen to them and to the town. Forty percent of the homes and businesses in the city have been abandoned. Imagine what it would be like if you lived in a city where almost every other house is empty. What would be your state of mind?

It is with sad irony that the company which invented "planned obsolescence" -- the decision to build cars that would fall apart after a few years so that the customer would then have to buy a new one -- has now made itself obsolete. It refused to build automobiles that the public wanted, cars that got great gas mileage, were as safe as they could be, and were exceedingly comfortable to drive. Oh -- and that wouldn't start falling apart after two years. GM stubbornly fought environmental and safety regulations. Its executives arrogantly ignored the "inferior" Japanese and German cars, cars which would become the gold standard for automobile buyers. And it was hell-bent on punishing its unionized workforce, lopping off thousands of workers for no good reason other than to "improve" the short-term bottom line of the corporation. Beginning in the 1980s, when GM was posting record profits, it moved countless jobs to Mexico and elsewhere, thus destroying the lives of tens of thousands of hard-working Americans. The glaring stupidity of this policy was that, when they eliminated the income of so many middle class families, who did they think was going to be able to afford to buy their cars? History will record this blunder in the same way it now writes about the French building the Maginot Line or how the Romans cluelessly poisoned their own water system with lethal lead in its pipes.

So here we are at the deathbed of General Motors. The company's body not yet cold, and I find myself filled with -- dare I say it -- joy. It is not the joy of revenge against a corporation that ruined my hometown and brought misery, divorce, alcoholism, homelessness, physical and mental debilitation, and drug addiction to the people I grew up with. Nor do I, obviously, claim any joy in knowing that 21,000 more GM workers will be told that they, too, are without a job.

But you and I and the rest of America now own a car company! I know, I know -- who on earth wants to run a car company? Who among us wants $50 billion of our tax dollars thrown down the rat hole of still trying to save GM? Let's be clear about this: The only way to save GM is to kill GM. Saving our precious industrial infrastructure, though, is another matter and must be a top priority. If we allow the shutting down and tearing down of our auto plants, we will sorely wish we still had them when we realize that those factories could have built the alternative energy systems we now desperately need. And when we realize that the best way to transport ourselves is on light rail and bullet trains and cleaner buses, how will we do this if we've allowed our industrial capacity and its skilled workforce to disappear?

Thus, as GM is "reorganized" by the federal government and the bankruptcy court, here is the plan I am asking President Obama to implement for the good of the workers, the GM communities, and the nation as a whole. Twenty years ago when I made "Roger & Me," I tried to warn people about what was ahead for General Motors. Had the power structure and the punditocracy listened, maybe much of this could have been avoided. Based on my track record, I request an honest and sincere consideration of the following suggestions:

1. Just as President Roosevelt did after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the President must tell the nation that we are at war and we must immediately convert our auto factories to factories that build mass transit vehicles and alternative energy devices. Within months in Flint in 1942, GM halted all car production and immediately used the assembly lines to build planes, tanks and machine guns. The conversion took no time at all. Everyone pitched in. The fascists were defeated.

We are now in a different kind of war -- a war that we have conducted against the ecosystem and has been conducted by our very own corporate leaders. This current war has two fronts. One is headquartered in Detroit. The products built in the factories of GM, Ford and Chrysler are some of the greatest weapons of mass destruction responsible for global warming and the melting of our polar icecaps. The things we call "cars" may have been fun to drive, but they are like a million daggers into the heart of Mother Nature. To continue to build them would only lead to the ruin of our species and much of the planet.

The other front in this war is being waged by the oil companies against you and me. They are committed to fleecing us whenever they can, and they have been reckless stewards of the finite amount of oil that is located under the surface of the earth. They know they are sucking it bone dry. And like the lumber tycoons of the early 20th century who didn't give a damn about future generations as they tore down every forest they could get their hands on, these oil barons are not telling the public what they know to be true -- that there are only a few more decades of useable oil on this planet. And as the end days of oil approach us, get ready for some very desperate people willing to kill and be killed just to get their hands on a gallon can of gasoline.

President Obama, now that he has taken control of GM, needs to convert the factories to new and needed uses immediately.

2. Don't put another $30 billion into the coffers of GM to build cars. Instead, use that money to keep the current workforce -- and most of those who have been laid off -- employed so that they can build the new modes of 21st century transportation. Let them start the conversion work now.

3. Announce that we will have bullet trains criss-crossing this country in the next five years. Japan is celebrating the 45th anniversary of its first bullet train this year. Now they have dozens of them. Average speed: 165 mph. Average time a train is late: under 30 seconds. They have had these high speed trains for nearly five decades -- and we don't even have one! The fact that the technology already exists for us to go from New York to L.A. in 17 hours by train, and that we haven't used it, is criminal. Let's hire the unemployed to build the new high speed lines all over the country. Chicago to Detroit in less than two hours. Miami to DC in under 7 hours. Denver to Dallas in five and a half. This can be done and done now.

4. Initiate a program to put light rail mass transit lines in all our large and medium-sized cities. Build those trains in the GM factories. And hire local people everywhere to install and run this system.

5. For people in rural areas not served by the train lines, have the GM plants produce energy efficient clean buses.

6. For the time being, have some factories build hybrid or all-electric cars (and batteries). It will take a few years for people to get used to the new ways to transport ourselves, so if we're going to have automobiles, let's have kinder, gentler ones. We can be building these next month (do not believe anyone who tells you it will take years to retool the factories -- that simply isn't true).

7. Transform some of the empty GM factories to facilities that build windmills, solar panels and other means of alternate forms of energy. We need tens of millions of solar panels right now. And there is an eager and skilled workforce who can build them.

8. Provide tax incentives for those who travel by hybrid car or bus or train. Also, credits for those who convert their home to alternative energy.

9. To help pay for this, impose a two-dollar tax on every gallon of gasoline. This will get people to switch to more energy saving cars or to use the new rail lines and rail cars the former autoworkers have built for them.

Well, that's a start. Please, please, please don't save GM so that a smaller version of it will simply do nothing more than build Chevys or Cadillacs. This is not a long-term solution. Don't throw bad money into a company whose tailpipe is malfunctioning, causing a strange odor to fill the car.

100 years ago this year, the founders of General Motors convinced the world to give up their horses and saddles and buggy whips to try a new form of transportation. Now it is time for us to say goodbye to the internal combustion engine. It seemed to serve us well for so long. We enjoyed the car hops at the A&W. We made out in the front -- and the back -- seat. We watched movies on large outdoor screens, went to the races at NASCAR tracks across the country, and saw the Pacific Ocean for the first time through the window down Hwy. 1. And now it's over. It's a new day and a new century. The President -- and the UAW -- must seize this moment and create a big batch of lemonade from this very sour and sad lemon.

Yesterday, the last surviving person from the Titanic disaster passed away. She escaped certain death that night and went on to live another 97 years.

So can we survive our own Titanic in all the Flint Michigans of this country. 60% of GM is ours. I think we can do a better job.

the bottom according to kunstler

I think that James Howard Kunstler's peak oil informed approach to the unravelling of US society is always worth a read! Whilst obviously it first and foremost is a critique of the US almost all of it is equally applicable to the UK. This is his latest ...

The Bottom

Euphoria managed to out-run swine flu last week as the epidemic-du-jour, with “consumer” confidence jumping and the big bank stocks nudging up. The H1N1 virus fizzled for now, at least in terms of kill ratio, though we’re warned it might boomerang in the fall with a vengeance. No one was surprised to see Chrysler roll over like a possum on a county highway, but the memory of their muscle cars will linger on like a California surfing song. Here in the northeast, where Sundays are not spent at the NASCAR oval, the spring foliage reached the tenderly explosive stage and it was hard to feel bad about anything.

For now, the “bottom” is in — that is, the bottom of this society’s ability to process reality. It may continue for a month of so, even after the “stress test” for banks is finally let out of the massage parlor with a “happy ending.” But events are underway that are beyond the command of personalities. We’re done “doing business” in all the ways that we’ve been used to, but we just can’t get with the new program. Let’s count the ways:

1) The revolving credit economy is over. It’s over because we can’t increase energy inputs to the system, which is one way of saying “peak oil.” Of course hardly anybody believes this right now because the price of oil crashed nine months ago, along with global manufacturing and trade. But nothing has changed on the peak oil scene — except perhaps that ever more new oil projects have been cancelled for lack of financing, which will boomerang on us (even if swine flu doesn’t) in the form of much lower future oil production. In any case, the credit fiesta is over, and the “consumer” economy with it, because industrial growth as we have known it is over. It’s over globally, too, though all regions of the world will not experience its demise the same way at the same rate.

The Asian nations may swap things around a while longer but China is basically screwed. They have less oil left than we have (which is saying, not much at all) and they won’t corner the rest of the global oil market without starting World War Three. Meanwhile, they’re running out of water and food. Good luck becoming the next global hegemon. Oh, and Japan imports 90 percent of its energy; India over 80 percent. Fuggeddabowdit.

Credit will not vanish everywhere overnight — even in the USA — because it is not distributed equally everywhere. But it will vanish in layers, and here in the USA a very broad layer of the lower and middle classes are now losing their access to it in one way or another — personally, in small business — and they will never get it back. Anyone who intends to thrive in the years just ahead had better plan on doing it on the basis of accounts receivable — and what they receive might not even necessarily come in the form of US dollars. It may come in the form of gold or silver or in the promise of reciprocal services rendered.

This has enormous implications for two of the items in which our credit-dispensing operations are most deeply vested: houses and cars. Unfortunately, these are exactly the things that economic life has been based on for decades in our nation, which leads to the next categories:

2) The suburban living arrangement is over, along with all its accessories and furnishings. Taken as “all of a piece,” the suburban expansion was one sixty-year-long orgasm of hypertrophy. We did it because we could. We won a world war and threw a party. We had lots of cheap land and cheap oil. It made lots of people lots of money and all its usufructs have become embedded in our national identity to the dangerous degree that the loss of them will provoke a kind of national psychotic breakdown. In fact, it already has. The completely unrealistic expectation that we can resume this way of life is proof of it.

The immediate problem is that we can’t build anymore of it. The next problem will be the failure of the stuff that already exists. The first stage of that is now palpable in the mortgage foreclosure fiasco and, just beginning now, the tanking of malls, strip centers, office parks and other commercial property investments. The latter will accelerate and become visible very quickly as retail tenants bug out and weeds start growing where the Chryslers and Pontiacs once parked. The next stage, which involves large demographic shifts in how we inhabit the landscape, has not quite gotten underway.

3) The Happy Motoring fiesta is over. You’d think that with Chrysler crawling into the bankruptcy court, and GM just weeks away from the same terminal ceremony, the news media would begin to suspect that the foundation of everyday life in this country was cracking. Instead, all we hear is blather about “market share” shifting to Toyota. News flash: not only will we make fewer automobiles in the USA, but Americans will buy far fewer cars made anywhere. We’ll keep the current fleet moving a while longer, but when it’s too beat to repair, we won’t be changing it out for a new fleet — despite all the fantasies about hybrids, plug-and-drive electrics, and so on. The masses will be too broke to buy these things. What’s more, they will be very resentful of th e shrinking economic “elite” who can afford them. And, anyway, our roads and highways are destined to fall apart very quickly because there is no way we can sustain the necessary rate of normal maintenance. Meanwhile, we remain completely un-serious about public transit — even about fixing the vestiges that still exist. The airline industry, of course, will be toast inside of five years.

4) Our food production system is approaching crisis. There’s no way we can continue the petro-agriculture system of farming and the Cheez Doodle and Pepsi Cola diet that it services. The public is absolutely zombified in the face of this problem — perhaps a result of the diet itself. President Obama and Ag Secretary Vilsack have not given a hint that they understand the gravity of the situation. It is probably one of those unfortunate events of history that can only impress a society in the form of a crisis. It also happens to be one of the few problems we face that public policy could affect sharply and broadly — if we underwrote the reactivation of smaller, local farm operations instead of shoveling money to giant “agribusiness” (or Citibank, or Goldman Sachs, or AIG. .). I maintain that this may be the year that the crisis gets our attention, because capital is suddenly harder to get than fossil-fuel-based fertilizer.

All these epochal discontinuities present themselves, for the moment, as a season of muted “hope” and general apathy. The days are suddenly mild. We’ve resumed old and happy habits of grilling meat outdoors and motoring to those remaining places that were not blanketed with franchised food huts and discount malls. We have a new, charming president with an appealing family. Newly minted dollars are flowing to the “shovel-ready.” The new bad news is less bad than the old bad news (or seems to be). And the year just past has been such a bummer that our hard-wired human nature tells us that good things must be just around the corner.

Personally, I think a lot of good things await us, but not the ones we’re expecting — not a return to buying slurpees on credit cards. It will be very salutary to leave behind the junk empire we’ve accumulated and move into an epoch of quality and purpose. For the moment, though, our hopes reside elsewhere.

a US view

From the great James Howard Kunstler's blog - wise views on future transport in the USA, that could equally be applied to the UK and Europe.

[W]hat people of good intention and progressive predilection want to know is how come Mr. Obama doesn’t just lay out the truth, undertake the hard job of cutting the nation’s losses, and get on with setting this society on a new course. The truth is that we’re comprehensively bankrupt, and no amount of shuffling certificates around will avail to alter that. The bad debt has to be "worked out" — i.e. written off, subjected to liquidation of remaining assets and collateral, reorganized under the bankruptcy statutes, and put behind us. We have to work very hard to reconfigure the physical arrangement of life in the USA, moving away from the losses of our suburbs, reactivating our towns, downscaling our biggest cities, re-scaling our farms and food production, switching out our Happy Motoring system for public transit and walkable neighborhoods, rebuilding local networks of commerce, and figuring out a way to make a few things of value again.

What’s happened instead is what I most feared: that our politicians would mount a massive campaign to sustain the unsustainable. That’s what all the TARP and TARF and PPIT and bailouts are about. It will all amount to an exercise in futility and could easily end up wrecking the USA in every sense of the term. If Mr. Obama doesn’t get with a better program, then we are going to face a Long Emergency as grueling as the French Revolution. One very plain and straightforward example at hand is the announcement last week of a plan to build a high-speed rail network. To be blunt about it, this is perfectly ******* stupid. It will require a whole new track network, because high speed trains can’t run on the old rights of way with their less forgiving curve ratios and grades. We would be so much better off simply fixing up and reactivating the normal-speed track system that is sitting out there rusting in the rain — and save our more grandiose visions for a later time.

I don’t like to be misunderstood. With the airlines in a business death spiral, and mass motoring doomed, we need a national passenger rail system desperately. But we already have one that used to be the envy of the world before we abandoned it. And we don’t have either the time or the resources to build a new parallel network.