Rail Freight Quotes

The vibrations he felt in his sleep had nothing to do with his soul easing out of his body as he dreamily thought; they came solely from the weight and motion of the freight train rolling north to deliver fuel, furniture and other items having no relevance to Elijah’s life or his dreaming. On the metal rail his arm itched like a nose with a feeling that something bad was about to happen. In another life the sound of the train would have been reminiscent of certain songs by Muddy Waters or even Bruce Springsteen but not in this one. In this life the sound stabbed viciously against the night exactly like a human being demonstrating flawless disrespect for the life of another human being. --from short story ELIJAH’S SKIN

Like here it was that I entered that stage when a child overcomes naivite enough to realize an adult's emotional reaction as somethimes freakish for its inconsistencies, so can, on his own reasoning canvas, paint those early pale colors of judgement, resulting from initial moments of ability to critically examine life's perplexities, in tentative little brain-engine stirrings, before they faded to quickly join that train of remembered experience carrying signals indicating existence which itself far outweighs traction effort by thinking's soon slipping drivers to effectively resist any slack-action advantage, for starting so necessitates continual cuts on the hauler - performed as if governed lifelong by the tagwork of a student-green foreman who, crushed under on rushing time always building against his excessive load of emotional contents, is forever a lost ball in the high weeds of personal developments - until, with ever changing emphasis through a whole series of grades of consciousness (leading up from root-beginnings of obscure childish inconscious soul within a world), early lack - for what child sustains logic? - reaches a point of late fossilization, resultant of repeated wrong moves in endless switching of dark significances crammed inside the cranium, where, through such hindering habits, there no longer is the flexibility for thought transfer and unloading of dead freight that a standard gauge would afford and thus, as Faustian Destiny dictates, is an inept mink, limited, being in existence firmly tracked just above the constant "T" biased ballast supporting wherever space yearnings lead the worn rails of civilized comprehension, so henceforth is restricted to mere pickups and setouts of drab distortion, while traveling wearily along its familiar Western Thinking right-of-way. But choo-choo nonsense aside, ...

That was some shady shit out there, Rome,” Braeden said once the total chaos of winning the game had gone down to a considerable roar. We were finally in the locker room, and I was stripping off my sweat and grass-stained gear. “Total douche move.” I agreed. It wasn’t the first time a team had tried to take me out of a game. It was pretty much common practice, especially when something like a title and championship was at stake. Still, I’d never quite had anyone come at me like that before. The play was already in progress. Sacking me wouldn’t have changed the touchdown I’d just thrown. Except of course to keep me from throwing another one. That guy deliberately came in like a freight train and plowed me down. I lay there stunned for long moments, waiting for the air to come back in my lungs and for my body to process the shock of the hit. Thankfully, he wasn’t that good at tackling and it did nothing more than stun me. And it got him thrown out of the game. It really hadn’t been a big deal. Like I said, it happened a lot. But it was the first time it happened in front of Rimmel. I couldn’t help but notice how the large screen on the field had zeroed in on the girl in number twenty-four’s hoodie, who was climbing over the railing and preparing to leap down onto the field. The security guard was yelling at her, but she barely noticed him. Her eyes were trained out on the field, where I was. It was almost laughable that her tiny ass was going to rush out onto a field full of men more than double her size to make sure I was okay. G**damn. I loved her even more just then. When the guard put his hand on her ankle, trying to stop her from going back to her seat, something happened. Something that never had in my entire life of playing football. The game faded away. For once, I was out on the field and unable to focus on only the game. It took a backseat to the girl teetering on the edge of the railing.

all this important stuff has *no one in charge of it.* Some people claim to be, but they're in charge of one tiny piece of it, and maybe they think *their* piece is a brake or a steering wheel, but they're wrong. The world's economy is a runaway train, the driver dead at the switch, the passengers clinging on for dear life as their possessions go flying off the freight-cars and out the windows, and each curve in the tracks threatens to take it off the rails altogether. There's a small number of people in the back of the train who fiercely argue about when it will go off the rails, and whether the train can be slowed down by everyone just calming down and acting as though everything was all right. These people are the economists, and some of the first-class passengers pay them very well for their predictions about whether the train is doing all right and which side of the car they should lean into to prevent their hats from falling off on the next corner. Everyone else ignores them.

The truth was that the city was losing manufacturing jobs at a pace five times worse than the national average, and one of the reasons for its loss of 800,000 industrial jobs since 1962 was, expert after expert concluded, the decline of rail freight service. Several government studies had to concede, despite the bias toward the more glamorous and profit-intensive Trump-like development of these yards, that “a substantial market demand” existed for a real rail terminal at either 60th or 34th Streets. In fact, the ailing railroad industry was beginning to make a strong comeback outside of New York by the end of the seventies, aided by escalating fuel costs, which were putting truckers at a sudden disadvantage. A West Side terminal at either of the Trump yards would not only have positioned the city to take advantage of this economic shift, it would also have dramatically reduced truckload traffic through clogged Manhattan streets. Trump’s simultaneous hold on both of the potential terminal sites for almost half a decade may have been a fatal blow to a manufacturing revival in New York.

Michael Ward knows. Ward loves railroads. His loves his own railroad company, CSX, which traces its origins to 1827 when the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad was formed as the nation’s first common carrier. He traces his own origins at CSX back thirty-seven years, when he took an analyst job as a newly minted Harvard Business School M.B.A., rising to become chairman, president, and CEO in 2003. And he loves the whole American freight rail industry. “Railroaders are like farmers,” Ward declares. “You heard about the farmer that won the lottery? They said to him, ‘Oh my gosh, you won the lottery; what are you going to do with all that money?’ He said, ‘I’m a farmer and I love farming, and I’m going to farm until every penny of it is gone.’ And I say railroaders are like that. When we make more money, we’re going to invest more back into the infrastructure, so we can strengthen the railroad and grow the business.” Ward may sound like a press release, but that’s exactly how he talks, and why he’s a major industry spokesman. He lavishes praise on industry performance: “While we’ve improved the profitability of the industry, we’ve also cut rates in half of what they were in 1980 for our customers, on an inflation-adjusted basis. We’re providing a more economical product to them, and it’s safer and more reliable. Over the years, as an industry, our train accident rate is down 80 percent; our personal injury rate is down 85 percent; and we’re doing this with about one-third of the workforce we had in 1980.” He calls the industry “the envy of the world.

Before the cotton crash, though, the Delta’s main problem was that black people had begun to migrate to the North to work in factories. The main transportation routes out of the Delta led straight north. The Illinois Central Railroad, which was by far the most powerful economic actor in Mississippi, had bought the Delta’s main rail system in 1892; its passengers and freight hooked up in Memphis with the main Illinois Central line, which ran from New Orleans to Chicago, paralleling the route of U.S. Highway 51. U.S. Highway 61, paralleling the Mississippi River, passed through Clarksdale; U.S. 49, running diagonally northwest through the Delta from Jackson, Mississippi, met 61 on the outskirts of Clarksdale.

Together they pulled the door shut, and suddenly the car was dark and warm, and it throbbed like the body of a bass viol. The beat of wheels on the rail-ends grew less rapid as the freight slowed to go through the town.

When you hitchhike, people tell you their secrets. You exist in a liminal space between what is real and what is not, a sort of leaf come unstuck from an eddy. The driver feels as though talking to you, the hitchhiker, is like stuffing a note into a bottle and tossing it into the sea.

I have not "cowboy camped" in a long time. When you cowboy camp, you do not set up a tent. Your roof is the stars, and you are cradled by the wind. Insects crawl over you in the night. They pause on the bridge of your nose. They check their watches. They are running late. They hurry down your cheeks, muttering to themselves. They don't think of you, of your heavy human worries. They have their own lives.

Away deep in the aim to study himself in the school of the land his ancestors' gravestones flowered, Rip planned to burn his oil on the journey for growth by the hike, the thumb, the hitch, the rod, the freight, the rail, and he x'd New York on a map and pencilled his way to and into and through and under and up and between and over and across states and capitals and counties and cities and towns and villages and valleys and plains and plateaus and prairies and mountains and hills and rivers and roadways and railways and waterways and deserts and islands and reservations and titanic parks and shores and, ocean across to ocean and great lakes down to gulfs, Rip beheld the west and the east and the north and the south of the Brobdingnagian and, God and Christ and Man, it was a pretty damn good grand big fat rash crass cold hot pure mighty lovely ugly hushed dark lonely loud lusty bitchy tender crazy cruel gentle raw sore dear deep history-proud precious place to see, and he sure would, he thought, make the try to see it and smell it and walk and ride and stop and talk and listen in it and go on in it and try to find and feel and hold and know the beliefs in it and the temper and the talents in it and the omens and joys and hopes and frights and lies and laughs and truths and griefs and glows and gifts and glories and glooms and wastes and profits and the pulse and pitch and the music and the magic and the dreams and facts and the action and the score and the scope and span of the mind and the heart and spine and logic and ego and spirit in the soul and the goal of it.

Quiet and loneliness were twin rails down which the freight car of her regrets could come hurtling.

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And maybe, one of these nights, talking with Tara in the yellow light from the oil lamp, we'll stumble upon answers; answers to the riddles that are stuck like thorns into the darkest parts of our hearts.

Try to get support while you're doing this," he said, his eyes kind. "Talk to someone who knows about grief. Don't white-knuckle your way through this." I started crying, and he handed me a box of tissues. I felt like he could see right through me.

I had learned that you couldn't escape the darkness entirely, but you could learn to live above it. Grief was an ocean but you could reach the surface and bob there, where the light was.

How long until the ghosts catch up to me? Until they crowd around me, shouting away anything wonderful in my world. Until they grab my ankles and attempt to drag me underground, back into the darkness.

In the 1990 election campaign both Labour and National parties adopted ambitious targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The country at that point was near carbon-neutral, with sources of emissions balanced by forestry which s3equestered the carbon. However, in the coming decade emissions would skyrocket as New Zealanders drove more; trucks replaced rail and shipping for freight; coal and gas were increasingly burnt for electricity; vast swathes of the country’s farms and wetlands were converted to dairy farming; and coal was used to convert that milk to powder for export. The National government spent the 1990s anguishing over what tool to use to reduce emissions and ended up doing nothing. Labour came in in 1999, signed up to the Kyoto Protocol and announced a carbon tax, but set it so far in the future that coalition politics eventually killed it. Meanwhile, every year, NZ’s net emissions increased from cars, cows and coal. Labour took climate pollution out of the RMA, relying on voluntary commitments and technological wishes… By 2008 NZ’s emissions were 25% higher than they had been in 1990.

Transportation Sector The transportation sector is a close second to industry in terms of energy use. While air travel gets a bad rap, it is transport on highways that by far dominates this sector’s energy use, using more than 10 times the energy of air travel. Of this highway energy, about 75% is expended by small vehicles, the passenger cars and trucks used to move ourselves around. Amazingly, almost half of this is used on trips of less than 20 miles, mostly to get to and from work and for family responsibilities—things like church, shopping, and school. Of non-highway transport, air travel is the largest contributor, followed by ships and then trains. Incidentally, a fully loaded modern jet aircraft gets the equivalent of around 60 miles per gallon (MPG) per passenger, so for traveling long distances, they beat solo road trips in cars (but if you take four friends with you, even a gas-guzzling American car is not so bad—something hyped by the ride-share community). We can even see that the energy required to transport fossil fuels is significant, with about 1% of US energy use committed to transporting natural gas (we’ll come back to this later). Nearly half of freight-rail transportation is used to move coal—most of the other half is wheat and food. A not-so-surprising revelation from a close study

I suddenly realize how lucky I am to have never had a father.

Yogurt is good for you. And it’s just one spoon,” Sharpcot had replied, but this stack summoned a billion voices, all of them saying in a chorus, “Just one spoon.” From kids’ lunches and store shelves and desk drawers and airline meal packs, in every country of the world: Canada and the United States and Nicaragua and Uruguay and Argentina and Ireland and Burkina Faso and Russia and Papua New Guinea and New Zealand and very probably the Antarctic. Where wasn’t there disposable cutlery? Plastic spoons in endless demand, in endless supply, from factory floors where they are manufactured and packaged in boxes of 10 or 20 or 100 or 1000 or individually in clear wrap, boxed on skids and trucked to trains freighting them to port cities and onto giant container ships plying the seas to international ports to intercity transport trucks to retail delivery docks for grocery stores and retail chains, supplying restaurants and homes, consumers moving them from shelf to cart to bag to car to house, where they are stuck in the lunches of the children of polluting parents, or used once each at a birthday party to serve ice cream to four-year-olds where only some are used but who knows which? So used and unused go together in the trash, or every day one crammed into a hipster’s backpack to eat instant pudding at his software job in an open-concept walkup in a gentrified neighbourhood, or handed out from food trucks by the harbour, or set in a paper cup at a Costco table for customers to sample just one bite of this exotic new flavour, and so they go into trash bins and dumpsters and garbage trucks and finally vast landfill sites or maybe just tossed from the window of a moving car or thrown over the rail of a cruise ship to sink in the ocean deep.

The date of the trial, Tuesday, 21 February 1804, marked the first time a steam locomotive running on rails hauled a loaded train of freight cars—in this case, about twenty-five tons of engine, iron, wagons, and men.

At zero, the solid rocket boosters ignited and the bolts were exploded in half, setting the shuttle free. We leaped off the launchpad with an instantaneous 7 million pounds of thrust. I knew from watching videos and from seeing launches in person that the shuttle appeared to rise very slowly at first. Inside, though, there wasn’t a thing about it that felt slow. One second we were sitting on the launchpad, completely still, and the next we were being hurtled straight up faster than would have seemed possible. I was strapped into a freight train gone off the rails and accelerating out of control, being shaken violently in every direction. We went from a standstill to faster than the speed of sound in less than a minute.

If you were in the railroad industry, would you be more interested in the business of laying the tracks or delivering the freight? One element is discrete and transactional (how many new rail lines do you really need?); the other represents ongoing value. A new management team at Cisco decided to go all-in on services, which by definition meant subscriptions. But how do you sell routers and switches on a subscription basis? By focusing on the data inside all that hardware—the freight, not the tracks. Cisco’s latest set of Catalyst hardware comes embedded with machine learning and an analytics software platform that helps companies solve huge inefficiencies by reducing network provisioning times, preventing security breaches, and minimizing operating expenses.

Freight rail is the unsung hero of the global supply chain. From the shoes on your feet to the chemicals fueling industrial production, freight rail ensures that goods move efficiently, reliably, and on time. But what exactly is freight rail goods transport service, and why has it remained such a vital part of global commerce for decades?