I work in the rail industry in Canada. For those who haven't been paying attention to the rail industry over the last decade; precision scheduled railroading. PSR is a buzzword for investors and...
I work in the rail industry in Canada. For those who haven't been paying attention to the rail industry over the last decade; precision scheduled railroading. PSR is a buzzword for investors and management and a bogeyman for workers.
There are good parts to PSR (like the scheduled part) but it always goes hand in hand with stuff like cost cutting, delaying maintenance, ignoring small customers in favour of big contracts, and tearing out useful infrastructure while insisting they don't need it.
Federal inspectors said they found an alarming number of defects in the locomotives and railcars Union Pacific was using at the world’s largest railyard in western Nebraska this summer, and the railroad was reluctant to fix the problems.
Federal Railroad Administrator Amit Bose wrote a letter to UP’s top three executives Friday expressing his concern that the defects represent a “significant risk to rail safety " on the Union Pacific railroad.
Bose said the 19.93% defect rate on rail cars and the 72.69% rate for locomotives that inspectors found in July and August are both twice the national average. But the letter didn’t detail what kind of defects inspectors found in the Bailey Yard in North Platte, and there are a myriad of federal rules.
You see the same issues in municipalities where the rail companies are allowed to own the infrastructure; they simply do not care as long as they can roll a train across it that day. Where I live...
You see the same issues in municipalities where the rail companies are allowed to own the infrastructure; they simply do not care as long as they can roll a train across it that day.
Where I live there are bridges with supports so rusted you can see right through them in places, load bearing structures holding on by a thread etc.
These companies should also be responsible for their own cleanup. If they were able to budget to put up hundreds of miles of wood posts and barbed wire across BLM and USFS lands, they should be...
These companies should also be responsible for their own cleanup. If they were able to budget to put up hundreds of miles of wood posts and barbed wire across BLM and USFS lands, they should be able to budget to remove the dilapidated remains instead of leaving tangles of rusted barbed wire in bushes and trees for the public, and our dogs and children, to stumble into. Just another example (much like mines) of big companies who are able to raise enormous sums to build these things but can't seem to find a dime to cleanup their mess when they're done and leave it behind for taxpayers to cleanup. We need personal, criminal liability for these actions (jail time) instead of just going after defunct LLCs with empty, closed bank accounts.
Was this not one of the concerns raised by the rail worker's during their strike? Either way it is little surprise, the state of US infrastructure is quite alarming. I work with the power grid and...
Was this not one of the concerns raised by the rail worker's during their strike? Either way it is little surprise, the state of US infrastructure is quite alarming. I work with the power grid and it's hardly any different. Disasters waiting to happen in service of the bottom line.
So what can we do about it? Put folks in office that will enforce safety regulations? Nationalize utilities and transportation infrastructure? The prior seems too milquetoast to be as effective as needed as soon as needed whereas the latter seems too extreme for many to accept and potentially dangerous in this political climate.
I work in the rail industry in Canada. For those who haven't been paying attention to the rail industry over the last decade; precision scheduled railroading. PSR is a buzzword for investors and management and a bogeyman for workers.
There are good parts to PSR (like the scheduled part) but it always goes hand in hand with stuff like cost cutting, delaying maintenance, ignoring small customers in favour of big contracts, and tearing out useful infrastructure while insisting they don't need it.
You see the same issues in municipalities where the rail companies are allowed to own the infrastructure; they simply do not care as long as they can roll a train across it that day.
Where I live there are bridges with supports so rusted you can see right through them in places, load bearing structures holding on by a thread etc.
These companies should also be responsible for their own cleanup. If they were able to budget to put up hundreds of miles of wood posts and barbed wire across BLM and USFS lands, they should be able to budget to remove the dilapidated remains instead of leaving tangles of rusted barbed wire in bushes and trees for the public, and our dogs and children, to stumble into. Just another example (much like mines) of big companies who are able to raise enormous sums to build these things but can't seem to find a dime to cleanup their mess when they're done and leave it behind for taxpayers to cleanup. We need personal, criminal liability for these actions (jail time) instead of just going after defunct LLCs with empty, closed bank accounts.
Was this not one of the concerns raised by the rail worker's during their strike? Either way it is little surprise, the state of US infrastructure is quite alarming. I work with the power grid and it's hardly any different. Disasters waiting to happen in service of the bottom line.
So what can we do about it? Put folks in office that will enforce safety regulations? Nationalize utilities and transportation infrastructure? The prior seems too milquetoast to be as effective as needed as soon as needed whereas the latter seems too extreme for many to accept and potentially dangerous in this political climate.