If you are thinking of railroads at all this time of year, you are probably thinking about the Polar Express, either watching the movie, reading the book, running the train around the tree, or maybe finding a railroad running Polar Express excursions.
(Good luck with that — some of them sell out months in advance! If you can make it to Kingston, NY, there’s still a very few seats left last time I checked.)
John Oliver recently took on a rail story that’s far less family-friendly: the way freight railroads are operating in America. The video — see below — is going viral. The comments on it Youtube are compelling — Oliver is getting high marks on it.
He begins with a scene from a classic episode of Thomas the Tank Engine, featuring Henry, the Green Engine. With a lot of snark and adult language, Oliver shows how this story, as originally narrated by Ringo Starr, takes on a very dark aspect for something intended for children.
From there, Oliver transitions to discussing freight railroads in America which are being operated in a way that puts profits over safety, and how it happened. Oliver is very clear that railroads can be good for the environment and the economy — they move a significant fraction of goods in the national economy, some of which can’t effectively be moved any other way, and do it with only a fraction of the emissions that come from other ways of moving things around.
All well and good, but what’s happening in the industry is NOT good. Oliver uses a lot of his trademark snark and some adult language to make some key points:
Railroads were deregulated back in 1980. The idea was to make them more competitive in response to decades of government investments in highways over rail. The end result was to greatly reduce government oversight, setting up today’s situation where the Federal Railroad Administration has nominal responsibility for overseeing the railroads — in theory. In practice the FRA is seriously underfunded and minimally staffed; railroads are effectively left to police themselves. East Palestine showed how well that works. Not to mention what happened to Lac Megantic and what it means for bomb trains operating in America.
Along with the abdication of effective oversight by the government, an industry management philosophy took hold that has proven to be great for profits, but at a high cost to everything else. Precision Scheduled Railroading (PSR) was the brainchild of the late Hunter Harrison.
Oliver has a scathing takedown of Harrison, who admitted he had blood on his hands as one of the consequences of PSR. His idea put in practice across the industry has maximized rail profits at the expense of safety, service, employees, infrastructure, and the lives of everyone who lives along rail corridors.
Oliver dissects the rail industry with precision in just under a half hour. He covers all the bases with the way it is running. A truly brilliant segment at the end shows what the world of Thomas the Tank Engine would be like if Sir Topham Hat ran the railroad like Hunter Harrison. It’s truly amazing black humor that recreates the original show with loving attention to detail.
You may not want the kids to see it — as Oliver says, it’s things like that which made him the person he is today. /s
UPDATE: If you want to skip to the last segment showing the episode on the Island of Sodor under PSR, go to 23 minutes. It’s an incredible job recreating the original look and feel of the series. It also illustrates all of the issues Oliver has been discussing.
So, why should you pay any attention to freight railroads or rail in general? If you don’t ship by rail, if you don’t ride commuter trains or usually travel by car or airline, why does rail matter any more? Why does it matter for you?
I have in mind a series to explore this in depth. Possible topics include “The Siren Song of High Speed Rail”, “Rail Trails: Waste or Needless Indulgence?”, “Why the best airline deal is overnight by train”,"How rails can save the Whales”, “Should transit be free?” and so on.
Granted this is not as exciting as hearing about Florida Republicans trying to explain their way out of a three-way sex scandal while banning books in defense of “Family Values”. (Amazing how something like that can get lots of recs while other topics…. don’t. Sex Sells.)
So, let me know what you think about this proposal in comments.