Ayn Rand Never Put This in "Atlas Shrugged."

I was driving on a viaduct yesterday, the southern section of Chouteau Trafficway, heading south over the Union Pacific yard in the east bottoms. I looked left and the WHOLE YARD was chock full of locomotives. Dozens of them. Checking Bing Maps today, I count about 40 parallel tracks in the yard, and I tell you most of them were occupied by engines, not cars. Normally, engines are dispersed over the entire rail grid, but here they were parked, and as far as I could tell while driving, not even running. I will try to post photos tomorrow.

You know what this means - most long-haul bulk freight, the backbone of rail service, is almost at a standstill. Even in her novel "Atlas Shrugged," which wove a dystopian tale around a fictional railroad, Ayn Rand never depicted anything like this.

If you want to look at the railyard, and it won't be up to date, key this address into your map program: 951 Topping Avenue, Kansas City, Missouri 34120. Or these coordinates: 39.122780 -94.512695. Maybe you can estimate the number of engines...

It looks like UP engines are stored or abandoned in other places as well:

www.youtube.com...

www.youtube.com...

www.youtube.com...

Trainspotting eh?

What it looks like in South Africa:

a reply to: Lazarus Short

Back in Dec-Jan i picked up a bit of chatter online that i dismissed at the time but now it all makes sense ? , A trucker was moaning about the lack of loads they were getting and stated he had never seen it so dead , trucks were parked up every where and nothing was coming into the docks anywhere .

Scuttlebutt was China said no to more debt and wanted physical monetary for all the shipments of goods going to America ,

Then Covid happened



Makes you wonder

a reply to: stonerwilliam

War by other means...?

I would not dismiss it as possible.

originally posted by: Lazarus Short
a reply to: stonerwilliam

War by other means...?

I would not dismiss it as possible.

a reply to: Lazarus Short

I follow a channel on YouTube called Prepper Nation, and you can hear a train in the background in some of his videos.

I've tried to find the clip but was unable, but he said in one of them (from my memory) that he's used to hearing maybe one train a week out where he is, but lately he's sometimes hearing three or so a day, people in the chat have reported the same thing in their areas.

He said that when he went to get a glimpse of one, they were carrying double-stacked containers with no markings.

Could be nothing, but I too thought this was interesting.

a reply to: Lazarus Short

The first two look to be wreck lines. For example the first locomotive, 9676, is listed as wrecked from years ago and those two videos predate the pandemic.

a reply to: Lazarus Short

I'm going to try to post a couple of screenshot pics, but lately they haven't been working for me, so HERE'S a link (St. Louis Fed - rail car traffic) - check out different charts if you go to the website.

You'll see a massive drop with the 2008 crash, which seemed to have established a "new normal" (lower) level of rail freight volume. It then starts a huge drop around Oct/Nov 2015, sinking to a modern low around Apr 2016, then some up and down up to anout a 10% increase from there until early 2020.

It drops suddenly and precipitouslyearly in early 2020, around 20%, though it made about half of that up mostly since May.

What I found more interesting checking out these charts, is how the significant drop at the '08 crash established a new baseline for years to come.

If the pics work...

I screenshat a couple seasonally-adjusted charts. Seasonally-adjusted smooths out the zig-zags of short-term fluctuations. Sort of like looking at the Rona death charts on Worldometers as a 7-day average, rather than the daily, which varies depending on reporting days.)

Please note, these charts start at 800k carloads, so changes look more drastic than their actual percentages. In other words, the peaks and valleys would look smaller if the chart bottom was a zero.

And here they are (maybe)
1 year chart to see the near-term in better detail.

Pics didn't work, I used the "BBcode for use in post" Taking out the leading pic and /pic in brackets after the filename so the text will maybe show at all. If anyone knows how to fix, please do.
These are the screenshot pics. Whe
mm5f7a3c08.jpg

Max-length chart to include pre- and post-2008, as well as the 2020 rail volume crash.
xz5f7a3c15.jpg

a reply to: dogstar23

That is VERY good information - thanks. Given that chart, it does NOT look like the US of A economy really recovered from the 2008 recession, and now we have the events of 2020. I'm thinking things will not be "normal" for a generation or more.