A Follow-up On American Railcar

I posted back in February about the American Railcar Industries (ARII) efforts to expand the country’s rail infrastructure and the increase of passenger rail. It appears that they have been busier than I thought.

American Railcar expanded their plant in Marmaduke in 2007-08, probably on the anticipation of an increase in rail traffic that did not materialize. Instead it moved the other way with the beginnings of the current economic recession, the expansion was downsized and operations consolidated. However they did leave themselves in a good position to think “outside the box”.

ARII is now one of four Arkansas businesses receiving stimulus money for clean energy manufacturing and will be reconfiguring the plant to produce structural towers for large scale wind turbines. Combined with others in the state, they will now be able to configure complete wind generating systems.

Kentucky, on the other hand, is continuing to push coal and the immense carbon footprint that it carries along with the environmental damage created by its mining. If Arkansas can transition into a cleaner type of industry then so can Kentucky.

TIGER, Stimulus and The Corman Group

The R. J. Corman Railroad Group, one of my favorite rail companies, is on the receiving end of some of the TIGER funds of the stimulus package. Funds that will rehabilitate some of the aging trackage that they lease from CSX, trackage that CSX let deteriorate as they lost freight market share to the trucking industry. Yes, it is the same trucking industry that has been propped up by the highway subsidies since the early '50s.

The funds will be used to rehabilitate roadbed and ties on the three short lines, the Central Kentucky line, the Bardstown line and the Memphis line. The amount of work will require approximately 100 additional positions and be spread from Winchester to Louisville and Bowling Green to Tennessee.

These rail infrastructure upgrades will allow more freight to be hauled at a cheaper cost in terms of our carbon footprint if not actual drayage fees. Such upgrades may also allow the possibility of regional passenger rail but I think that it is too soon to tell on that one. Some other recent upgrades, that did not involve federal dollars, included the tunnel expansion in Frankfort and several new sidings along the route to Louisville in anticipation of some type of increased rail movements and excursions.

If my hunch is right, this may not be the only contact that the Corman Group has with stimulus money. Another big award was for The National Gateway Rail Corridor on the CSX System in West Virginia, Pennsylvania and eastern Ohio that totals $98 million. This project involves enlarging tunnels to allow containerized freight moving in double-stack trains to be able to shave off about 200 miles and up to a day’s transit time between the East Coast and the Midwest. Coincidentally, Corman has recently completed three good sized tunnels for the Norfolk-Southern Heartland Corridor project. The National Gateway Corridor also feeds several of Corman's short lines in Pennsylvania. It would only be logical for Corman to pick up some of this work.

How all of this ties into the plans of Warren Buffet and the BNSF or the CN expansion plans along the former Illinois Central corridor, I can only speculate but I would love to be proven right on some of my earlier hunches.

Failing To Build Is Building To Fail

We in America are poised, again, to fail.

The opportunity is rearing its head and I wonder if we can jump at the chance to show our collective stupidity, again. The current rage in Washington, if not in parts of the rest of the country, is the stimulus money designated for High Speed Rail(HSR). $ 8 Billion for HSR and that is promised to be the starting level. Even more stimulus money is planned for rebuilding our other rail facilities. Yet nobody is talking about revamping our automobile industry to include the HSR vehicles. And somebody else is watching.

German engineering giant Siemens and their national railway operator Deutsche Bahn, already well ahead of America's companies, are hungrily watching to see how much they can profit from our stimulus package. Will our tax money pay for returning their workers to full employment? Both GM and Chrysler are being bailed out by the US taxpayers yet the only transportation modes being considered for these companies is automobiles and trucks. Where is the evidence of American ingenuity and expertise in the rail industry, why firmly planted in the dismantling of the passenger rail system back in the '60s.

This past month the "Cash for Clunkers" program boosted auto sales for Ford, Toyota and Honda yet did little for GM and Chrysler (see link here). And just who are the majority owners of these fine losers? The American people, of course. We need to pay ourselves first and invest in an American controlled transportation manufacturer. That will take a change in just what we manufacture.

We are going to need a quantity of light-rail vehicles, as well as a larger quantity of heavier rail vehicles and a good number of High Speed Rail trainsets. I see no reason that these vehicles cannot be produced right here in the good old USA. By the folks that built the trains that connected the East coast with the West. We can employ our own engineers to design our rail facilities(NASA probably has a few dozen capable of the job). We have people who can design and build the tracks, as well as maintain them, right in our back yard. So, how long are we going to stand in our own way of getting the job done?

There is currently only ONE producer of streetcars in America, The Oregon Iron Works, and they aren't even in the transportation business. They do dams and bridges and things. Shouldn't we have our transportation people designing these things?

The "Cash for Clunkers" program was to designed to make the individual auto more efficient, a streetcar system can make our entire city more efficient and a High Speed Rail system can make the whole country more efficient.

One last question. Does anyone know the total value of the aircraft owned by the aviation industry, both in service and those mothballed out in the desert? I would love to know the answer.

Another Project from the Mayors Stimulus Package

This past week I stopped by the Woodland Park and took this shot of the former Realtor's Plaza.

This, of course, was an item on the Mayor's wish list for stimulus money and something that I commented on when the list first became public. At the time I did not know what the plans were for the site and I hoped for some type of shelter to welcome the visitors to the park. I would be disappointed when I found out the plans.

I was hoping for something of a nice, simple facade like the building that used to occupy that spot. I also know that the City builds thing on the cheap, but what I wanted was way more than $150k.

I remember the old auditorium vividly. I should, I passed by every school day for 7 years . Coming and going, morning and afternoon and yes, I used to go home for lunch in those days. Then there were the summer days playing in the park, being in or near the office and elsewhere. For a youngster, it was an imposing place and the park directors told the kids to stay out of the balcony, for safety reasons and "the bats".

I never saw any of the shows that were presented there, it had already fallen out of use. My father told me of boxing and wrestling matches and I even found a photo of one on the KDL website. From what I've found on the Library's Local History Index, there were a lot of shows around the early 1910s. The streetcar line used to run by there and at one time they had to install a streetcar siding to allow many more cars to held there for after the performances.

The building was taken down in the early '70s and there followed much discussion about a new Community/Senior Center on the location. A mass of opposition killed that idea so that it sat vacant and ugly, until the Board of Realtors volunteered to fund a beautification project., in the 1980s They only spent $25,000 and boy did it show. Cheap material and labor and a crappy design. We would have been better off with the seniors.

Well, what are we getting for $150,000? A parking lot. A parking lot to replace a parking lot.

It is not what I expected and not what I wanted, but it is better than the ugly Realtor's Plaza