[In his book The Robber Barons], Josephson missed the distinction between market entrepreneurs like Vanderbilt, Hill, and Rockefeller and political entrepreneurs like Collins, Villard, and Gould. He lumped them all together. However, Josephson was honest enough to mention the achievements of some market entrepreneurs. James J. Hill, Josephson conceded, was an “able administrator”, and “far more efficient” than his subsidized competitors. Andrew Carnegie had a “well-integrated, technically superior plant”; and John D. Rockefeller was “a great innovator” with superb “marketing methods”, who displayed “unequaled efficiency and power of organization”.
Most of Josephson’s ire is directed toward political entrepreneurs. The subsidized Henry Villard of the Northern Pacific Railroad, with his “bad grades and high interest charges” show that he “apparently knew little enough about railroad-building”. The leaders of the Union Pacific and Central Pacific, Josephson notes, “carried on [their actions] with a heedless abandon … [which] caused a waste of between 70 and 75 percent of the expenditure as against the normal rate of construction”. But it never occurs to Josephson that the subsidies government gave these railroads created the incentives that led their owners to overpay for materials and to build in unsafe areas. He quotes “one authority” on the railroads as saying, “The Federal government seems … to have assumed the major portion of the risk and the Associates seem to have derived the profits” — but Josephson never pursues the implication of that passage.
Burton W. Folsum, “How the Myth of the ‘Robber Barons’ Began — and Why It Persists”, Foundation for Economic Education, 2018-09-21.
March 16, 2026
QotD: Political entrepreneurs and federal subsidies
February 15, 2026
The smartphone as a tool to create a real-life Idiocracy
Not being much of a film fan, I’d never seen the movie Idiocracy, but based on the description in Christopher Gage’s rant against the smartphone, I might not need to watch it as it’s happening all around us:
Transport for London, the mythical entity alleged to manage the city’s Tube, has revealed its campaign to tackle the smartphone scourge: sickly posters splashed in kindergarten colours.
The campaign targets the “disruptive behaviour” of passengers who were evidently raised by a pack of snarling hyenas. They blast reels, videos, music. They FaceTime their cackling friends. Not so long ago, a fellow passenger revealed to us — her captive audience — that someone named Sarah had caught the clap from someone named Travis. Syphilis? How literary.
Miraculously, researchers at Transport for London discovered a rare tribe thought to be long extinct: Londoners who communicate with their fellow human beings by making noises with their mouths — one thousand of them, in fact.
Researchers approached these strange beings with a mixture of wonder and trepidation. They prodded them with a stick. That didn’t work. After jabbing them with a cattle prod, they looked up from their phones. Several members landed in Accident and Emergency, complaining of neck strain injuries.
Seventy percent of those surveyed said the constant noise screaming out of smartphones drove them crazy. One responder suggested offenders receive forty lashings in public. That is a bit much. Ten should do the trick.
TFL wavered from such brutal and effective methods. Campaign posters politely ask passengers to wear headphones.
I’m afraid that TFL’s well-meaning campaign hasn’t quite restored sanity on the London Underground.
Last week, I sat next to a grown man grinning at his phone like a Hindu cow. On the screen was a captivating spectacle. Someone, somewhere, makes it their daily business to buy gigantic, waist-height glass bottles of soda. This clearly well-adjusted person then rolls the bottles down a flight of concrete steps. Our friend dissolved the journey between Hammersmith and Leicester Square in a trance. Bottle. Roll. Smash. Bottle. Roll. Smash.
This reminded me of the satirical film, Idiocracy. The plot follows U.S. Army librarian Luke, and prostitute Rita.
After signing up for a hibernation experiment, the two awake in America, year 2500. Mountains of trash litter the landscape. Planes fall out of the sky. The citizens drag their gormless faces between Starbucks (which is now a coffee-serving brothel) and shopping malls even more dementing than those today. Over centuries, the dumb have biologically outgunned the smart.
The citizens of this moronic inferno drain their days glued to hyperactive screens. Their favourite content includes the Masturbation Channel and a reality TV show called “Ow! My Balls!” That show follows a hapless man as he gets whacked in the testicles.
They cultivate high culture, too. The profound film, Ass, zooms in on a pair of bare bum cheeks. The sophisticated audience fizzes with laughter as the bum, for two hours, passes wind.
Back in 2006, Idiocracy was a well-done satire which stretched logical extremes. Today, I’m not so sure it is as ridiculous as it once seemed. Just spend ten minutes on the Tube, inhaling the noxious TikTok fumes spewing from smartphones.
Transport for London has a point. But it is far too late. We are a nation of dopamine addicts. Those dopamine crack pipes stitched to our palms are quite literally designed to suck away as much of our time and attention as possible. An intervention, at this late hour, must be drastic.
How about a campaign outlining the terrifying effects of watching brain-rot content for hours and hours each day? A growing body of research suggests today’s smartphone is tomorrow’s lobotomy. Am I rioting in hyperbole? No.
One study found that watching short-form video is more harmful to our brains than soaking them in booze. At least, the latter indulgence might get you laid.
Several studies link smartphone culture with declines in comprehension, literacy, and the ability to reason. Others link smartphones with rising narcissism and collapsing social capital. And then there’s the nascent research suggesting that smartphone addiction may trigger ADHD and Autism-like symptoms in the addicted.
QotD: The love of long-distance train travel
Of course, the accursed cell phone and the even more accursed smartphone have penetrated the seclusion. And alas, there are no more dining cars, a delight now almost completely abolished by spiteful managements, and available mainly on ridiculous super-luxury trains such as the pastiche Orient Express. Yet no restaurant meal I have ever had, including the pressed duck at the old Tour D’Argent in Paris (before it became a museum where you could eat the exhibits), has surpassed the breakfasts, lunches, teas, and dinners I have eaten in trains.
I think of the wonderful bacon and eggs, accompanied by soda bread, on the cross-border Belfast-to-Dublin flyer in Ireland; the vast plates of pork and dumplings accompanied by Pilsener beer on the somnolent Zapadny Express from Nuremberg to Prague; the fresh pancakes and maple syrup at breakfast on the California Limited, with antelopes fleeing from the train somewhere between Dodge City and Albuquerque; the first sip of tea from the samovar, served in a glass in an ornate silver holder, on the Red Star night sleeper from Moscow to Leningrad; the first glass of wine on a sunny September evening as the Rome Express, an hour out of Paris, clattered southward past the faintly minatory cathedral tower at Sens. Then there were the toasted teacakes near Grantham on the southbound Flying Scotsman, and the superb galley-cooked steak on the upper deck of the Chicago-bound Capitol Limited, as it climbed westward through the evening into the forests beyond Harper’s Ferry and up the Potomac valley.
Peter Hitchens, “Why I Love Trains”, First Things, 2020-07-16.
February 14, 2026
Former First Lady suffers unplanned mingling with the plebs in Germany
eugyppius offers some news from Germany, one of the many western nations eagerly plunging toward cultural suicide in a race with Canada, Australia, the UK and other formerly “first world” nations:
Yesterday Lufthansa pilots and cabin crews went on strike, forcing Hillary Clinton to slum her way on the train to the Munich Security Conference.
[…] you can see the former First Lady and U.S. Secretary of State disembarking from her filthy Deutsche Bahn Intercity Express from Berlin, which had naturally suffered an electrical fault that disabled the restaurant car and with that, all possibility of coffee. Munich Central Station is one of the worst train stations in all of Germany; the place is awash in trash and smells always of urine and french fries. It is a very minor pleasure, watching political elites being forced to navigate the very same dysfunctional landscape all of us have to deal with every day.
“eugyppius,” said absolutely nobody ever, “why has it been so long since you last updated us on Germany? Is nothing going on? Tell us something please.”
The problem is that German politics have degenerated so much in the past year that it is becoming very hard to write abut them.
In the post-Merkel era under Olaf Scholz, insane new crazy bad inadvisable unbelievable stuff would happen almost every day; in the post-post-Merkel years under Friedrich Merz, absolutely nothing can happen no matter how bad things get. After an unstable period comprising the second half of Covid and the pious afterglow of St. Greta (before the latter took up her charitable sailing initiatives), we have settled into a new order. Imagine an airplane piloted by heedless methed-out lunatics. For a brief time they enjoyed aerobatics well exceeding the engineering specifications of their craft, until they snapped a few flight control cables, and now they have become the prisoners of their own recreations as the altimeter ticks down and the ground rushes up at them.
Metaphors are fun but specifics are healthier. As everybody knows, the centre-right Christian Democrats are in a coalition with the newly hard-left Social Democrats, and the latter are determined to block every last initiative, reform and legislative proposal, however mundane or plainly necessary or routine. A little over a year ago, I wrote that German politics had become stuck, and that was true enough back then. What is true right now, is that they have achieved a stage well beyond stuck. The federal government is in a coma, an indefinite vegetative state, on life support – totally paralysed and neither dead nor alive.
We’ve gone over the reasons so much, I hesitate to recite them again, but I will. At the root of our present crisis is a shift within the German left that has had cascading consequences for the party system as a whole. Basically, the left has become both more scattered and more extreme in the last five years. They have become more scattered, because climatism is decaying and this process of ideological unravelling means that leftists have lost a crucial focal point used to rally activists and moderates alike. They have become more extreme, because the general rightward shift in politics is depriving the Social Democrats of their traditional moderating, working-class constituents. These are migrating steadily to the Christian Democrats and ultimately to Alternative für Deutschland.
As the left slowly boils down to their activist base, they become more radicalised. The Social Democrats are no longer the family-friendly centre-left party of Gerhard Schröder. They want to fight, they want to burn things down, they want hell. The very same rightward shift, meanwhile, has had a nearly opposite effect on the CDU. They have lost many of their most engaged constituents and no few members to the AfD. What remains is a husk of dull, uninspired careerists, eager to maintain their good regard with polite society and their regular schedule of polite evening talk show appearances. To break the present impasse, Merz or those around him must act decisively and make facts. He needs to fire all his SPD ministers, form a minority government and achieve some kind of rapprochement with the AfD. Alas, neither Merz nor anybody else in CDU leadership has the mettle for that kind of fight, which would also set off a series of catastrophic revolts within the CDU itself. Thus everything must remain frozen and broken indefinitely, while things get worse and worse and our ability ever to fix them decays.
October 29, 2025
The Making Of Modern London – The Heyday of London Transport 1914 – 1939
Classic Vehicle Channel
Published 15 May 2020A lovely documentary telling the story of the development of the London transport system from 1914 to 1939 — The heyday of London Transport. This film features awesome archive footage of buses, trams and London street scenes from the time. It’s one of a number of episodes this one featuring London’s transport system.
I’ve cut out the LWT adverts but I have left two in that I think you’ll love!
This film was broadcast by London Weekend Television in 1984 and later by CH4.
Written, Directed & Narrated by Gavin Weightman
October 3, 2025
Mulligan “Hobo” Stew from the Great Depression
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 29 Apr 2025Soup with canned peas, canned corned beef, onion, and ketchup
City/Region: United States of America
Time Period: 1940Today the word “hobo” is usually used in a derogatory manner, but back in the time between the end of the Civil War and the end of the Great Depression, it referred to a specific group of migrant workers and their culture.
Part of that culture was mulligan stew, which was basically a stew of any meat and vegetables that were thrown together. The ingredients would be made up of things that keep well, mostly food that was canned or bottled.
The flavor of this soup is surprisingly good, but it’s maybe a little too sweet, even for me. The prodigious amount of ketchup is the dominant flavor, and maybe 1940 ketchup was less sweet than modern versions.
Mulligan Stew (Serves 6)
1 medium size can corned beef — minced
1 onion — minced fine
1 No. 2 can peas with liquid
1 medium size bottle tomato catsup
1 cup water
Salt and pepper to tastePut all ingredients in saucepan and simmer gently over low flame for about one hour. The flavor improves with the length of cooking time.
— The Brookshire Times, August 2, 1940
September 15, 2025
When folks built their houses from Sears, Roebuck & Co. kits
I thought I’d discussed the Sears kit homes about a decade back, but perhaps it wasn’t for the blog. Anyway, there’s a nice summary by Katrina Gulliver of how Sears and other companies made home-building great a century ago:
A hundred years ago, kit homes were more common in the US. Sold by Sears, Montgomery Ward, and other local firms, buyers received the plans and the pieces for a house and put it together themselves. Economies of scale made these a viable option for someone looking to build a house in the expanding suburbs.
The 1914 Sears Modern Homes catalog shows three homes that could each be bought for $656 (in the small print, they admit your outlay would be more like $1,250 all-in, including brick, cement, plaster — which they don’t supply — and labor). Your kit house would be delivered by rail; it was generally assumed householders would be handy enough (or know whom to hire) to put it all together from the supplied plans.
According to a 1930 report by the National Bureau of Economic Research, National Income and Its Purchasing Power, in 1914, the average clerk could be making $1,000, and a factory manager earning $2,300. That means these houses were within reach of lots of people — especially bearing in mind that land costs in many cities were also relatively low. In Chicago, lots within 5 miles of downtown were available for less than 50¢/square foot in 1914.
Those kit homes included wood, metal, and glass, and reflected both the tastes of consumers and the economies of bulk production. The various styles in the catalog over the years included craftsman, Dutch colonial, Federal, and cottage — styles that have continued to be popular in residential architecture of the US.
The Sears catalog of 1936 states: “This is the age of modern efficiency. No longer can human hands compete with machine precision and production. ‘Speed with accuracy’ is the watchword in any department of our great factories.”
(For those curious about such houses, fans of Sears kit homes put together lists of examples still standing.)
September 7, 2025
Long before the “Bad Orange Man”, there was “T.R.”
In the Coolidge Review, Amity Shlaes points out some strong similarities between Donald Trump’s career and that of the Bull Moose himself, Theodore Roosevelt:
Though a century apart—TR served from 1901 to 1909 — these two chief executives have favored the same modus operandi: using unpredictability to amass power. And the record of Theodore Rex, as Edmund Morris titled his TR biography, bodes ill for both the economy and the Republican Party.
The Trump-TR Parallels
But to the similarities. They start, for both men, pre–White House. As Trump did, TR staged his pre-presidential efforts as much with an eye to public recognition as to sustained reform or strengthening institutions.
Whenever TR stumbled, he pivoted to a new venture and publicized it like mad, though the medium in those days was the printed word, not season after season on The Apprentice. Before the cognoscenti had even absorbed the meaning of the young Roosevelt’s humiliating fourth-place score in a key 1886 New York City mayoral contest, for example, TR was off to the Badlands, memorializing his ranching experiences in dispatches and books such as Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail.
As Trump does, TR routinely alienated GOP grandees, circumventing them to get ahead. As Trump has, TR skillfully cultivated the media — so skillfully that members of Congress were left trying catch up with whatever shifts in public opinion resulted from the politician’s press alliances. TR’s Rupert Murdoch was the widely syndicated William Allen White of Kansas’s influential Emporia Gazette. TR’s equivalent of Fox News was the New York Journal, whose owner, William Randolph Hearst, drummed a steady beat of support when Roosevelt called for war against Spain.
Today, Murdoch must be scratching his head over what his showcasing Trump has wrought, especially now that Trump decided to sue both Murdoch and his Wall Street Journal. White, too, found that he had second thoughts about his decision to back TR: “Roosevelt bit me and I went mad,” White reportedly told a colleague.
[…]
BULLY
The occupant of what he labeled the Bully Pulpit — “bully” as in “excellent” — proved a literal bully as well.
As president, TR perpetually unnerved fellow Republicans, pivoting back to domestic politics. As Trump has, TR cast his campaigns in moral terms rather than economic ones. Where Trump launched his tariff war, TR made war against trusts, large combinations of companies. Relying more on whim than statute, Roosevelt segregated trusts into “good trusts” and “bad trusts”.
TR targeted an invincible-looking industry that, in those days, mattered as much as the interstate highways, or the internet, do today: railroads. James Hill’s Great Northern Railway took over a struggling competitor, Northern Pacific. Roosevelt asked Hanna what he made of the combined entity, Great Northern Securities. Hanna replied that it was “the very best thing possible for the future of the whole Northwest territory”. Roosevelt nonetheless sicced the Justice Department on the Great Northern.
J. Pierpont Morgan, a participant in the beleaguered deal, called on the president to inquire, as desperate steel importers these days do from time to time, whether their attorneys might work out the matter behind the scenes.
No.
Next, the disconcerted Morgan asked whether other investments of the House of Morgan might be assailed. Roosevelt’s reply captures the chill of arbitrary leadership. The administration would not go after the other Morgan companies, he said — unless “they have done something we regard as wrong”.
As Edmund Morris reports in Theodore Rex, to observers such as French ambassador Jules Jusserand, Roosevelt seemed “more powerful than a king”. That power suited many voters fine, which is why Roosevelt won so headily when he ran for office on his own in 1904.
Of course TR, like Trump, occasionally supported laws that aligned with his impulses. One example is the Elkins Act of 1903, which made it illegal for railroads to charge different freight rates for different customers. This shallow effort to achieve market “fairness” deprived the railroads of a standard business tool: the ability to provides discounts to those who buy the product in larger quantities. Shares in railroads promptly dropped more than 20 percent, a shift that undermined TR’s premise of railroad invincibility.
August 26, 2025
“One of the top tips for having a decent country is never, ever, allow the fuckwits to gain power”
If you need to drop someone off at London’s Gatwick Airport, you’ll find yourself facing a £7 charge for the privilege, no matter what day of the week or time of day you choose. Tim Worstall explains why:
“Gatwick Airport, North Terminal” by Martin Roell from Berlin, Germany is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 
.
It’s sod all to do with congestion and everything to do with the tractor production statistics the fuckwits have imposed upon the airport.
The conditions attached by the transport secretary included national landscape provisions as per the Levelling Up and Regeneration Act 2023, more consideration for sustainability in buildings design and additional pollution-related mitigation measures.
The government said in its formal response to the Planning Inspectorate’s recommendations on the Gatwick DCO that it wanted more detail on how it would achieve its commitment of 54% of passengers arriving at the airport via rail within the first year of dual runway operations, which could be by the end of this decade.
The government has a target. That 54% of the arrivals at an airport — yes, an airport, where people get on jet planes — must be by public transport. Therefore the airport is charging for car drop offs in order to decrease the number of car drop offs. There is no more reason than that. Or, as up at the top, the reason there’s a £7 drop off charge at Gatwick Airport is because we are ruled by the fuckwits who have a target for public transport to an airport where people then get on jet planes.
London Gatwick has also accepted a requirement to have 54% of passengers using public transport prior to bringing the Northern Runway into operation and has reiterated the need for third parties, including the Department for Transport, to support delivery of the necessary conditions and improvements required to meet this target. This would include, for example, reinstating the full Gatwick Express train service.
Given the reliance on other parties to achieve this 54% target, should it not be achieved then London Gatwick has also proposed an alternative cars-on-the-road limit to be met before first use of the Northern Runway to address concerns about possible road congestion. Furthermore, if neither the 54% transport mode share or the cars-on-the-road limit are met, then use of the Northern Runway would be delayed until £350m of road improvements have been completed. This would make sure any additional road traffic flows can be accommodated and any congestion avoided.
It’s all fuckwit targets set by fuckwits.
Of course, there are those who think that fuckwit targets set by fuckwits are a good idea. For one of the problems of life is that there are always fuckwits:
When we talk about airport expansion, we often focus on runways, terminals, and the physical infrastructure. But what about how people actually get to the airport?
The journey begins long before passengers step foot in a terminal, and their choices about transport can have a significant impact on congestion, carbon emissions, and overall passenger experience.
One of the conditions set for Gatwick’s expansion is a legally binding guarantee that 54% of passengers will travel by public transport, up from today’s 44%. On the surface, it sounds like a simple shift. But transport isn’t just about availability — it’s about behaviour, convenience, and incentives.
One of the top tips for having a decent country is never, ever, allow the fuckwits to gain power. But we have done so therefore there is this £7 charge for a drop off at Gatwick Airport. That’s it, there is no other reason. There are fuckwits buried in the belly of the British state and they’re making the rules now.
August 20, 2025
California’s ever-receding High Speed Rail dream
Chris Bray provides an on-the-ground update of California’s ultra-expensive high speed rail project which still has yet to deliver a single passenger from one station to another after nearly 20 years of funding:
Start with a description: “In 2008, California voters approved $9.95 billion of state bond funding as seed money to build an 800-mile high-speed rail (HSR) network connecting Los Angeles and San Francisco, and the Central Valley to coastal cities, at speeds of up to 220 miles per hour, with an expected completion date of 2020.”
Construction started in 2015. Pause for a moment and really notice the date.
Ten years later, the project has consumed $18 billion, and an effort to connect Los Angeles and San Francisco has turned into a much more modest “Phase One” plan to connect the cities of the Central Valley, well east of the coast. The modest declared cost of the proposed LA-to-SF bullet train now looks like this for the much shorter line: “a cost range of $89 billion to $128 billion.” The Trump administration has declined to provide more federal funding for the project, but California is suing to try to keep the federal spigot open.
[…]
Famously, the California High-Speed Rail Authority has been posting pictures of its huge construction successes on social media:
See, that’s … almost a whole rail line for a bullet train. Obviously!
So!
If you ever find yourself in Fresno, and I sincerely hope you don’t, the structures that have been built for “high-speed rail” are surprisingly easy to access. There are several places where those structures aren’t fenced in or guarded. At all. […] So when you see this:
…it’s not that hard to just head up onto the thing. It’s also very dangerous, legally dubious, and something you definitely shouldn’t do. Since it’s an elevated construction site, there are a lot of places without guardrails where you can just fall off the thing, and it’s a long way down.
Everyone see this part: Don’t go up there. It’s dangerous. You can fall and die. […] But if you were to climb up onto the thing, which you absolutely should never do, you would see a whole bunch of this:
That’s a section at the northern end of Fresno, looking south.
Of course, California isn’t the only jurisdiction struggling to complete big infrastructure projects: Toronto’s long-awaited Crosstown LRT project got started in 2007 and still has no confirmed completion date, although a faint possibility exists that a portion of the line may open later in 2025.
July 26, 2025
VIA Rail’s premier passenger train, The Canadian
In the National Post, Raymond J. de Souza discovers the aging crown jewel of VIA Rail’s passenger services, The Canadian, which VIA inherited from Canadian Pacific Railway when the country’s long-distance and intercity rail passenger services were merged into a single Crown Corporation in the 1970s:
Canadian Pacific FP7 locomotive 1410 at the head of The Canadian stopped at Dorval, Quebec on 6 September, 1965. The Canadian was Canadian Pacific’s premier passenger train before VIA Rail was formed.
Photo by Roger Puta via Wikimedia Commons.
What did I learn after four days and four nights, some 4,500 kilometres, from Vancouver to Toronto on board Via Rail’s The Canadian? Many things, as it happens.
I learned that The Canadian attracts train aficionados the world over for one of the last great rail journeys on one of the last great trains. The stainless steel rolling stock is 70 years old, the cars having been upgraded along the way, but still rolling as a living part of railway history.
Part of the cultural history Via Rail preserves is superlative meals thrice daily, served in fine style in the dining cars. Four dinners: rack of lamb, beef tenderloin, AAA prime rib, bone-in pork chop. Delicious desserts. Canadian wines and craft beers. Fish eaters and vegans also had options. The question arises ineluctably: Why is the Via Rail food between Montreal and Toronto so horrible?
Perhaps it would be too expensive; The Canadian in sleeper class certainly is. Expense was really the question in the 1870s.
“Could a country of three and a half million people afford an expenditure of one hundred million dollars at time when a labourer’s wage was a dollar a day?” asked Pierre Berton in his 1970 chronicle of that decision, The National Dream.
The cost of not building was greater, argued Sir John A. Macdonald. It was the price of remaining a sovereign continental country. Part of the financing was creative; the Hudson’s Bay Company gave Rupert’s Land to Canada, and Canada paid the contractors partly in free land.
Growing up in Calgary, I presumed that the greatest challenge was putting the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) through the mountains. And it is true that the most spectacular scenery on the route is the Fraser Canyon and the mountains of the Yellowhead Pass. (The Canadian now travels the northern route of the Canadian National (CN) Railway, not the original southern route of the CPR.)
Yet it was the Canadian Shield, thousands of lakes and muskeg atop the hardest rock on earth, that was the real obstacle. John Palliser, one of the 1860s expeditioners between Thunder Bay and the Rockies, reported back that while getting through the mountain passes could be done, the impenetrable land north of Lake Superior was the insuperable problem. And without getting around the Shield, Canada would be constrained, cooped up, with the prairies and mountains and west coast inaccessible.
VIA dome observation car on The Canadian in 2007. The best views are available from the domed seating on the upper level.
Photo by Savannah Grandfather via Wikimedia.
I’d always hoped to travel The Canadian at some point, but I was never able to afford the tickets at the same time that I had available time to travel, and there’s no hope I’ll ever be able to scrape up the money these days. According to VIA Rail’s website, the trip from Toronto to Vancouver would be between C$5860 to $9460 per person.
July 9, 2025
QotD: “Look at those high cars roll”
Once encountered on the observation platform by the author as The Century rocketed through the Indiana countryside to overtake and pass a long merchandise train doing a mere sixty on the adjacent track […]
“Look at those high cars roll”, he exclaimed, as we passed the head end of the swiftly moving freight. “There’s nothing so beautiful in the world as a money making train going places fast on a spring evening!”
Lucius Beebe, 20th Century, 1962.
May 23, 2025
Yasukuni-jinja, Japan’s most controversial historical site
Nigel Biggar on the Yasukuni-jinja in the Imperial Gardens in Toyko, where the Japanese shrine to their war dead also celebrates fourteen convicted WW2 war criminals:
The Yasukuni Shrine in the Imperial Gardens, Tokyo.
Photo by Pierre Hazan
If ever you find yourself in the centre of Tokyo, make your way to the north-west corner of the Imperial Gardens, and turn left. A few minutes will bring you to the Yasukuni-jinja, Japan’s most controversial site. This is the national shrine to the war-dead, whose two and half million resident “glorious souls” include fourteen Class A war criminals.
A hundred yards to the right of the main shrine stands a museum, the Yushukan. Upon entering it, a visitor finds himself immediately face to face with a locomotive.
Now, when an Anglo-Saxon puts together Japan, Second World War, and locomotive, he arrives at one thing only: the “Burma Railway”. This is the railway that was hacked through the Burmese jungle partly by Allied prisoners-of-war, who were treated as slave labour and perished in their thousands. Over 12,000 Westerners died — about one in five — alongside perhaps 90,000 Asians.
So our Anglo-Saxon visitor beholds the locomotive with a mixture of disbelief, rising horror, and curiosity. He approaches the machine, looking for an explanatory text. Finding it, he learns that this locomotive is one of ninety that ran along the Burma Railway. He also learns the name of the military unit responsible for the railway’s construction. But of the Allied prisoners, the slave-labour, and the number of their deaths he learns nothing at all.
The Burma Railway wasn’t Auschwitz, either in genocidal intent or in murderous scale. But it was similar in its cruel contempt for human life. So the experience of confronting this Tokyo locomotive is analogous to stepping into a museum in Berlin and being confronted by one of the trains that shipped Jews to Auschwitz, and then reading an explanation that omits any mention of its cargo or the nature of its destination. If there were such a museum in Berlin, I’d have found it.
When our Anglo-Saxon ventures deeper into the Yushukan, he eventually discovers the exhibition on the 1930s and World War Two in the Far East. And here he learns that Japan’s imperial expansion was in fact a war of liberation, waged on behalf of subjugated Asian peoples, against Western colonial domination. And he learns that, even though Japan lost the war militarily, she won it politically, since the example of her early victories over the French in Vietnam, the Americans at Pearl Harbor, and the British at Singapore helped to inspire anti-colonial movements worldwide and so succeeded in ridding the world of European empires.
He also learns that what is known outside Japan as “the Rape of Nanking” (1937-8) is referred to demurely in the museum as “the Chinese incident”. And that whereas the “Rape of Nanking” is reckoned to have involved the indiscriminate massacre by Japanese troops of about 300,000 Chinese civilians, “the Chinese incident” only involved the severe treatment of Chinese troops who had violated the laws of war by disguising themselves in civilian clothes.
May 11, 2025
Will Amtrak survive the DOGE treatment?
J.D. Wong outlines Amtrak’s never-ending financial difficulties:
“Amtrak” by Mike Knell is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 .
Founded 54 years ago, Amtrak set out on a bold adventure to see if passenger trains could be profitable. Fast forward to today, this experiment has been unsuccessful. Politicians have often crafted routes to win votes rather than attract riders. As a result, Amtrak has been squandering taxpayer money since its start in 1971.
Take, for instance, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021. It allocated a monumental $66 billion to bolster passenger rail. Yet, even with this backing, Amtrak’s losses soared from $1.12 billion in FY2019 to $2.12 billion in FY2024. This financial drain isn’t new; America’s passenger trains have lost money for 79 years.
Amtrak asserts that it is “on-track to reach operational profitability”. Yet, this is a bald-faced lie. While Amtrak reported a loss of $705.2 million for FY2024, it didn’t include:
- $966.2 million in depreciation;
- $447.3 million in “Project Related Expenses”;
- $314.1 million in state subsidies, which it classified as “revenue”;
- $26.9 million in Office of Inspector General funding
By omitting these costs, Amtrak paints an optimistic view of its financial health. In reality, Amtrak needs larger subsidies than ever before. In fact, Amtrak has been deceiving Congress with its “path to profitability” since 1990.
Although Amtrak touted a “ridership record” for FY2024, this figure is misleading too. Ridership numbers don’t reflect the average length of each passenger’s trip. A more insightful metric is passenger-miles, which measures how far people are traveling. In fact, Amtrak only transported 6.54 billion passenger-miles in FY2024. This is a decrease of 3.40 percent since FY2013.
Amtrak often attributes its financial struggles to its long-haul routes. Yet, the outlook is even bleaker for its short-haul, state-supported routes. Amtrak reported a $251.5 million loss for these routes in FY2024. Yet, with $314.1 million in state subsidies included, the true loss hits $565.6 million. This represents a shocking 94 percent increase from the $291.7 million lost in FY2019.
Amtrak’s advocates often cite highway “subsidies” to explain its financial debacles. But Amtrak guzzles about 39 times more subsidies per passenger-mile than highways do.
Amtrak asserts that freight trains “interfere” with its passenger services. However, Amtrak often makes questionable route choices despite having legal priority over freight. Between Chicago and Los Angeles, the Desert Wind lost less money than the Southwest Chief. Despite this, Amtrak favored the Southwest Chief, which passed through more congressional districts. It discontinued the Desert Wind in 1997, leaving Las Vegas with no train service.
February 11, 2025
Mapping the Tube 1863-2023: Treasures of the Tube Map
Jago Hazzard
Published 27 Oct 2024Mapping the Tube: 1863-2023 at The Map House is a captivating selling exhibition showcasing rare maps and materials spanning over 160 years of London’s transport history. It features the largest collection of Harry Beck manuscripts ever offered for sale, alongside early cartographic works and striking posters by 20th-century artists.
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