Rex Krueger
Published 15 Dec 2021Build a bench that breaks down, goes with you & sets back up fast!
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December 16, 2021
The Portable, Affordable, Quick-Stack Workbench
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Fallen Flag — the Chicago Great Western Railroad
This month’s Classic Trains fallen flag feature is the Chicago Great Western Railroad (CGW) by H. Roger Grant. Not being over-familiar with the US Midwest, while I’d heard of this railway I had no real background knowledge about it. The earliest charter was granted to the Chicago, St. Charles & Mississippi Airline in 1835, but no construction took place under the original management and the charter rights were passed on to the Minnesota and North Western Railroad (M&NW) in 1854. Actual construction of the line did not begin until 1884, connecting St. Paul, Minnesota with Dubuque, Iowa. The M&NW was taken over by the Chicago, St. Paul & Kansas City Railroad under the control of Alpheus Beede Stickney, a St. Paul businessman. By 1892, when the system adopted the Chicago Great Western name, there were routes to Omaha, Nebraska, St. Joseph, Missouri and Chicago.
The Panic of 1907 ended Stickney’s control of the railway and it ended up in the hands of J.P. Morgan:
Even though Stickney had imaginatively assembled a Midwestern trunk line, he ultimately lost his railroad. The brief but severe Bankers’ Panic of 1907 threw CGW into receivership, a fate the company had avoided during the much more severe Panic of 1893. The nation’s financial wizard, J.P. Morgan, took control, and in 1909 a reorganized Chicago Great Western Railroad made its debut. Morgan wisely placed Samuel Morse Felton in charge, because the new president excelled as a railroad manager. His greatest triumph before joining the Great Western had been to turn the Chicago & Alton into a profitable property.
[…]
The Felton years in Chicago Great Western railroad history resulted in a rehabilitated physical plant. Changes in rolling stock caught the attention of thousands of on-line residents. In 1910, for example, CGW purchased 10 Baldwin 2-6-6-2 Mallets (“Snakes”, as employees called them), and the road’s own shop forces at Oelwein, Iowa, rebuilt three F-3 class 2-6-2s (CGW had 95 total Prairie types) into three more 2-6-6-2s. Unfortunately, these giants did not work out, and in 1916 the Baldwins were sold to the Clinchfield and the homebuilds were rebuilt into 4-6-2s. In the Mallets’ place appeared reliable yet powerful 2-8-2s, of which CGW owned 35.
The railroad became a leader in the use of gasoline and later diesel motive power. Before World War I CGW assembled a small fleet of McKeen motor cars, knife-nosed “wind-splitters” that replaced steam-powered branchline and local trains. Its 1924 gas-electric car M-300 was the first unit of any type sold by the Electro-Motive Co., and it helped replace steam on trains 3 and 4 on the 509-mile Chicago–Omaha run. In 1929 CGW remodeled three McKeens to make up a deluxe gas-electric train, the Minneapolis–Rochester (Minn.) Blue Bird. CGW was mostly satisfied with its pioneering internal-combustion equipment.
1906 advertising blotter for the Chicago Great Western Railroad’s passenger trains.
Wikimedia Commons.
CGW’s independent life came to an end in the same era as a lot of small to medium sized railways disappeared into corporate mergers, take-overs, or bankruptcy:
Being a small road in an era when competitors were expanding through mergers led to the corporate demise of the CGW. Saying that shareholders “must be protected”, the board sought a partner. Although the expectation was union with KCS or perhaps the Soo Line, the aggressive Chicago & North Western, headed by resourceful Ben W. Heineman, made an acceptable proposal, and in 1968 Chicago Great Western Railroad history ended with it becoming a Fallen Flag.
C&NW operated CGW switchers and F units for a short time, and assimilated Great Western’s only second generation diesels — eight GP30s and nine SD40s, all painted in the final solid “Deramus red” seen also on KCS and Katy — into the yellow fleet.
Although for a short time much of the former Great Western maintained its identity as C&NW’s Missouri Division, that operating organization ended and its lines started to disappear. By the 1980s much of the trackage had been retired, and at the start of the 21st century only about 145 miles remained. Survivors include portions of the main lines in Iowa (Mason City to the Fort Dodge area; Oelwein–Waterloo; and a leg into Council Bluffs); the Cannon Falls (Minn.) branch; and terminal trackage around South St. Paul, Minn., and just west of Chicago.
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Supersonic Firsts
The History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered
Published 20 Aug 2021On August 20, 1955, United States Air Force Colonel Horace A Hanes set the world’s first supersonic world speed record in a North American Aviation F-100C Super Sabre. Although we are well into the supersonic age, aircraft that can exceed the speed of sound are still rare machines, and marvels of engineering and pilot prowess. The early aviation pioneers who tested the terrifying sound barrier have helped scientists better understand the dynamics of superfast speeds.
This is original content based on research by The History Guy. Images in the Public Domain are carefully selected and provide illustration. As very few images of the actual event are available in the Public Domain, images of similar objects and events are used for illustration.
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https://www.thetiebar.com/?utm_campai…All events are portrayed in historical context and for educational purposes. No images or content are primarily intended to shock and disgust. Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Non censuram.
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QotD: “Advance Australia Fair”
Despite the remorseless filleting of the lyrics to “O Canada”, every year or two some grievance is lodged against the two or three remaining lines of the original. Thus:
O Canada!
Our home and native land…Which should of course be:
O Canada!
Our home on natives’ land…Game as I am to disparage the senior Dominion’s anthem, I have to say it’s effortlessly outpaced in insipidity by …
Australians all let us rejoice
For we are young and free
We’ve golden soil And wealth for toil
Our home is girt by sea…“Girt” is famously the only point of lyric interest in “Advance Australia Fair”. Peter Dodds McCormick wrote the song back in 1878, which meant, by the time they decided to make it the official anthem twenty years ago, most of the verses were unusable. No point shaking off the old cultural cringe of “God Save The Queen” only to start singing couplet after couplet about “gallant Cook from Albion” and “true British courage” and “old England’s flag”. And how about this quatrain?
Britannia then shall surely know
Beyond wide ocean’s roll
Her sons in fair Australia’s land
Still keep an English soul …So, after all the colonial sucking up was excised from the lyric, “girt” was pretty much all that was left. A few years ago, incidentally, there was an Aussie satirical magazine named Girt in its honor: I signed on with them but it folded after one issue. Don’t believe I ever got the check. Or cheque. I try not to be biased against “Advance Australia Fair” on that account, but honestly, was there ever such a gulf between the spirit of a great nation and its official musical embodiment?
Mark Steyn, adapted from A Song for the Season, 2008.
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December 15, 2021
Is the Wehrmacht Defeated in 1942? – WW2 Special
World War Two
Published 14 Dec 2021It’s late 1942 and the German Army is close to ruin. The Ostheer alone has suffered more than a million casualties in its fight against the Red Army. If the Wehrmacht cannot find a way to return to its former strength or reap decisive strategic benefits in the near future, it will ultimately face destruction in a war of attrition.
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Christopher Hitchens, ten years gone
In The Critic, Ben Sixsmith laments our loss of the “last cool columnist”:
Christopher Hitchens speaking at The Amaz!ng Meeting held at the Riviera Hotel, Las Vegas, Nevada on 20 January 2007.
Photo detail by ensceptico via Wikimedia Commons.
The ten year anniversary of the death of Christopher Hitchens (15 December) brings to mind two questions. Firstly, has it really been ten years since Christopher Hitchens died? Secondly, has it only been ten years since Christopher Hitchens died? The vivid nature of his prose and rhetoric makes him feel like our contemporary. His obsessions, though, — like atheistic evangelism and Middle Eastern nation building — feel as dated as a Roman artifact.
Columnists have a short cultural lifespan. Once, millions of Britons read Bernard Levin every week. Now? I doubt that most young writers have even heard of him. Classic books are reprinted. Newspapers gather dust. Hitchens’s name does not have all the weight it had ten years ago but it has stayed alive, because the Internet archives essays and appearances and because of the esteem that he is held in by his peers.
Janan Ganesh, writing for the Financial Times, believes that Hitchens would have thrived if he had lived to comment on 2021. “He was made for our time, not his own,” Ganesh writes, “The great vacancy in today’s public life is for an equal scourge of the censorious left and the feral right … Hitchens would have been in his element.”
This is bunkum. Hitchens would have been hopelessly out of sorts in the 2020s. How, for example, would he have responded to the COVID-19 pandemic? It is as implausible to imagine that a man with such a lust for life would have endorsed long-term restrictions as it is to imagine that a man with such cheerful faith in the scientific establishment would have had time for COVID sceptics and vaccine hesitancy. Anybody hoping that Hitchens would have carved out some kind of nuanced middle ground, meanwhile, must have forgotten who we are dealing with. No, the plain truth is that the high moralism and rhetorical fury of “the Hitch” were perfectly suited to the heydays of the War on Terror and cable TV.
Liberal commentators like Ganesh miss Hitchens not so much because of his opinions as because he was cool. Ross Douthat mentions Mark Lilla, Anne Applebaum and Andrew Sullivan as other liberals who criticise the left and the right. But while I respect Lilla and Applebaum’s accomplishments and enjoy Sullivan’s writing, how many people do you think have fantasised about having a few drinks with them — or, indeed, with any other political commentator not named “Hitchens”?
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Why Real Wasabi Is So Expensive | So Expensive
Business Insider
Published 19 Jan 2019The green paste you’ve been eating with your sushi isn’t really wasabi. If you check the ingredients on the packet, you might see a mixture of sweetener, horseradish and perhaps a small percentage of the real thing. Real wasabi is hard to come across and it can cost $250 per kilo. So what actually is wasabi, and why is it so expensive?
For more from The Wasabi Company, go to: https://www.thewasabicompany.co.uk/
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QotD: Suppressing intellectual heresy
The young people at Middlebury who shouted down Charles Murray and assaulted a faculty member who had tried to engage him in civil debate were, in effect, suppressing the ideas of a heretic. After all, a heretic’s ideas are too dangerous to be heard.
Dangerous ideas are, of course, interesting ideas, especially to young people. When we fail to address dangerous ideas in our courses, we add to their mystique. When activists shout down or assault heretical speakers they send two messages. The first and intended message is a display of righteous disapproval. The other, unintended message, is that there is something so menacing about the idea being expressed that it cannot simply be laughed off or even argued with, rather it cannot be allowed to be spoken.
Consider how that looks to someone who is starting to question the premises of the liberal orthodoxy on race, gender, diversity and so on. Why, our alt-right curious person might wonder, are there some ideas that are so laughably false that one need not even mount a counter argument (a flat earth or the financial benefits of college athletics), some ideas that are considered contentious but still open to debate (supply-side economics), and some ideas that are so outré that they can only be met with back turning, shouting, or by punches to the face?
Might it be, our waverer must wonder, that these people don’t want me to hear this idea because they don’t have a good answer to it?
Erik Gilbert, “Liberal Orthodoxy and the New Heresy”, Quillette, 2019-02-04.
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December 14, 2021
Michael Nesmith, RIP
In Monday’s NP Platformed newsletter, Colby Cosh paid tribute to the late Michael Nesmith:
Michael Nesmith, the Monkees’ toqued Texan, died on Friday at the age of 78. It’s probably fitting that Nesmith died at a moment when the Beatles are back in the forefront of public consciousness: being hired as a fake Beatle for a television show was the beginning, for him, of an epic American life. It’s a sequence of events that defies belief in retrospect.
The Monkees were a corporate creation — four guys pulled together in order to be vaguely Beatles-like and serve as the public face of a series of glorious hit singles written (and largely played) by others. They had a period of truly enormous stardom, but they began to attract criticism when word of their sham-like nature filtered out into a world of increasing concern with authenticity. Meanwhile, they were themselves revolting against the Monkees machine and its Svengali, Don Kirshner — a revolt of which the sharply intelligent Nesmith was the acknowledged leader.
The Monkees got control of their performing lives — and began to make distinctly inferior records. There is a reason “Last Train to Clarksville” went to number 1 on the charts, and “I’m a Believer” (written by Neil Diamond) went to number 1, and “Daydream Believer” went to number 1, and Nesmith’s “Listen to the Band” went to number 63. Nobody really had much use for authentic Monkees. By all rights they ought to have ended up as Milli Vanilli.
Yet Nesmith had one rock-‘n’-roll standard, one bright gemlike classic, in him. This was “Different Drum”, a record Nesmith had written in 1964 before anyone had invented the Monkees. He couldn’t get Kirshner and his hired tastemakers and arrangers to turn it into an actual Monkees record. It did appear on an episode of the show in 1966, but in an astonishingly humiliating way: Nesmith’s character, “Mike Nesmith”, plays a few bars of it very haltingly while pretending to be an inept country-folk singer, “Billy Roy Hodstetter”.
A country-folk singer was, of course, what Nesmith actually was when not in front of the cameras. The result is a media puzzle worthy of the brainpower of a dozen French deconstructionists. Nesmith, in this handful of seconds, is a real musician in a fake TV band pretending to be a real TV musician on a fake show-within-a-show, mangling his own genuine material.
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Minoan Civilization
Thersites the Historian
Published 25 Jan 2018In this video, I look at the Bronze Age civilization on Crete known as the Minoans.
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The Omicron variant of the Wuhan Coronavirus
Jim Treacher gets to the essential question about the dreaded and fast-spreading Omicron variant that the media somehow always forgets to ask:
We’ve seen a lot of headlines about the Omicron variant, which is the latest thing we’re all supposed to panic about. That’s how it works: You must be driven into a perpetual state of hysteria. You must never be allowed a moment to stop and catch your breath and think about what’s happening, because you might fall into badthink. The latest name for that is Omicron.
Omicron! OMG!! Run around like a headless chicken!!!
But here’s a question that none of our moral, ethical, and intellectual betters in the press are asking, because they have no incentive to ask: How many people have died of Omicron?
Like, in the entire world. It doesn’t need to be a precise number. A rough estimate is fine. You can round up to the nearest 10.
Anybody? Hello?
I’m not sure how trustworthy Snopes is, but they say the number so far is … zero.
Zip.
Zilch.
Goose egg.
1 – 1.
None.
So please excuse me if I don’t freak the hell out every time somebody gets Omicron. Every story about it lists the number of cases but glosses over minor little details. Like what happens to the people who get it.
Do they get sick?
If so, how sick do they get?
If not, what’s the problem?
The media is just selling fear, as usual. Yes, COVID-19 is real, and a lot of people have died. No, nobody is dying from this Omicron variant. That’s good news, which is why the “news” isn’t interested.
Of course, on the weekend British PM Boris Johnson announced the death of someone in Britain who had contracted the Omicron variant … but it’s not clear if the person’s death was a direct result of that infection. So, we know at least one person has died with the Omicron variant, but we don’t know if it was from it.
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Chatellerault M24/29: France’s New Wave of Post-WWI Small Arms
Forgotten Weapons
Published 26 Aug 2017France fought the Great War with an array of weapons which were all sub-par in one way or another — the Lebel rifle was obsolescent by 1914, the Berthier was a cavalry carbine forced into rifle service, the Chauchat was an emergency wartime design optimized for production volume instead of quality, and the handguns were a mixture of old revolvers and desperate imports from Spain. Once the war finally ended, the French military would move to replace the whole lot with new and modern arms.
This would begin by finally replacing the 8mm Lebel cartridge with a non-tapered, rimless cartridge — something that would be well suited to use in magazines and repeating arms. Simultaneously, a new light machine gun would be found, as this was deemed to most important improvement to be made. The cartridge was adopted in 1924 as the 7.5x58mm, but it would soon be realized that there was a critical problem with that round. The French military had a large supply of German arms taken as war reparations, and the new 7.5mm cartridge looked very similar to the 8x57mm Mauser cartridge. Worse, the Mauser round would chamber and fire in the new French chambers, causing serious damage to guns when the 8mm bullet was squeezed down to 7.5mm. To fix this issue, the French cut their cartridge down by 4mm, resulting in the 1929 adoption of the 7.5x54mm round — the chamber of which would no longer fit a German 8mm round.
As for the machine gun, the first choice was to simply adopt the Browning BAR — but France insisted on obtaining the technical data package and producing the guns in France, and they could not come to an agreement with Colt over the price of such a license. So, the French held trials of other guns, looking at virtually everything then available. In the aftermath of the trials, it was decided that the Chatellerault arsenal could design its own weapon using the best features of the other existing guns. The arsenal rather quickly produced prototypes, and they were adopted in 1924 (and then updated to use the shorter version of the 7.5mm cartridge in 1929).
The Chatellerault M24/29 is a quite good weapon, especially considering how early it was designed. It uses a tilting bolt and a top-mounted 25 round magazine. It has two triggers, the front one firing in semiautomatic and the rear one in fully automatic. The wooden front handguard allows for fire from the hip or shoulder if desired, and a set of thorough dust covers keep the gun free from ingress of mud or dirt. About 188,000 would be manufactured, and it would stay in service for many decades.
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QotD: Insulated from reality
The first notable thing about today’s act of public nuisance masquerading as a protest was the hilarity of the campaign group itself. Remember when radicals fought for higher wages or better working conditions or for a revolution to replace capitalism with something else? Not anymore. Today’s self-styled militants demand the insulation of houses. “What do we want? The creation of a thermal envelope in people’s homes! When do we want it? Now!” What a crock to go to the barricades for. Also notable is the irony of supposed planet-lovers causing so much pollution by forcing hundreds of cars and trucks to sit still for ages, chugging fumes into the air for nought. Well played, greenies.
But the most striking thing about these kinds of protests is their sheer arrogance. Their inherently anti-democratic, anti-masses nature, where the aim is always, but always, to inconvenience the little people and teach us a lesson. You’re on your way to Heathrow for a much-needed jaunt to Malaga to escape the stresses of work? Not anymore, you’re not – the eco-elitists blocked junction 14, which leads to one of Heathrow’s terminals. You’re a knackered trucker who’s been driving all night long and now wants to get back to his family? Tough shit. These plummy alarmists have decided to make you the collateral damage of one of their narcissistic stunts.
Brendan O’Neill, “Environmentalism is a revolt against the people”, Spiked, 2021-09-13.
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December 13, 2021
The Battle of Cannae (216 B.C.E.)
Historia Civilis
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Website | http://historiacivilis.comMusic is Beethoven’s “Sonata No. 32 in C Minor, Op. 111” – I. Maestoso – Allegro con brio ed appassionato, performed by Daniel Veesey
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QotD: Cultural undermining of the British “establishment” was effectively complete by 1970
[…]
It also made the middle class, especially the educated and well-off middle class, despise themselves and feel a sort of shame for their supposedly elitist prejudices, based upon injustice and undermined by their failure to defend the nation from its enemies in the era of appeasement. Thanks to this, in another paradox, they have often felt unable to defend things within Britain which they value and which help to keep them in existence, from the grammar schools to good manners. They are ashamed of being higher up the scale, though for most middle-class people this is more a matter of merit than birth, and nothing to be ashamed of at all.
[…]
Since the 1960s, when the Left began its conquest of the cultural battlements, it has always been surprised and annoyed by Tory election victories. The 1970 Tory triumph, though entirely predictable, took the cultural establishment by surprise. The 1979 Tory win, though even more predictable, infuriated them. They had won control of broadcasting, of the schools, of the universities, the church, the artistic, musical and architectural establishment? How was it possible that they could not also be the government? Their rage was enormous, and increased with each successive Labour defeat. It was an injustice. How could the people be so foolish? Now, instead of aristocratic snobs misgoverning the country, the establishment was portrayed as a sort of fascistic semi-dictatorship, hacking at the NHS and the welfare state, waging aggressive wars abroad and enriching itself while the poor lived in misery.
This series of falsehoods has now become a weapon ready and waiting for unscrupulous demagogues to harness, and perhaps use against the new “establishment” which has benefited so much from the satire boom and the alternative comedians. Once you have begun to use dishonest mockery as a weapon, you can never be entirely sure that it will not eventually be turned against you, by others who have learned that abuse and jeering pay much easier and swifter dividends than hard fact or serious argument. It could be that the civilized mirth of the sixties leads in a direct line to the crude hyena cackling of the mob. In any case, there is no sign of the humour industry taking the side of traditional morality, patriotism or civility. The best it can do is dignify itself with noisy and public collections for sentimental and prominent charity. Once you step beyond the fringe, you sooner or later find yourself in very wild country indeed.
Peter Hitchens, The Abolition of Britain, 1988.
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