Quotulatiousness

February 19, 2021

Freddie DeBoer’s arguments against successful charter schools

Filed under: Books, Education, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Scott Alexander’s extensive review of Freddie DeBoer’s book The Cult of Smart includes this discussion of DeBoer’s belief that American charter schools are fraudulent and only manage their headline-worthy educational outcomes by “cooking the books”:

I think DeBoer would argue he’s not against improving schools. He just thinks all attempts to do it so far have been crooks and liars pillaging the commons, so much so that we need a moratorium on this kind of thing until we can figure out what’s going on. But I’m worried that his arguments against existing school reform are in some cases kind of weak.

DeBoer does make things hard for himself by focusing on two of the most successful charter school experiments. If he’d been a little less honest, he could have passed over these and instead mentioned the many charter schools that fail, or just sort of plod onward doing about as well as public schools do. I think the closest thing to a consensus right now is that most charter schools do about the same as public schools for white/advantaged students, and slightly better than public schools for minority/disadvantaged students. But DeBoer very virtuously thinks it’s important to confront his opponents’ strongest cases, so these are the ones I’ll focus on here.

Success Academy is a chain of New York charter schools with superficially amazing results. They take the worst-off students — “76% of students are less advantaged and 94% are minorities” — and achieve results better than the ritziest schools in the best neighborhoods — it ranked “in the top 1% of New York state schools in math, and in the top 3% for reading” — while spending “as much as $3000 to $4000 less per child per year than their public school counterparts.” Its supporters credit it with showing “what you can accomplish when you are free from the regulations and mindsets that have taken over education, and do things in a different way.”

DeBoer will have none of it. He thinks they’re cooking the books by kicking out lower-performing students in a way public schools can’t do, leaving them with a student body heavily-selected for intelligence. Any remaining advantage is due to “teacher tourism”, where ultra-bright Ivy League grads who want a “taste of the real world” go to teach at private schools for a year or two before going into their permanent career as consultants or something. This would work — many studies show that smarter teachers make students learn more (though this specifically means high-IQ teachers; making teachers get more credentials has no effect). But it doesn’t scale (there are only so many Ivy League grads willing to accept low salaries for a year or two in order to have a fun time teaching children), and it only works in places like New York (Ivy League grads would not go to North Dakota no matter how fun a time they were promised).

I’m not sure I share this perspective. Success Academy isn’t just cooking the books — you would test for that using a randomized trial with intention-to-treat analysis. The one that I found is small-n, short timescale, and a little ambiguous, but I think basically supports the contention that there’s something there beyond selection bias. Teacher tourism might be a factor, but hardly justifies DeBoer’s “charter schools are frauds, shut them down” perspective. Even if Success Academy’s results are 100% because of teacher tourism, they found a way to educate thousands of extremely disadvantaged minority kids to a very high standard at low cost, a way public schools had previously failed to exploit. That’s not “cheating”, it’s something exciting that we should celebrate. If it doesn’t scale, it doesn’t scale, but maybe the same search process that found this particular way can also find other ways? Surely it doesn’t seem like the obvious next step is to ban anyone else from even trying?

And we only have DeBoer’s assumption that all of this is teacher tourism. Success Academy itself claims that they have lots of innovative teaching methods and a different administrative culture. If this explains even 10% of their results, spreading it to other schools would be enough to make the US rocket up the PISA rankings and become an unparalleled educational powerhouse. I’m not claiming to know for sure that this is true, but not even being curious about this seems sort of weird; wanting to ban stuff like Success Academy so nobody can ever study it again doubly so.

DeBoer’s second tough example is New Orleans. Hurricane Katrina destroyed most of their schools, forcing the city to redesign their education system from the ground up. They decided to go a 100% charter school route, and it seemed to be very successful. Unlike Success Academy, this can’t be selection bias (it was every student in the city), and you can’t argue it doesn’t scale (it scaled to an entire city!). But DeBoer writes:

    After Hurricane Katrina, the neoliberal powers that be took advantage of a crisis (as they always do) to enforce their agenda. The schools in New Orleans were transformed into a 100% charter system, and reformers were quick to crow about improved test scores, the only metric for success they recognize. Whether these gains stand up to scrutiny is debatable. But even if these results hold, the notion of using New Orleans as a model for other school districts is absurd on its face. When we make policy decisions, we want to isolate variables and compare like with like, to whatever degree possible. The story of New Orleans makes this impossible. Katrina changed everything in the city, where 100,000 of the city’s poorest residents were permanently displaced. The civic architecture of the city was entirely rebuilt. Billions of dollars of public and private money poured in. An army of do-gooders arrived to try to save the city, willing to work for lower wages than they would ordinarily accept. How could these massive overall social changes possibly be replicated elsewhere? And how could we have any faith that adopting the New Orleans schooling system — without the massive civic overhaul — would replicate the supposed advantages?

These are good points, and I would accept them from anyone other than DeBoer, who will go on to say in a few chapters that the solution to our education issues is a Marxist revolution that overthrows capitalism and dispenses with the very concept of economic value. If he’s willing to accept a massive overhaul of everything, that’s failed every time it’s tried, why not accept a much smaller overhaul-of-everything, that’s succeeded at least once? There are plenty of billionaires willing to pour fortunes into reforming various cities — DeBoer will go on to criticize them as deluded do-gooders a few chapters later. If billions of dollars plus a serious commitment to ground-up reform are what we need, let’s just spend billions of dollars and have a serious commitment to ground-up reform! If more hurricanes is what it takes to fix education, I’m willing to do my part by leaving my air conditioner on “high” all the time.

February 5, 2021

The 369th Infantry Regiment in WW1 – the “Harlem Hellfighters”

Filed under: France, Germany, History, Military, USA, WW1 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Lawrence W. Reed remembers the US regiment that spent the most days in combat during WW1 and was awarded the French Croix de Guerre for the unit’s incredible fighting efforts:

“Some of the colored men of the 369th (15th N.Y.) who won the Croix de Guerre for gallantry in action.” Left to right. Front row: Pvt. Ed Williams, Herbert Taylor, Pvt. Leon Fraitor, Pvt. Ralph Hawkins. Back Row: Sgt. H. D. Prinas, Sgt. Dan Strorms, Pvt. Joe Williams, Pvt. Alfred Hanley, and Cpl. T. W. Taylor.
Records of the War Department General and Special Staffs via Wikimedia Commons.

Formed from a New York National Guard unit, the men of the 369th learned basic military practices at Camp Whitman, New York, before being sent to Camp Wadsworth in Spartanburg, South Carolina, for combat training. They were not welcomed by many of the locals there, and some were subjected to discrimination and vile epithets for no more reason than their color. In December 1917, they were shipped to France where they expected to see action on the front lines.

Their high spirits were quickly dashed when it became apparent the Army did not want to deploy them for anything other than manual labor, far from the fighting. Even the rifles they brought with them were confiscated by US Army officials.

The commander of the American Expeditionary Force, General John J. Pershing, was reluctant to commit any US troops to the front until he felt he had assembled them in sufficient numbers to ensure victory. The French, meanwhile, were desperate for manpower. Finally bowing to French pressure, Pershing gave them the 369th. While some regarded black troops as expendable, they ultimately proved themselves indispensable.

Consider this amazing record of the Harlem Hellfighters: No American unit experienced more time in combat than they did — no less than 191 days under fire. They never lost an inch of ground. The enemy never captured a single of their number. They suffered the highest casualty rate of any US regiment. None deserted. The grateful French bestowed their highest military honor, the Croix de Guerre, upon the entire regiment. Many individuals of the regiment received the US Army’s second-highest award, the Distinguished Service Cross. Posthumously, Henry Johnson received America’s Medal of Honor in 2015. The 369th ended up as the most decorated US regiment of the war.

Another distinguishing feature of the Harlem Hellfighters was their band, the largest and best-known of any regiment. Its leader was James Reese Europe, whose enlistment in 1917 proved to be a boon for recruitment. He was one of America’s best-known black musicians and others like Noble Sissle, who became Europe’s lieutenant and lead vocalist, were eager to serve with him.

Europe’s band was extremely popular with the French, even when Europe introduced his own arrangement of La Marseillaise, France’s national anthem. The Hellfighters’ band brought both jazz and ragtime music to France, where nobody had heard either before.

January 21, 2021

Fallen Flag — the New York Central System (part 2)

Filed under: History, Railways, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

This month’s Classic Trains fallen flag feature is the history of the New York Central System by George Drury (part 1 is linked here). The New York Central was one of the biggest and most economically powerful American railways for over a century before the postwar boom turned into the economic disaster of the 1960s and 70s, as passengers and freight switched from rail to road — partly thanks to the taxpayer-funded Interstate Highway System — and air and the decline of northeastern heavy industry and mining hit the established eastern railroads very hard:

The New York Central System was the largest of the eastern trunk systems from the standpoint of mileage and second only to the Pennsylvania in revenue. It served most of the industrial part of the country, and its freight tonnage was exceeded only by the coal-carrying railroads. In addition it was a major passenger railroad, with perhaps two-thirds the number of passengers as the Pennsylvania, but NYC’s average passenger traveled one-third again as far as Pennsy’s. NYC did not share as fully in the post-World War II prosperity because of rising labor costs, material costs, and an expensive improvement program, especially for passenger service.

During 1946–47 Chesapeake & Ohio purchased a block of NYC stock, becoming the road’s largest stockholder. Robert R. Young gained control of the Central and became its chairman in 1954 as part of a maneuver to merge it with C&O. One of his first acts was to put Alfred E. Perlman in charge of the NYC.

Under Perlman NYC slimmed its physical plant, reducing long stretches of four-track line to two tracks under centralized traffic control, and developed an aggressive freight marketing department. At the same time NYC’s passenger operations were de-emphasized. On December 3, 1967, just before NYC and Pennsy merged, the Central reduced its passenger service to a skeleton, combining its New York–Chicago, New York–Detroit, New York–Toronto, and Boston–Chicago services into a single train and dropping all train names (including that of the legendary 20th Century Limited) except for, curiously, that of the Chicago–Cincinnati James Whitcomb Riley.

The Central’s archrival was the Pennsylvania Railroad. West of Buffalo and Pittsburgh the two systems duplicated each other at almost every major point; east of those cities the two hardly touched. Both had physical plant not being used to capacity (NYC was in better shape); both had a heavy passenger business; neither was earning much money. In 1957 NYC and Pennsy announced merger talks.

The initial industry reaction was utter surprise. Every merger proposal for decades had tried to balance the Central against the Pennsy and create two, three, or four more-or-less-equal systems in the east. Traditionally PRR had been allied with Norfolk & Western and Wabash; NYC with Baltimore & Ohio, Reading, and maybe the Lackawanna; and everyone else swept up with Erie and Nickel Plate. Tradition also favored end-to-end mergers rather than those of parallel roads.

Planning and justifying the merger took nearly ten years, during which time the eastern railroad scene changed radically, in large measure because of the impending merger of NYC and PRR: Erie merged with Lackawanna, C&O acquired control of B&O, and N&W took in Virginian, Wabash, Nickel Plate, Pittsburgh & West Virginia, and Akron, Canton & Youngstown.

Tradition aside, though, the New York Central and the Pennsylvania merged on Feb. 1, 1968 to form Penn Central.

Pages 1-2 from the July 1962 publicity booklet produced by the Penn-Central Merger Information Committee to inform the public on issues concerning their proposed merger. This pages shows various statistics showing Eastern railroads in decline.
Wikimedia Commons.

January 9, 2021

The (declining) power of the political cartoon

Filed under: History, Humour, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In Quillette, Jack Reilly outlines the rise of political cartooning from (of all people) Martin Luther to the present day, as it faces the final phase of its long career:

The first influential cartoon published in an American newspaper has traditionally been credited to Benjamin Franklin, who drew his famous serpent divided into eight parts with the legend Join, or Die — the message being that fellow colonists must band together to repel the enemy forces then threatening their territory. Long after Franklin’s death, the image would be dusted off for reuse by supporters of American unity.

Thomas Nast, whom many consider to be the greatest editorial cartoonist of all time, rose to prominence during the Civil War. Still in his early 20s, the young German immigrant began producing such arresting pro-Union material that Abraham Lincoln — flipping Napoleon’s rueful commentary about James Gillray on its head — referred to Nast as “our best recruiting agent.”

During the national election of 1864, conducted amidst the Civil War, the Democrats pushed a platform of reconciliation with the slaving south. In response, Nast created his famous Compromise with the South cartoon, depicting an injured union soldier, bowing his head and lifelessly shaking hands with a victorious confederate who stands atop the grave of a fallen Yankee, with Lady Liberty weeping in the foreground. The epitaph on a tombstone reads “In memory of the Union heroes who died in a useless war.” Nast’s lurid but masterful image created a sensation, and showed how politically powerful the cartooning medium could be in an age of mass newspaper readership. Two months later, Abraham Lincoln defeated the Democrat candidate, George McClellan, to secure a second term.

In the decades following the war, Nast would continue to elevate the medium to high art. In 1871, he began an ongoing series for Harper’s Weekly attacking the corruption of Tammany Hall, the Democratic political machine that controlled New York politics. Nast so mercilessly lampooned William M. “Boss” Tweed as the machine’s ringleader, that Tweed was heard to rage, “Stop them damn pictures! I don’t care a straw for your newspaper articles. My constituents can’t read. But they can’t help seeing them damn pictures!”

Eventually, Tweed was convicted of money laundering. (He attempted to escape justice by absconding to Spain, but was soon apprehended by Spanish officials, who reportedly recognized him with assistance from Nast’s cartoons.) As for Nast himself, he’d go on to conceive of the elephant as a symbol for the Republican party, popularize the use of the donkey for the Democrats, and help create the modern image of Santa Claus that Americans have come to love.

“The Third-Term Panic”, by Thomas Nast, originally published in Harper’s Magazine on 7 November 1874.

A braying ass, in a lion’s coat, and “N.Y. Herald” collar, frightening animals in the forest: a giraffe (“N. Y. Tribune”), a unicorn (“N. Y. Times”), and an owl (“N. Y. World”); an ostrich, its head buried, represents “Temperance”. An elephant, “The Republican Vote”, stands near broken planks (Inflation, Repudiation, Home Rule, and Re-construction). Under the elephant, a pit labeled “Southern Claims. Chaos. Rum.” A fox (“Democratic Party”) has its forepaws on the plank “Reform. (Tammany. K.K.)” The title refers to U.S. Grant’s possible bid for a third presidential term. This possibility was criticized by New York Herald owner and editor James Gordon Bennett, Jr.
Image and caption via Wikimedia Commons.

January 7, 2021

Fallen Flag — the New York Central System

Filed under: History, Railways, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

This month’s Classic Trains fallen flag feature is the first part of the history of the New York Central System by George Drury. The New York Central was one of the biggest and most economically powerful American railways for over a century before the postwar boom turned into the economic disaster of the 1960s and 70s, as passengers switched from rail to road and plane and the decline of northeastern heavy industry and mining hit the established eastern railroads very hard:

The New York Central was a large railroad, and it had several subsidiaries whose identity remained strong, not so much in cars and locomotives carrying the old name but in local loyalties: If you lived in Detroit, you rode to Chicago on the Michigan Central, not the New York Central; through the Conrail era and even now, the line across Massachusetts is still known as “the Boston & Albany.”

The streamlined steam locomotive New York Central Hudson No.5344 “Commodore Vanderbilt”, leaving Chicago’s LaSalle Street station pulling the NYC’s premier passenger traing, the 20th Century Limited, 22 February 1935.
Photo originally copyrighted International News Photos (copyright not renewed) via Wikimedia Commons

The system’s history is easier to digest in small pieces: first New York Central followed by its two major leased lines, Boston & Albany and Toledo & Ohio Central; then Michigan Central and Big Four (Cleveland, Cincinnati, Chicago & St. Louis). By the mid-1960s NYC owned 99.8 percent of the stock of Michigan Central and more than 97 percent of the stock of the Big Four. NYC leased both on Feb. 1, 1930, but they remained separate companies to avoid the complexities of merger.

In broad geographic terms, the NYC proper was everything east of Buffalo plus a line from Buffalo through Cleveland and Toledo to Chicago (the former Lake Shore & Michigan Southern). NYC included the Ohio Central Lines (Toledo through Columbus to and beyond Charleston, W.Va.) and the Boston & Albany (neatly defined by its name). The Michigan Central was a Buffalo–Detroit–Chicago line and everything in Michigan north of that. The Big Four was everything south of NYC’s Cleveland–Toledo–Chicago line other than the Ohio Central.

The New York Central System included several controlled railroads that did not accompany NYC into the Penn Central merger. The most important of these were (with the proportion of NYC ownership in the mid-1960s):

  • Pittsburgh & Lake Erie (80 percent)
  • Indiana Harbor Belt (NYC, 30 percent; Michigan Central, 30 percent; Chicago & North Western, 20 percent; and Milwaukee Road, 20 percent)
  • Toronto, Hamilton & Buffalo (NYC, 37 percent; MC, 22 percent; Canada Southern, 14 percent; and Canadian Pacific, 27 percent).

[…]

The New York & Harlem Railroad was incorporated in 1831 to build a line in Manhattan from 23rd Street north to 129th Street between Third and Eighth avenues (the railroad chose to follow Fourth Avenue). At first the railroad was primarily a horsecar system, but in 1840 the road’s charter was amended to allow it to build north toward Albany. In 1844 the rails reached White Plains and in January 1852 the New York & Harlem made connection with the Western Railroad (later Boston & Albany) at Chatham, N.Y., creating a New York–Albany rail route.

The towns along the Hudson River felt no need of a railroad, except during the winter when ice prevented navigation. Poughkeepsie interests organized the Hudson River Railroad in 1847. The railroad opened from a terminal on Manhattan’s west side all the way to East Albany. By then the road had leased the Troy & Greenbush, gaining access to a bridge over the Hudson at Troy. (A bridge at Albany was completed in 1866.)

By 1863 Cornelius Vanderbilt controlled the New York & Harlem and had a substantial interest in the Hudson River Railroad. In 1867 he obtained control of the New York Central, consolidating it with the Hudson River in 1869 to form the New York Central & Hudson River Railroad.

Vanderbilt wanted to build a magnificent terminal for the NYC&HR in New York. He chose as its site the corner of 42nd Street and Fourth Avenue on the New York & Harlem, the southerly limit of steam locomotive operation in Manhattan. Construction of Grand Central Depot began in 1869. The new depot was actually three separate stations serving the NYC&HR, the New York & Harlem, and the New Haven. Trains of the Hudson River line reached the New York & Harlem by means of a connecting track completed in 1871 along Spuyten Duyvil Creek and the Harlem River (they have since become a single waterway). That was the first of three Grand Centrals.

The Wikipedia page on the New York Central includes a good overview of the decline of the railway:

The New York Central, like many U.S. railroads, declined after the Second World War. Problems resurfaced that had plagued the railroad industry before the war, such as over-regulation by the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC), which severely regulated the rates charged by the railroad, along with continuing competition from automobiles. These problems were coupled with even more formidable forms of competition, such as airline service in the 1950s that began to deprive NYC of its long-distance passenger trade. The Interstate Highway Act of 1956 helped create a network of efficient roads for motor vehicle travel through the country, enticing more people to travel by car, as well as haul freight by truck. The 1959 opening of the Saint Lawrence Seaway adversely affected NYC freight business. Container shipments could now be directly shipped to ports along the Great Lakes, eliminating the railroads’ freight hauls between the east and the Midwest.

The NYC also carried a substantial tax burden from governments that saw rail infrastructure as a source of property tax revenues – taxes that were not imposed upon interstate highways. To make matters worse, most railroads, including the NYC, were saddled with a World War II-era tax of 15% on passenger fares, which remained until 1962, 17 years after the end of the war.

Robert R. Young: 1954–1958
In June 1954, management of the New York Central System lost a proxy fight in 1954 to Robert Ralph Young and the Alleghany Corporation he led.

Alleghany Corporation was a real estate and railroad empire built by the Van Sweringen brothers of Cleveland in the 1920s that had controlled the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway (C&O) and the Nickel Plate Road. It fell under the control of Young and financier Allan Price Kirby during the Great Depression.

R.R. Young was considered a railroad visionary, but found the New York Central in worse shape than he had imagined. Unable to keep his promises, Young was forced to suspend dividend payments in January 1958. He committed suicide later that month.

Alfred E. Perlman: 1958–1968
After Young’s suicide, his role in NYC management was assumed by Alfred E. Perlman, who had been working with the NYC under Young since 1954. Despite the dismal financial condition of the railroad, Perlman was able to streamline operations and save the company money. Starting in 1959, Perlman was able to reduce operating deficits by $7.7 million, which nominally raised NYC stock to $1.29 per share, producing dividends of an amount not seen since the end of the war. By 1964 he was able to reduce the NYC long-term debt by nearly $100 million, while reducing passenger deficits from $42 to $24.6 million.

Perlman also enacted several modernization projects throughout the railroad. Notable was the use of Centralized Traffic Control (CTC) systems on many of the NYC lines, which reduced the four-track mainline to two tracks. He oversaw construction and/or modernization of many hump or classification yards, notably the $20-million Selkirk Yard which opened outside of Albany in 1966. Perlman also experimented with jet trains, creating a Budd RDC car (the M-497 Black Beetle) powered by two J47 jet engines stripped from a B-36 Peacemaker bomber as a solution to increasing car and airplane competition. The project did not leave the prototype stage.

Perlman’s cuts resulted in the curtailing of many of the railroad’s services; commuter lines around New York were particularly affected. In 1958–1959, service was suspended on the NYC’s Putnam Division in Westchester and Putnam counties, and the NYC abandoned its ferry service across the Hudson to Weehawken Terminal. This negatively impacted the railroad’s West Shore Line, which ran along the west bank of the Hudson River from Jersey City to Albany, which saw long-distance service to Albany discontinued in 1958 and commuter service between Jersey City and West Haverstraw, New York terminated in 1959. Ridding itself of most of its commuter service proved impossible due to the heavy use of these lines around metro New York, which government mandated the railroad still operate.

Many long-distance and regional-haul passenger trains were either discontinued or downgraded in service, with coaches replacing Pullman, parlor, and sleeping cars on routes in Michigan, Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio. The Empire Corridor between Albany and Buffalo saw service greatly reduced with service beyond Buffalo to Niagara Falls discontinued in 1961. On December 3, 1967, most of the great long-distance trains ended, including the famed Twentieth Century Limited. The railroad’s branch line service off the Empire Corridor in upstate New York was also gradually discontinued, the last being its Utica Branch between Utica and Lake Placid, in 1965. Many of the railroad’s great train stations in Rochester, Schenectady, and Albany were demolished or abandoned. Despite the savings these cuts created, it was apparent that if the railroad was to become solvent again, a more permanent solution was needed.

December 25, 2020

Repost – “Fairytale of New York”

Filed under: Media, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Time:

“Fairytale of New York,” The Pogues featuring Kirsty MacColl

This song came into being after Elvis Costello bet The Pogues’ lead singer Shane MacGowan that he couldn’t write a decent Christmas duet. The outcome: a call-and-response between a bickering couple that’s just as sweet as it is salty.

Update: Looks like the video I’ve linked to has been taken down, so here’s a more recent version on the “official” Pogues YT channel.

November 5, 2020

Fallen Flag — the New York, Ontario and Western Railway

Filed under: Business, History, Railways, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

This month’s Classic Trains featured fallen flag is the New York, Ontario and Western, which ran from Oswego on the south shore of Lake Ontario down into the New York City megalopolis. Sadly, the line is best remembered as the only Class 1 US railway to be completely abandoned. John R. Taibi outlines the history of the NYO&W from formation to abandonment in 1957:

Preserved NYO&W General Electric 44-ton switcher number 104 preserved at the Southeastern Railway Museum in Duluth, GA.
Photo by Harvey Henkelmann via Wikimedia Commons.

The New York, Ontario & Western Railway struggled to find its place among the many transportation systems serving New York City, but in the end it was able only to secure a place in history as the first Class I railroad to be abandoned in entirety. Despite this unenviable status, “the O&W,” as it was known, did endear itself to the communities along its line. After all, it was the carrier that had brought boxcars full of prosperity to every community along the line during its 76-year life.

Begun on January 21, 1880, the O&W set a goal of improving the Oswego–New York corridor, as well as the branches to New Berlin, Delhi, and Ellenville, N.Y., it had inherited from the New York & Oswego Midland. The O&W developed a new entrance to Gotham from Middletown, N.Y., that ran to Cornwall on the Hudson River, thence to Weehawken, N.J., by rights on the New York, West Shore & Buffalo Railway (later New York Central).

[…]

As it improved its physical characteristics, the O&W also acquired modern motive power to haul its numerous coal, milk, passenger, and general freight trains. Where previously Camelback 4-4-0s, 2-6-0s, and 2-8-0s were as common as the road’s wooden coaches and country depots, a corps of end-cab locomotives helped usher in the new era. E-class Ten-Wheelers (1911), W-class Consolidations (1910-11), X-class 2-10-2 “Bull Mooses” (1915), and Y-class Mountains (1922 and ’29) provided the power for passenger trains to the Catskills, milk trains to Gotham, and coal trains to Oswego, Cornwall, and Weehawken. Still, many Camelbacks worked into the mid-1940s.

This familiar, widely circulated O&W map was created by cartographer Crawford C. Anderson.
Classic Trains.

[…]

Dieselization was hoped to be a savior, and under [O&W bankruptcy trustee, Frederick E.] Lyford’s direction a handful of GE 44-ton switchers arrived in 1941. Nine two-unit EMD FTs came in 1945 and were put into fast merchandise service between Scranton and Maybrook, and Scranton and Norwich. Lyford’s successors in 1948 acquired additional F3 and NW2 diesels, enough to banish steam locomotives from service by that summer.

By that time, though, O&W’s accumulated losses amounted to $38 million. It was beyond the ability of trustees, the reorganization court, and diesel locomotives to extricate the carrier from financial ruin. Nevertheless, passenger trains from Weehawken to Walton (then only to Roscoe) kept running until mail contracts gave out in 1950; the service was suspended in September 1953. Although milk and coal trains were a memory, gray-yellow-and-orange diesel locomotives soldiered on, leading a dwindling number of ever-shorter freight trains.

By the mid-1950s, the reorganization court — which had been searching for a buyer for the road now truly earning another of its nicknames, the “Old & Weary” — was advocating total abandonment. Additionally, the U.S. government was suing for taxes and retirement payments that were in arrears, and New York state began planning on how best to use the O&W right of way for highway improvements.

October 9, 2020

Speaking in code and public health

Filed under: Government, Health, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Line, Joshua Hind relates the tragedy that forced US emergency services to wean themselves off their many confusing (and sometimes conflicting) spoken codes and use plain language to help reduce tragic misunderstandings among different emergency response organizations:

“First responders on site of the Lac-Megantic train derailment” by TSBCanada is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

In the beginning, it was standardized, and the best-known codes, like “10-4,” were consistent from town to town or state to state. But it didn’t take long for newer codes to emerge, which often meant different things depending on where you were. Efforts to reorganize the codes every 20 years or so only compounded the problem. On a local level, in any one town, it wasn’t a problem. But when cops or firefighters from different towns had to work together it could lead to disaster.

In 1970, a particularly severe wildfire season in California killed 16 people in a 13-day period and laid bare the cost of bad interagency communication. The rat’s nest of codes, abbreviations, and jargon prevented firefighters from different towns from communicating with the speed and clarity a major disaster demands. To address the problem, the U.S. Forest Service created FIRESCOPE, the first complete system for organizing and managing major incidents. One of the primary principles of this new system was to “develop standard terminology.”

Despite this effort, which later went national and then international (the province of Ontario has its own version, the “Incident Management System”) coded language continued to proliferate. Nearly 30 years after FIRESCOPE was launched, on September 11th, incompatible technology, lack of protocols, and a refusal to harmonize terminology likely contributed to the deaths of 121 firefighters who were caught in the collapse of the North Tower because they either didn’t hear or couldn’t understand the warnings that the building was about to fail.

Which brings us back to 2006, and FEMA’s notice to first responders. After decades of asking agencies to stop using coded language, the federal government made funding contingent on compliance. “The use of plain language in emergency response is a matter of public safety,” the memo’s introduction read. “There simply is little or no room for misunderstanding in an emergency situation.” From that point forward, all interdepartmental communication would have to be un-coded. A fire would be called “fire.” A shooting would be “a shooting.” And if you needed help, you’d say “HELP!”

Police, fire departments and paramedics slowly but surely got on board and started using some form of the incident management system which included plain language. As use of the system spread, other sectors, like large music festivals and other live events, began adopting the concepts to better synchronize public safety programs with the first responders who support them. Today it’s not unusual for producers, technicians and event security staff to attend training at the police college right next to fire captains and police officers.

Then COVID-19 happened, and we realized that no one had told Public Health.

August 8, 2020

Andrew Sullivan – “[T]he Kendi test: does the staff reflect the demographics of New York City as a whole?”

Filed under: Business, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In his latest Weekly Dish, Andrew Sullivan looks at an earnest diversity initiative of The Newspaper Guild of New York:

I’m naming this after Ibram X. Kendi because his core contribution to the current debate on race is the notion that “any measure that produces or sustains racial inequity between racial groups” is racist. Intent is irrelevant. I don’t think many sane people believe A.G. Sulzberger or Dean Baquet are closet bigots. But systemic racism, according to Kendi, exists in any institution if there is simply any outcome that isn’t directly reflective of the relevant racial demographics of the surrounding area.

The appeal of this argument is its simplicity. You can tell if a place is enabling systemic racism merely by counting the people of color in it; and you can tell if a place isn’t by the same rubric. The drawback, of course, is that the world isn’t nearly as simple. Take the actual demographics of New York City. On some measures, the NYT is already a mirror of NYC. Its staff is basically 50 – 50 on sex (with women a slight majority of all staff on the business side, and slight minority in editorial). And it’s 15 percent Asian on the business side, 10 percent in editorial, compared with 13.9 percent of NYC’s population.

But its black percentage of staff — 10 percent in business, 9 percent in editorial — needs more than doubling to reflect demographics. Its Hispanic/Latino staff amount to only 8 percent in business and 5 percent in editorial, compared with 29 percent of New York City’s demographics, the worst discrepancy for any group. NYT’s Newsroom Fellowship, bringing in the very next generation, is 80 percent female, 60 percent people of color (including Asians), and, so far as I can tell, one lone white man. And it’s why NYT‘s new hires are 43 percent people of color, a definition that includes Asian-Americans.

But notice how this new goal obviously doesn’t reflect New York City’s demographics in many other ways. It draws overwhelmingly from the college educated, who account for only 37 percent of New Yorkers, leaving more than 60 percent of the city completed unreflected in the staffing. It cannot include the nearly 19 percent of New Yorkers in poverty, because a NYT salary would end that. It would also have to restrict itself to the literate, and, according to Literacy New York, 25 percent of people in Manhattan “lack basic prose literary skills” along with 37 percent in Brooklyn and 41 percent in the Bronx. And obviously, it cannot reflect the 14 percent of New Yorkers who are of retirement age, or the 21 percent who have yet to reach 18. For that matter, I have no idea what the median age of a NYT employee is — but I bet it isn’t the same as all of New York City.

Around 10 percent of staffers would have to be Republicans (and if the paper of record nationally were to reflect the country as a whole, and not just NYC, around 40 percent would have to be). Some 6 percent of the newsroom would also have to be Haredi or Orthodox Jews — a community you rarely hear about in diversity debates, but one horribly hit by a hate crime surge. 48 percent of NYT employees would have to agree that religion is “very important” in their lives; and 33 percent would be Catholic. And the logic of these demographic quotas is that if a group begins to exceed its quota — say Jews, 13 percent — a Jewish journalist would have to retire for any new one to be hired. Taking this proposal seriously, then, really does require explicit use of race in hiring, which is illegal, which is why the News Guild tweet and memo might end up causing some trouble if the policy is enforced.

And all this leaves the category of “white” completely without nuance. We have no idea whether “white” people are Irish or Italian or Russian or Polish or Canadians in origin. Similarly, we do not know if “black” means African immigrants, or native black New Yorkers, or people from the Caribbean. 37 percent of New Yorkers are foreign-born. How does the Guild propose to mirror that? Ditto where staffers live in NYC. How many are from Staten Island, for example, or the Bronx, two places of extremely different ethnic populations? These categories, in other words, are incredibly crude if the goal really is to reflect the actual demographics of New York City. But it isn’t, of course.

My point is that any attempt to make a specific institution entirely representative of the demographics of its location will founder on the sheer complexity of America’s demographic story and the nature of the institution itself. Journalism, for example, is not a profession sought by most people; it’s self-selecting for curious, trouble-making, querulous assholes who enjoy engaging with others and tracking down the truth (at least it used to be). There’s no reason this skillset or attitude will be spread evenly across populations. It seems, for example, that disproportionate numbers of Jews are drawn to it, from a culture of high literacy, intellectualism, and social activism. So why on earth shouldn’t they be over-represented?

And that’s true of other institutions too: are we to police Broadway to make sure that gays constitute only 4 percent of the employees? Or, say, nursing, to ensure that the sex balance is 50-50? Or a construction company for gender parity? Or a bike messenger company’s staff to be reflective of the age demographics of the city? Just take publishing — an industry not far off what the New York Times does. 74 percent of its employees are women. Should there be a hiring freeze until the men catch up?

June 1, 2020

QotD: The right to keep and bear arms

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The bureaucrat who commands an army of over forty-nine thousand armed men and women (the largest police force in the world, slightly more than three Army divisions) in its century-old struggle against the Bill of Rights, has loftily decreed on 60 Minutes, the famous CBS newsish show, that it is “insanity” to “allow” national concealed carry reciprocity for law-abiding citizens. This according to an article that appeared this week on the Breitbart website, written by their distinguished Second Amendment specialist, A.W.R. Hawkins.

The bureaucrat in question is New York Police Department Commissioner James O’Neill, an individual who clearly believes that his thirty-five years spent plodding unspectacularly up the NYPD chain of command equips him better to tell you what your rights are, and what they are not, than the Founding Fathers of this country and the Framers of its unique social contract.

Well I’ve got news for you, Jimmy, there is no “allow”.

“Every man, woman, and responsible child has an unalienable individual, civil, Constitutional, and human right to obtain, own, and carry, openly or concealed, any weapon — rifle, shotgun, handgun, machine-gun, anything — any time, any place, without asking anyone’s permission.”* That’s the essential freight of the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution, the highest law of the land, which you and yours have been illegally suppressing since passage of the 1911 Sullivan Act, named for Tammany Hall’s Timothy Sullivan, perhaps the most corrupt, bigoted politician ever to occupy office in New York.

Since the ability to own and carry weapons unmolested by the State is a fundamental right, there can be no thought of any unit of that state “allowing” it or not “allowing” it. Any government employee who attempts to interfere with that right deserves a long stay in prison among those whose rights he’s violated. Note that I am not saying that peace and civil order are a bad thing, just that it has to be achieved within Constitutional parameters. The Founders put them there for a reason; they had seen the rule of law abused too often by arrogant and brutish British authorities.

* “The Atlanta Declaration”, L. Neil Smith, 1987

L Neil Smith, “There Is No ‘Allow’, Jimmy”, Libertarian Enterprise, 2018-02-18.

April 20, 2020

“New York City subways were ‘a major disseminator — if not the principal transmission vehicle — of coronavirus infection'”

Filed under: Government, Health, Politics, Railways, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Randal O’Toole wonders why the lone sacred cow of mass transit is still running, despite its potential role in spreading disease:

MTA NYC Subway 1 trains at 125th St., 14 May, 2018.
Photo by Mtattrain via Wikimedia Commons.

Sit‐​down restaurants and bars have been shut down. Public officials are discouraging or even forbidding people from doing “unnecessary travel,” even if it is to visit a second home where they might be able to socially distance themselves better than in their first, more urban home. All sorts of other rules are being passed, all supposedly for our own good.

So why are urban transit systems still running? A 2018 study found that “mass transportation systems offer an effective way of accelerating the spread of infectious diseases.” A 2011 study found that people who use mass transit were nearly six times more likely to have acute respiratory infections than those who don’t. Not surprisingly, a study published a few days ago found that New York City subways were “a major disseminator — if not the principal transmission vehicle — of coronavirus infection.”

Transit agencies say they are helping “essential workers” go about their business. But if they are so essential, isn’t it important to find them a safe way of getting to work? If we truly cared about people’s safety, then transit services should have shut down at the same time we closed other non‐​essential businesses and asked people to stay at home.

[…]

Unfortunately, the transit lobby has successfully turned government‐​subsidized transit into a sacred cow. Transit is supposedly greener than driving when in fact it’s an energy hog. Transit is supposedly needed to help poor people get to work when in fact the people most likely to commute by transit are those earning more than $75,000 a year.

When the pandemic took away most of transit’s customers, instead of shutting down, which would have been the responsible thing to do, transit agencies demanded that Congress give them $25 billion, tripling federal support to transit this year. Thanks to transit’s sacred cow status, Congress agreed without any serious debate.

Effectively, Congress rewarded the agencies for spreading disease. It would have been better to use that money to help transit‐​dependent essential workers buy a car so they could have a safe way of getting to work.

New York City subway system.
Image by Jake Berman (maps.complutense.org) based on information from the MTA, via Wikimedia Commons.

February 6, 2020

Fallen flag – The Nickel Plate Road

Filed under: Business, History, Railways, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Kevin J. Holland provides a brief look at the history of the New York, Chicago & St. Louis, better known as the “Nickel Plate Road”:

The New York, Chicago & St. Louis opened between Buffalo and Chicago on October 23, 1882, in many spots east of Cleveland just a stone’s throw from rival Lake Shore & Michigan Southern Railway. What would become the Nickel Plate became a Vanderbilt property in January 1883.

Although eclipsed by the Lake Shore’s plush limiteds, NYC&StL from 1893 fielded three unpretentious, reliable Chicago to Buffalo, N.Y., passenger trains, establishing a long-standing pattern of modest passenger service. In 1897, Delaware, Lackawanna & Western entered the picture, conveying NYC&StL cars from Buffalo to Hoboken, N.J.

“The great … Nickel-plated railroad”
When NYC&StL was being surveyed, Editor F. R. Loomis of Ohio’s Norwalk Chronicle waxed enthusiastically on the railroad coming to town referring to it as “the great New York and St. Louis double-track, nickel-plated railroad.” Use of “Nickel Plate Road” proliferated, in newspapers and by the road itself.

In 1914, LS&MS and Nickel Plate were wards of New York Central. Passage of the Clayton Act that same year was intended to bolster the earlier Sherman Antitrust Act, and left NYC with a dilemma. Enter brothers Oris P. and Mantis J. Van Sweringen, self-made Cleveland real-estate developers who purchased acreage from NYC Vice President Alfred H. Smith. “The Vans” as the brothers were known, approached Smith, by then NYC president, to discuss their plans involving land owned by the Nickel Plate. As the Clayton Act’s divestiture deadline loomed, Smith engineered a sale to the Vans of not only the land they sought, but of the entire Nickel Plate Road. Their Alleghany Corporation holding company eventually in­­cluded control of the Nickel Plate, Chesapeake & Ohio, Pere Marquette, Erie, Wheeling & Lake Erie, Chicago & Eastern Illinois, and Missouri Pacific.

The gaunt NYC&StL was ripe for re-equipping under its new owners. Addressing the Vans’ lack of railroad experience, Smith orchestrated John J. Bernet’s move from an NYC vice-presidency to be Nickel Plate’s president. Neglected physical plant and obsolete motive power received needed attention under Bernet, who reincarnated the road into a lean and aggressive contender.

Nickel Plate Road GP9 number 526 switching a way freight at Gibson City, IL on November 24, 1962.
Roger Puta photo from the Mel Finzer Collection via Wikimedia Commons.

January 3, 2020

Fallen flag – the Pennsylvania Railroad

Filed under: Business, History, Railways, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

The origins and an outline history of the “Standard Railroad of the World” for Classic Trains magazine by George Drury:

The original Pennsylvania Railroad ran from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh. Much of its subsequent expansion was accomplished by leasing or purchasing other railroads.

Construction began in 1847. Two years later the Pennsy made an operating contract with the Harrisburg, Portsmouth, Mountjoy & Lancaster, and by late 1852 rails ran from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh via a connection with the Portage Railroad between Hollidaysburg and Johnstown, Pa. The summit tunnel was opened in 1854, bypassing the inclined planes and creating a continuous railroad from Harrisburg to Pittsburgh.

In 1857 PRR bought the Main Line of Public Works and in 1861 leased the Harrisburg, Portsmouth, Mountjoy & Lancaster, putting the entire Philadelphia to Pittsburgh line under one management.

PRR also acquired interests in two major railroads, the Cumberland Valley and the Northern Central. The Cumberland Valley was opened in 1837 from Harrisburg to Chambersburg, and it was extended by another company in 1841 to Hagerstown, Maryland. The Baltimore & Susquehanna was incorporated in 1828 to build north from Baltimore. Progress was slowed because of the reluctance of Pennsylvania state officials to charter a railroad that would carry commerce to Baltimore. The line reached Harrisburg in 1851 and Sunbury in 1858. By then the railroad companies that formed the route had been consolidated as the Northern Central Railway. Pennsy acquired majority ownership of the Northern Central in 1900.

The Pennsy expanded into northwestern Pennsylvania by acquiring an interest in the Philadelphia & Erie Railroad in 1862 and assisting that road to complete its line from Sunbury to the city of Erie in 1864. The line to Erie was not particularly successful, but from Sunbury to Driftwood it could serve as part of a freight route with easy grades. The rest of that route was the Allegheny Valley Railroad, conceived as a feeder from Pittsburgh to the New York Central and Erie railroads. The Pennsylvania obtained control in 1868, and in 1874 opened a route with easy grades from Harrisburg to Pittsburgh via the valleys of the Susquehanna and Allegheny rivers. PRR leased the Allegheny Valley Railroad in 1900.

Horse shoe curve near Altoona on the Pennsylvania Railroad, circa 1874.
Photo by W.P. Mange & Co. via the Library of Congress.

But even the mighty can fall, and the PRR fell into difficult times after WW2:

During World War II Pennsy’s freight traffic doubled and passenger traffic quadrupled, much of it on the eastern portion of the system. The electrification was of inestimable value in keeping the traffic moving. After the war Pennsy had the same experiences as many other railroads but seemed slower to react. PRR was slower to dieselize, and when it did so it bought units from every manufacturer.

As freight and passenger traffic moved to the highways, Pennsy found itself with far more fixed plant than the traffic warranted or could support, and it was slow to take up excess trackage or replace double track with Centralized Traffic Control.

PRR was saddled with a heavy passenger business. It had extensive commuter services centered on New York, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh and lesser ones at Chicago, Washington, Baltimore, and Camden, New Jersey. It had gone through the Depression without going bankrupt.

Pennsylvania and New York Central surprised the railroad industry by announcing merger plans in 1957. The two had long been rivals, and the merger would be one of parallel roads rather than end-to-end. The merger took place on February 1, 1968 — and Penn Central fell apart faster than it went together.

PRR E8A 5803 with Train 72, The Red Bird, passing the Hartsdale, Indiana tower and crossing the NYC and EJ&E on November 26, 1965.
Photo from the Roger Puta collection via Wikimedia Commons.

December 25, 2019

Repost – “Fairytale of New York”

Filed under: Media, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Time:

“Fairytale of New York,” The Pogues featuring Kirsty MacColl

This song came into being after Elvis Costello bet The Pogues’ lead singer Shane MacGowan that he couldn’t write a decent Christmas duet. The outcome: a call-and-response between a bickering couple that’s just as sweet as it is salty.

December 5, 2019

The New York Central in 1928-1929

Filed under: History, Railways, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Speed Graphic Film and Video
Published 22 Dec 2017

More early sound film from the Fox Movietone News archives in the University of South Carolina’s Moving Image Resource Collection.

It shows New York Central trains in the Hudson River valley in 1928 and 1929. Scenes include:
0:10 K3 Pacifics passing through Peekskill station.
1:10 View from the tender as a fast freight crosses the bridge at Castleton.
2:30 Looking up at the bridge as a train passes over.
2:42 Another ride over the bridge at Castleton, this time seen from the caboose. There is a brief glimpse of NYC 0-6-6-0 No. 1300, the only locomotive with that wheel arrangement on the railroad.
4:54 View from a bluff above the Weehawken yards. (Thanks to Vincent Zablocki for the ID.)
5:30 Street operations on the West Side Line in Manhattan when it still ran at street level. Locomotives seen include No. 595 and dummy No. 1904.
7:33 A look at the drivers as a K3 Pacific passes by the camera.
8:21 Passenger trains on the main line, seen at a distance. These are editing “trims,” so the shot ends just as the train gets near the camera. These were probably taken at Breakneck Mountain.
11:19 Departing passenger train at a grade crossing. Again, this is a “trim,” so the beginning of the shot is missing.

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