Amsterdam 2018

 Travelling is a good thing.  I just read over 50 quotes about travel.  The consensus is: "Go.  It's good for you."

So, we went.

This time, our travel centered around a 14 day Viking cruise around the Baltic Sea and on to Norway that they call their "homelands" cruise.  We extended each end of the trip a bit adding in Amsterdam and Stockholm at the start and Scotland and England at the end.

First stop, Amsterdam.  We've been there before, but flying Delta direct from Atlanta and then on to Stockholm on a separate ticket the next day was SO much cheaper than flying the whole way one ticket that we decided to stay over in Amsterdam.

We arrived at Schiphol, shuttled over to the hotel near the airport, dropped out bags and grabbed a train to Centraal Station.  We walked over to Dam Square and grabbed a "free" walking tour - the tour is free but you tip the tour guide what you think it's worth at the end.  These types of tours are generally excellent and this one was no exception.

The tour looped around over the canals, through the red light district, past the Oude Kirk (old church), Nieumarkt (new market) and then over to the Jordaan near the Anne Frank House.

Royal Palace on Dam Square (used to be Dam on Amstel River here.)

Royal Palace

Oude Kirk.  Oldest building in Amsterdam.  You can see centuries worth of construction in this photo.

Original University

Before street names and numbers, this was how you identified your house.

Westenkirk in the Jordaan

Bikes and canals.  Amsterdam has lots of both.

Blomenmarkt - floating flower market.  Need any tulip bulbs? 

Obligatory stroopwafel.

We spent the rest of out day wandering over to the floating flower market and then strolling back toward Centraal Station and called it a day.

How can a place with four kinds of chocolate to add on your breakfast be bad?

Off to Schiphol airport and Sweden

Next up:  Stockholm

Railroad Renaissance or Dead Man Walking

There's a lot you can find out by just looking.  The problem is knowing where to look.

A recent thread on a Trains magazine got me thinking.  Conventional wisdom says that railroads are back.  That they're having a renaissance.  But, one fellow there says "not so fast", and he trotted out some data to show it.

Hmmm.

He had two data points about a decade apart.  I wondered what the rest of the data set looked like, so I dug into it.  I particularly wanted to know about NS - for obvious reasons.

Step one.  Get the data.  Edgar has it as NS published annual carloads and revenue by line of business in the 10-K.  Great!  Just copy and paste it into Excel, no sweat.

Actually, some sweat.  From year to year, NS arrayed the data differently.  In the older reports, they covered 5 years.  Lately, 3 years.  So, I grabbed and pulled and copy and pasted and "paste special, transposed" and "find and replaced" and cntl-c, cntl-v'd my way to 133 rows of data covering 1999 through 2017 by year.

Some basic results:

Well, okay.  Doesn't seem awful.  Coal is dying.  We already know that.  Intermodal is zooming.  We know that, too.  But Merchandise traffic seems sick.

• Every line takes a dip in 2009 for the recession.  
• Coal dives after 2011.  
• Merchandise never gets back to pre-2007 level.
• Intermodal is off to the races.

What about revenue?

This is better! 

• Merchandise revenue is growing nicely
• Intermodal growing, too, passing coal in 2014.
• Only coal is falling apart.

Here's the skinny on rates:

It's RPU that's driving the Merchandise revenue.  Look at the inflection point about 2004, when the "Thoroughbred Operating Plan" took hold - NS's version of scheduled railroading.

Also, look at how flat the RPU for Intermodal is.  Clearly, it's volume that's driving the revenue.

I'm going to add one more set of charts.  A set that might indicate the overall direction of NS.  I normalized the data with two factors.  One is GDP.  As the economy grows, one would expect rail traffic to grow proportionally.  The other is inflation.  It's always good to put money inconstant dollars so you don't mistake inflation for growth.  Here's what unit and revenue look like normalized for these factors.

If the lines are flat, then business is keeping up with the economy - growing just as fast.  If the line is going down, then the business isn't keeping up.  If the line is going up, then the business is growing faster than the economy.

Parsing this out.  Merchandise seems to by dying.  Plain and simple, although it seems to have plateaued the last five year or so, it hasn't come close to the pre-recession levels.

Intemodal is growing.  Maybe.  The overall trend is up, but the past four years are flat.  This likely means that conditions aren't great for truckload conversions.  Lack of investment in new, speedier lanes, perhaps?  There are lots of trucks on I-85 and I-81 that aren't being "converted".

Coal is just plain dead and I wouldn't plan on any resurrection.

(Note that I put Merch units on the RH y axis so it was easier to compare)

If you put it all together and look revenue, it's even worse.  Merchandise isn't taking in any more money than it did 20 years ago.  Intermodal, despite the volume growth, isn't growing revenue faster than the economy.  It doesn't look like it's going to be a replacement for coal, unless the company makes some investment for a cost and speed competitive Crescent Corridor or pulls a rabbit from their hat.

And, coal.  It's just dead.  It's okay to ride it to a stop, but if it keeps declining at the current rate since 2011, it'll be all gone in 25 years.

So, is NS in a stalled renaissance?  A flat-line existence where staying in business means finding cost efficiencies every year? Or, just having a long, protracted "going out of business" sale.

Don't listen to what they say.  Look at the data!  And, look where they spend their profits.  Hint:  It's not the Crescent Corridor.

These charts make me sad.

P.S. The only factor I didn't normalize for is revenue tons per car.  If car capacity is growing, that could bend some of these lines up a bit.  I believe it is, but I'm skeptical of the leverage...and I'm too lazy to dig out the data. 

A Strange Day

August 21, 2017.  Eclipse day.  We live in Atlanta, which is pretty close to the path of totality, so maybe that would be good enough.  But, "they" say that total is so much better?  Really?  Really!

Should we go?  Nothing else on the calendar, so...road trip!  Gotta get in the zone!

Where to go?  Altanta has over 5 million people and a good number of them might decide to head out to see the eclipse.   The closest spots were up I-985 and into the mountains or up I-85 to the South Carolina border.  Sounded like a recipe for traffic!

We joined forces with some friends, got out a map and decided on Abbeville SC.  Why Abbeville?  It's not near anything.  Except, maybe Greenwood SC. And, Elberton GA.  Ever heard of these places?  I didn't think so.  That's what made it so perfect.  Maybe nobody would think to go there.

It's 110 miles from home and eclipse started at 1 PM there, so we left home at 8 AM.  We arrived in Abbeville at 10:30 AM.  There was no traffic to speak of.  Couldn't say that about the other routes.

Red road are bad roads.

The whole way out, the sky was wall to wall blue.  Perfect eclipse weather!  We drove around the town a bit, and then stopped to walk around the town square.  The town all set up for the eclipse.  A very outgoing town councilman was set up raffling off a box of goodies.  A DJ was playing "eclipse music".  There were kids games and the shops were all offering "eclipse specials".  In the center of town was a monument to the beginning of the confederacy.  It seems the very first serious meeting about secession was held in Abbeville about two weeks after Lincoln's election in November 1860.  We also found out the town was also where the CSA ended their revolt.  Jefferson Davis's cabinet met for the last time in Abbeville.

Town Square, Abbeville, SC

Monument in town

Town visitor center with paintings of town's past, including last CSA cabinet meeting.

There were a couple peculiar storefronts in town.  One was a Sons of Confederate Veterans shop (?) where it looked like you could get all the CSA battle flags you'd ever want. The other was "Red Barn Likker".  Yep.  A micro distillery producing moonshine.  We skipped the former and took a closer look at the latter.  We got the 10 minute tour where they explained how the still worked - an Arkansas "double diamond" style still (who knew?) - and then some of us decided on the tasting.  Potent stuff.  They also sold all sorts of fruit-based mixers to make the stuff palatable.

Double D still

Tasting

By then, we had decided to view the eclipse from a local little league field where there were picnic tables in the shade and open restrooms. We had packed a picnic lunch, not just because we are cheap, but because we thought the eclipse throngs might drain all the local restaurants of their inventory.  It turns out, the "eclipse throng" at the ball field were us and two other groups.  That's it.

Our spot.  Uh, oh.  Clouds!

We had excellent food -homemade potato salad sandwiches and homemade chocolate cookies. At one clock, we broke out our eclipse paraphernalia - glasses and pinhole lens.  At 1:09, it started. We could see it happening with our glasses and pinhole projection.

Then, a cloud wandered by and obscured the sun.  Uh, oh.  Clouds had been building all around.  They were moving rather slowly.  We kept our fingers crossed and started thinking about which way we might need to drive when the total eclipse started.

About half way

We got lucky.  Over the next hour, not only did we have little cloud obstruction, but the cloud cover actually dissipated.  Don't know why.  Maybe just dumb luck?  Maybe eclipse cooling kills clouds?

As 2 PM approached, you could start to notice the sun felt a lot less hot.  In fact, you couldn't tell the difference between being in the sun and the shade on your skin.  A bit after 2 PM, it started looking darker, as well - like early twilight.

We hunted around for natural pinhole projections and found a crepe myrtle doing a fine job.

At 2:30 PM, it was noticeably darker, but you could still see your shadow.  Then, with just about a minute to go at roughly 2:40, it was like someone dimming the house lights.  It darkened about that fast.  We watched through our glasses as the last edge of the sun disappeared behind the moon.  It was dark.  Like full-moon-night dark.  All the lights in the park came on.  Crickets started up.

Dark!

Building lights on.  Bright horizon

You could look right at the sun without glasses!  Right at it!  A dark disc with a bright, white corona all around it.  The horizon was light, like at sunset.

Kind of like a weird full moon - with the center blotted out.

The two minute of totality came and went quickly.  Wow.  The "house lights" came back up.  Do it again!  When's the next one?  2024?  Arkansas?

Road trip!