Another Strange Day

 Remember this?

https://blerfblog.blogspot.com/2017/08/a-strange-day.html

Well, it ended with:  "When's the next one?  2024?  Arkansas? Road trip!"

So, we did!  Unfortunately, our friends couldn't go with us this time.  But, there were two other reasons to make the trip.  One, was a visit to Memphis.  We'd never been, so it was a good time to check Memphis out.  The second was I have been to 49 states.  The only missing one was Arkansas.  I needed a good reason to visit Arkansas.  It was hard to find one.  Now, we had one, so...

Ready?  Here we go.

Memphis.  We arrived on Sunday evening, in time for dinner.  Our hotel was only a few blocks from Beale Street, the home of Memphis style blues.  So, with a recommendation or two from the hotel desk, we wandered out.

From the East end of the street

The origins and of Beale Street and the Memphis Blues music go back to the Yellow Fever epidemic of 1878.  Part one.  Riverboat captain buys slave boy.  Part 2. Riverboat captain adopts the boy as son.  Riverboat captain dies. Part 3. Son, Robert Church, now and adult, inherits boat. He makes money.  Yellow Fever wipes out a good chunk of Memphis population.  Part 4. Church buys all the land around Beale Street and developed it into clubs and restaurants, many of them black owned.  The sad sound of the blues music allegedly owes part of it's origins to the sadness surrounding the times of the epidemic.

From the west end.

We ate here.  Live music.  Okay food.  $10 cover.  YOLO!

The band was good.  Played a mix of stuff.  Blues to R&B to Bluesy Country.

Funky tables!

A cool looking theater on Beale Street.

We also walked down to the river, to make sure Arkansas was still there.  It was.

Tow boat and barge head up the Mississippi.  Arkansas on the other side.

Arkansas.  Really.  Although it rained a bit overnight, including a good downpour, the next day started out with thin clouds.  Forecast was looking good for the eclipse.  Only 25% cloud cover.  It had been improving all week.

Welcome to Arkansas.  50 in the bag.

We decided to go toward Jonesboro, which is north west of Memphis.  It's about an hour's drive.  Going another 30 minutes got us a little deeper into the totality zone.

Proof!

Nice of Union Pacific to provide us with a freight train to keep (some of) us entertained.

We ate lunch parked at the train station.  Next to it was an interpretive walk explaining the "Rock and Roll Highway 67".   https://maps.app.goo.gl/eAB14vwJfpYp99aFA Apparently, the early rock and roll acts played at clubs along Highway 67 in Arkansas.  A nice collection of signs, some of them with audio narration.  Now, we know.

One of the signs.

The town had a gathering at a city park, but we decided to get a bit further out of town, 6 miles to the northeast.  Might get to see the shadow roll in and roll out.

The town of Walnut Ridge abuts Hoxie.  The "Twin Cities" of Arkansas, says me.

The main event.

Armed with our free solar glasses from Warby Parker eyeglass shop!

As the sun was getting blocked, it really didn't seem and darker, but the heat from the sun was noticably absent - a "why isn't the sun hot?" moment.  When the eclipse got to 90% it started looking darker.  Finally, the last minute before totality, it was like the house lights in a theater being turned down.  Very ethereal, like something was "wrong".  Sky was very dark above but light all the way around the horizon.  Crickets started up.  Birds went quiet.  We could see a solar prominence at the "bottom" of the sun with the naked eye. 

It lasted over 3 minutes.  At the very end, it brightened rapidly and you could see the light return to the land, as if a very dark cloud was scudding across the sky.  Birds started up again and were flying about as if it were early morning.

 

Here are some pictures taken by placing the free glasses over the lens of my Canon "point and shoot" super-zoom camera. 

And totality without the glasses.

Totality.  Venus visible.

Post totality shrimp cocktail on the veranda.

...and then we went back to Memphis...with everyone else.  

Some positive return trip factors:

• Not many people live in Memphis area.
• Not many people live near Memphis area.
• There are two interstate highways that cross Mississippi at Memphis.
• It was a weekday.
• There were easier places to see the eclipse for most of US than Arkansas.
• We planned on stopping at Jonesboro to eat dinner and "wait out any traffic".

Some negative return factors:

• There are ONLY two bridges at Memphis and no other for a long way up and down the river (70 miles south, 100 miles north)
• It rained hard in West Memphis that afternoon
• We listened to Google Maps/Waze - they were beyond their depth.
• Lots of people used Memphis as a gateway to the eclipse extending their weekend a day.
• Many other people also use Google Maps and Waze.

Heading into the mess.

The actual mess.

Result?  It took us 5:30 to get home from Jonesboro.  The last 6 miles took 2:30.  Waze and Google kept filling up all the minor arteries leading to the bridges, then rerouting you backwards to get on the interstate "upstream" as the low capacity routes were filled to jam in minutes.  Just an awful trip.

The next day we woke up to rain, with a forecast of even more rain, without let-up. So we abandoned plans for a day of sightseeing in Memphis and headed home a day early.  Might just have to come back this way again...

Was it worth it?  You bet!  Next practical one?  Across Florida Sat, Aug 12, 2045.  Near St Augustine.  We're all set!  ...Just have to live to be 87 and be sentient...

The Go-kart

Go kart V1.0

When I was a kid, the Saturday activity was heading to the hardware store and lumber yard - via the train station - to get supplies for the current household project.  My mom and dad were always doing home improvement.  Improving kitchen storage, built-in bookshelves and mantle for fireplace, fininshing the attic.  There was always something going on.

Part of this, was I learned to use hand tools at a young age.  A really cool thing my dad did, was to help me build wooden push-style go kart when I was in the 3rd grade.  Kind of a glorified wagon.  Each day he would leave instructions on the next step, complete with illustrations.  Drill holes and install the threaded rod for the axle.  Install eye-bolts for steering cord.   Every day a new set would await me when I got home from school.  

This project never really got completed as we moved that summer but we did play with it a good bit in the new neighborhood.

Go kart V2.0

Like every kid, the Sears Christmas catalog was THE thing to peruse every fall.  They had every toy you could ever want.  The section that always caught my attention was the go karts.  Not something I could ever afford or even ask for...  However, somewhere, perhaps Boys Life, there were adds for companies that sold go kart parts mail order.  ...maybe we could build a REAL go kart.  My dad agreed provided I pay for all the parts.  So,  ordered the mail order catalog and started saving.  I think he was interested in the design and build challenge.

Somewhere in the 8th grade, we got started. We ordered the parts we needed from the catalog and an engine from the Sears catalog.   A front axle assembly, tires, wheels, a live rear axle, bearings, band brake, pedals, centrifugal clutch, sprockets and roller chain.  He designed a frame made from 1" steel electrical conduit.  We bought the tubing and rented a bender and cut and bent and drilled and bolted and double nutted a frame.  We attached steel (or aluminum?) angles to allow for mounting the engine, seat, front axle, etc. 

The whole thing looked pretty cool.  Did it run?  Mostly.

Here's video of it running around the neighbors yard in the summer of 1969.

Notice the steering wheel is cut from plywood.  Couldn't afford everything!  Everyone had fun taking a turn until the chain fell off.  

The frame flexed enough that sometimes the chain had enough slack to jump.  We tried many ways of stiffening the engine mount.  Never really fixed the problem, though it did get a bit better.

Next problem was the drift pin the mounted the steering wheel to the hub fell out and the kart careened through a bush into a fence.  Scary.  Nobody got hurt.  Pin replaced with bolt.  Problem solved.

Next, the frame design wasn't quite up to the stresses from a kart with no suspension.  The tubing cracked and broke at several places.  We just plated over the breaks with angles to reinforce the weak spots.  That worked...until another break occurred.  Damn low cycle fatigue!

An continuing problem was getting the engine started.  It was terrible.  Even sent it out for a tune up by a small engine specialist.  Always took a whole lot of pulling the started rope to get it going.

A couple of times, we put it in the back of the station wagon and had mom drive us to some nearby trails in the woods around a sand pit. (off Wilson Rd for those familiar).  Had no idea whose property it was...but it seemed like a good idea.  We had to cut the top of the roll bar to get it to fit in the car.

For, um, safety, we had an ancient industrial hard hat - that we spray painted and put STP stickers on -   and a web strap for a seat belt.  Probably totally useless.  

The go kart had a top speed just short of 20 mph, calculated from engine max RPM and drive geometry, but when we drove it on those dirt paths in the woods, it felt like 90!  The engine would wind up all the way to it's limit and we kept the throttle all the way open as long as the path was straight.  It was really, really cool.  And really, really lucky nobody got hurt.  We could usually get a few runs in before something quit and we had to take it back home.

After a few years, the novelty wore off and real driving started happening and I sold the go kart to some younger kids.  They had good luck with it on paved parking lots where some steering would break the rear wheels "loose" (live axle, remember?) and they could drift/steer around the lot.

What a blast!

How to Kill a Rail Renaissance - and Maybe the Whole Industry

 Once upon a time, there was a Railroad Renaissance.  Traffic grew.  Revenue grew.  Railroads started making real money.  Stock prices went up. Flowers bloomed in the desert.  Wait.  Not that last one.  But, things were good.

And they looked like they were going to continue to go that way.

And then things got cloudy.  I wrote about it.

https://blerfblog.blogspot.com/2018/05/railroad-renaissance-or-dead-man-walking.html?m=0

It was just about then that E. Harrison Hunter went on his march to make all North American railroads in his image.  His brand was PSR which stood for Precision Scheduled Railroading.  It was a "bottom line" strategy that smoothed out operations so that resources could be trimmed precisely to fit, reducing costs to a very low level.

It worked. Railroads that adopted PSR netted trainloads of cash.

But, it looks like it killed the Railroad Renaissance.

The chart above show car loads of traffic - containers and trailers for intermodal.  It's adjusted for GDP.  A flat line would mean traffic is growing with the economy.  

You can see the Rail Renaissance really only applied to Intermodal.  There was real and steady growth until 2006 when some capacity issues impacted growth and the 2008 recession hit.  After that, the growth took off again topping out in 2018 before declining.

Coal was declining a bit and then nosed down with the advent of fracking about 2010, when natural gas started replacing coal in earnest.  

Merchandise traffic has just been on a steady decline the whole period. This is just the nature of business in the US. Supply chains aren't very well supported by fairly slow, large lot shipments.  What will remain of it is boutique business.  Specific commodities in fairly large quantities from specific shippers to specific consignees, like beer and sand.  Also, freight that can't economically go another way, like chemicals and ethanol for blending with gasoline.

So, what's revenue look like?

Better.  Again, data is normalized so that a flat line means revenue is keeping up with inflation and GDP growth.  There is some real revenue growth in Merchandise up until 2013 and intermodal revenue growth is more or less steady.  Coal declining after fracking boom, as expected.

The Merchandise story is one of raising rates on traffic that doesn't have real alternatives.  Here's the Revenue per unit in constant 2017 dollars.

Rates increasing on Merchandise much faster than inflation.  Rates for Intermodal relatively flat.  Coal is just trying to squeeze out the most money from a dying franchise.

So, what does this have to do with PSR?  Look at the units chart after 2018.  That is when NS started all in on PSR.

Merchandise keeps up it's steady decline.  Coal keeps dying in fits and starts.  But, intermodal starts a steady downturn.

Why?

It's because of how PSR is designed.  PSR optimizes the railroad for "what is", not "what will be".  Smooth and steady flow tends to blend traffic and eliminate day of the week variability.  It also tends to want all types of traffic to move at similar speeds and often, on the same train.  Extra track for trains to pass each other is reduced.  Once everything is "right sized", extra locomotives and engineers and conductors are eliminated.  Costs are very low, but there is little surplus for handling anything out of the ordinary or getting things back on track due to extraordinary circumstance, like snow storms or floods.

To be fair, the advent of Distributed Power, where you can run very long trains with locomotives dispersed throughout the train, also had an effect.  Railroads built for 100 car trains often have trouble finding places to stop and start 200 car trains.  They don't fit in passing sidings or yard tracks.

The combination of these two things meant railroads were optimized for:

THE EXISTING TRAFFIC OPERATING UNDER IDEAL CIRCUMSTANCES.

This is not a growth strategy, and it is showing.  New business means you have to have capacity available AHEAD of the time you take it on.  Adding track, personnel and locomotives takes quite a bit of time.

Optimizing your plan around dying merchandise traffic makes it difficult to accommodate new intermodal traffic and trains.  Part of this is inertia.  Railroads have long believed they were born to handle box cars and would just fit those "new" intermodal and unit coal trains in around the flow.  What's become clear in the past 20 or 30 years, is they are becoming primarily intermodal carriers and will have to tailor the railroad to that reality and figure out how to fit the boutique box car traffic into that flow.  

 Railroads need to pivot and go "all in" on intermodal growth.  This means investing the huge sums of cash currently being generated on building routes and equipment designed for future logistic flow.

Anything less, they are just having a glorified "going out of business sale"