Margin Notes: Detours, P3's, Pile Drivers

A detouring Montreal to Calgary Canadian Pacific train passed underneath the CN Tower in Toronto, Ontario on 7 June 2009

TORONTO, ONTARIO - Because of two derailments, one on the Toronto-Montreal mainline at Oshawa, Ontario on Friday and one on the Ottawa-North Bay mainline at Hodgson, Ontario on Wednesday, the Canadian Pacific has been detouring its priority traffic on the Canadian National between Toronto and Brockville, Ontario this weekend. This means that Canadian Pacific freight trains have been passing through the Union Station Rail Corridor in Toronto for the first time since I moved here. After missing two detours on Saturday, I finally caught what apparently was the next-to-last westbound detour today at Bathurst Street, led by a locomotive in the "Olympic" scheme. The sight will probably not be seen again unless there's another derailment.

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The Canadian Pacific was at the center of what stuck me as the quote of the week from host Kathleen Petty on CBC Radio One's The House yesterday. In a discussion about the possible sale of crown corporations, the Canadian Pacific came up, and Petty responded to the dialog by saying, "That sounds like a P3!" [That's a Public-Private Partnership, for those not up on the latest terminology.] I had never thought of transcontinental railroads as a P3 before, and considering the mess that many of the transcontinental railroads in the United States created from their land grant "P3's" in the gilded age, it certainly doesn't make me feel any better about contemporary P3's.

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Railroads continue to annoy residents of The Junction neighborhood of Toronto as a result of the current project to create a grade separation between the GO Transit Georgetown Line and the Canadian Pacific North Toronto Subdivision to enable expanded GO service on the Georgetown Line. The pile driving on the project is so loud that I can often hear it more than 2.5 kilometers away, and a friend has reported being able to hear it 3 kilometers to the north. I find it very hard to believe that the noise cannot be better mitigated than that.

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The Swansea Historical Society annual walk, "Along the Boardwalk of Humber Bay," stopped on the 1994 Humber Bay Arch Bridge in Toronto, Ontario on 6 June 2009

I don't think the project can be heard on the other side of the Gardiner Expressway, but that was the location of this year's Swansea Historical Society walk. I had no idea how much I didn't know about the shores of Lake Ontario between the Argonaut Rowing Club and the Humber River--from the fact that the Toronto Argonauts Canadian Football League team started as an adjunct to the rowing club to the presence of the Lion Memorial to the Queen Elizabeth Way near the Humber River. More coverage of the walk will be forthcoming in a future entry.

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After all the time I spent earlier this year in California where Spanish speakers represent a significant portion of the population, imagine my surprise this past week when a bank teller at my local branch here in Toronto started speaking to a customer in Spanish. Being used to overhearing--and mostly understanding--such conversations in California, it took me a couple seconds to realize that I was in my own neighborhood in Toronto. There's no denying that Toronto is a thoroughly multi-cultural community.

Radio Pick: Restricting Braille on Search Engine

TORONTO, ONTARIO - I've been remiss in following up on the state of Search Engine, the one-time CBC radio show hosted by Jesse Brown that had since become a podcast with no staff other than Brown himself, and finally was canceled entirely, which reflects just how quickly downhill the CBC is going as a result of its budget problems. Brown has found a new home for the podcast at TVO, a nice reminder that TVO is more than just a public television station in Ontario. This week's Search Engine podcast is my radio pick for the week.

A great example of niche media, Search Engine provides very interesting coverage of the Internet. This week, host Jesse Brown's second story described how western governments have been trying to pass legislation to inhibit the translation of documents into Braille, which has to be one of the most absurd anti-copyright initiatives I've ever heard, and I've only heard about it on this 14-minute edition of Search Engine.

Listen to MP3 of Search Engine "Who's Copying Who?"

Photos: Trip to Massachusetts, Spring 2009

CSX train Q427 from Ayer, Massachusetts to Selkirk, New York passed St. Vincent's Hospital in Worcester, Massachusetts on 30 May 2009

TORONTO, ONTARIO - This week's update to my photo site features my recent trip to Massachusetts. Between 28 May 2009 and 2 June 2009, I managed to view scenery along the way, visit Worcester, Massachusetts' Union Station, spend a day viewing Pioneer Valley sights like the Quabbin Reservoir, Sugarloaf Mountain and Northampton with the Maserati family, explore the Keystone Arches Trail in the Berkshire Mountains, and see the State University of New York Albany campus with local resident Mark Johnson.

Heritage: Moving the 6213 Tender

The move of steam locomotive #6213's tender paused under the Prince's Gates at the Canadian National Exhibition grounds early on the morning of 4 June 2009

TORONTO, ONTARIO - The last major element of the Toronto Railway Heritage Centre's collection started its move to the centre's John Street Roundhouse site across from the CN Tower early this morning. The tender of the 6213 locomotive, long on display at the Canadian National Exhibition grounds, was transported to the roundhouse tracks by truck in what turned into an all-night adventure.


The TTC had to raise its streetcar wires, turned off for the overnight period, in order to allow the passage of the tender through Bathurst Street as the CN Tower loomed in the distance on 4 June 2009

The nighttime move was necessitated not only to avoid traffic, but also since the TTC streetcars do not run after 01:30. The streetcar wires needed to be de-powered and temporarily raised to allow the passage of the tender past Bathurst Street as it headed down Lake Shore Boulevard West.


The 6213's tender entered the westbound lanes of Lake Shore Boulevard West heading east as part of its trip early on the morning of 4 June 2009

Another interesting aspect of the routing was that the move had to run eastbound on the westbound lanes of Lake Shore Boulevard over Spadina Avenue. The clearance to go under the Gardiner Expressway was only large enough via this route, and not via the eastbound lanes. It is the bridges on this part of Lake Shore Boulevard that have delayed the transport moves, as they were re-inspected to ensure that they could handle the weight of the tender and the locomotive.


The Toronto Railway Heritage Centre's Whitcomb diesel #1 started to pull the tender off the trailer onto the roundhouse tracks at daybreak on 4 June 2009

While the move itself went quite smoothly, with the trailer positioned at the end of track #34 at the roundhouse by 03:30, it took some time to properly set up the track ramp from the trailer to the roundhouse, so it was 05:30 before the Toronto Railway Heritage Centre's Whitcomb diesel switcher started to ease the tender off the trailer. With some hiccups along the way, that process was not completed until about 06:30, and the tender was not tied up for the day on track #33 until after 07:00.


The tender of the 6213 was on the John Street Roundhouse's turntable to be rotated so that its coupler was facing the turntable at first light on 4 June 2009

With the tender move completed, the next step will be to move the locomotive itself, which may occur as soon as next week. Watch the Toronto Railway Historical Association web site for advance information.

More pictures of the move will be forthcoming on my photo site.

Economics: Sin as an Irrelevant Concept?

TORONTO, ONTARIO - In an hour of the On Point radio program on Monday discussing the bankruptcy of General Motors, guest Allan Meltzer of Carnegie Mellon and the American Enterprise institute made the statement: "Capitalism without failed companies is like religion without sin--it doesn't work." While I ironically agreed with much of his assessment of the government intervention in the auto industry, this kind of statement is exactly why I often lose respect for the right wing in the United States--they often don't see how their cultural perspective gets in the way of their own ideology, even when their logic is actually sound.

On its face, Meltzer's statement could be easily seen as culturally arrogant. Many non-western religions do not contain a concept of sin, at least in explicit terms, and thus practitioners could hear their religion being called non-functional. Buddhists, for example, who fundamentally believe in enlightenment by being freed from desire and hence suffering, would find it pretty hard to believe that an explicit system of divine moral codes is necessary as the foundation of religious faith. What a number of non-Abrahamic faiths tend to share is not a set of moral rules, but a sense of achieving balance with world, which is often situational rather than absolute.

Yet, that's not what really bothered me about the statement, as an educated person from a faith without an explicit concept of sin should still be able to understand the meaning of the statement. The concept of feeling "bad" (out-of-balance if not guilty) for doing the "wrong thing" (whether categorized as a sin or not) is a nearly universal concept, so the use of what sounded to me like Catholic vocabulary should be not be taken as an insult by people from other cultures when Meltzer likely would be just as happy with a more general concept in his analogy.

What bothered me was that the mind-set of sin seems in conflict with the free market economics Meltzer was trying to espouse. Human beings are expected to feel guilty (or "bad") when they realize that they have done the wrong thing and then make some effort to repent or otherwise be forgiven (or come back in balance). Corporations and businesses have no capacity to feel guilty, or really to feel anything at all. If they do the wrong thing, there is no incentive to repent--in fact, unless laws require them to do something, the boards of public corporations have a legal responsibility to their shareholders to NOT do anything that would reduce profits. Only in the most direct of consumer markets--where customers can become upset with a company and boycott its products--can the free market actually lead to changed behavior, and in some sense that kind of emotional behavior is even against the view of a rational free market, in which consumers base their decisions on the qualities (cost and utility) of the products in the markets alone.

The right wing often seems to think that a free market without government regulation actually will be self-correcting, that corporations will somehow "repent" for any "sins" that they commit. Yet, without laws and regulations holding the companies accountable for actions against the interest of society, that correction won't occur. This fundamental conflict between free-market and Christian thought is not necessarily unresolvable, but is rarely acknowledged and I suspect leads to problems making laws that adequately reflect either perspective or a balance thereof.

Again, I don't think any of this has much, if anything, to do with the government rescues of Chrysler and General Motors, which are about direct government intervention and not regulation. Yet, by invoking Christian rhetoric that points to what I consider a fundamental disconnect, I am led to wonder about quality of the rest of his logic, even if I started out inclined to find it sound (and, ultimately, do find it so). Such is the real danger of invoking the concept of sin in an free market economic context.

Margin Notes: Scooby, Pledge Drives, Transport

A "Spirit Zone" sign at the University of Albany featured the Great Dane mascot as seen on 1 June 2009

TORONTO, ONTARIO - I had no idea that Scooby Doo was going to become a theme of my latest trip. However, the generation-old cartoon has had quite an influence on regional universities. In the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts, each school in the "Five Colleges" consortium is commonly associated with a Scooby Doo character in folklore. Smith College is Velma, Mount Holyoke is Daphne, Amherst is Fred, Hampshire is Shaggy, and of course the University of Massachusetts at Amherst is Scooby himself. Yet, it's the University of Albany (part of the State University of New York system) that actually has a Great Dane that looks much like Scooby Doo as its mascot, as seen above.

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While they may not air cartoons, one of the joys of traveling in United States for me is usually getting to hear local public radio stations. There was little joy in this latest trip, as the public radio stations serving the areas where I spent the most time--WFCR 88.5 FM Amherst (and affiliated WNNZ 640 AM) and WAMC 90.3 FM Albany--were both in fund-raising mode. WFCR's pledge breaks were bad enough, but WAMC's were prolonged and borderline disturbing. WAMC president and CEO Alan Chartock hosts many of the pledge breaks himself, and had no problems making comments like "we've been doing that for the past eight years, not just the past year," and "we criticize Democrats too; you just heard that in the last report." It's statements like that which allow right-wingers to paint public radio as a left-wing atrocity and discredit the balanced programs that do appear on public radio stations such as the major NPR news magazines.

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I ended up listening to a lot of WAMC yesterday when I was in stopped traffic on the Berkshire Extension of the New York Thruway after an accident shut down the westbound lanes near the Canaan, New York tolls for nearly an hour. After about twenty minutes without moving, just about everyone had shut down their engines and I was treated to the surreal experience of listening to birds chirp on an Interstate highway (the eastbound lanes were behind a grove of trees and almost inaudible).

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The incident on the Thruway underscored the misguided nature of a statement I had made to a friend in Albany after the derailment experience on Friday. I claimed that since I would be driving a rental car on Monday, I would be in more control of my schedule. Driving presents only an illusion of control--in reality, one is just as much at the mercy of those around them in a car as in any other form of transportation. Real freedom comes from having choices, instead of having little choice except to drive as is the case in most of North America, and surprisingly even in much of the urban Albany area.

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Bicyclists enjoyed the trails along the Erie Canal near Fairport, New York on 2 June 2009

Farther west, there are locations in which a true multi-modal scene could be seen in New York. The New York Thruway toll road (I-90), the Erie Canal, the bike path along the Erie Canal, and the former New York Central railroad (now CSX) could conceivably be placed in the same frame at many locations between Amsterdam and Syracuse, New York.

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The platforms at Buffalo, New York's Central Terminal, effectively abandoned since 1979, were viewed on 2 June 2009 from Amtrak's detouring Maple Leaf on the Loop Lead

Amtrak's Maple Leaf traverses the old New York Central between New York City and Buffalo, and an unexpected pleasant surprise occurred as the train approached Buffalo today. It turned out that the train was detouring over the CSX Belt Subdivision around Buffalo because of track work. While the detour meant skipping the Exchange Street station and views of the Peace Bridge, it meant rare miles for me and a different view of the derelict Buffalo Central Terminal train station as the train traversed the Loop Lead to enter the Belt Subdivision.

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The ridiculous immigration inspection of the Amtrak Maple Leaf at Syracuse, New York that was taking place last year has apparently ceased. An immigration agent was boarding the train to make sure no illegal aliens were on board the train bound for Canada. (The agent was also supposed to ensure US residents had correct paperwork to enter Canada and re-enter the United States, but never checked my identification and spent a lot of time talking to Hispanic-looking people on the train both in my experience and in other reports.) Exactly why the United States cared was a bit beyond me, and why the inspection occurred in Syracuse and not closer to the border (say, in Buffalo) was really beyond me. The only inspection on the train today was the Canadian inspection upon entry to Canada at Niagara Falls, Ontario.

Heritage: Keystone Arch Bridges

Amtrak's Lake Shore Limited, powered by a P42DC locomotive built in 2001, crossed a Keystone Arch Bridge in Chester, Massachusetts completed one hundred sixty years earlier in 1841, on 1 June 2009

ALBANY, NEW YORK - Nestled in a somewhat remote part of the Berkshire Mountains of western Massachusetts lies a series of engineering landmarks. The Keystone Arch Bridges of the Western Railroad, the oldest arched railroad bridges in the United States, still stand along the West Branch of the Westfield River, two of them part of a hiking trail, and one of them amazingly still in use on the CSX's Berkshire Subdivision mainline.

I became aware of these engineering gems when I first rode the Amtrak "Lake Shore Limited" route between Boston, Massachusetts and Albany, New York on a Massachusetts Bay Railroad Enthusiasts Fall Foliage Flyer special in 2001. Two of the arched bridges are visible from the current line, which bypassed all but one of the Keystone Arch Bridges in a 1912 line relocation, and the history of the bridges figured prominently in the route guide.


The Keystone Arch Bridge "B" in Becket, Massachusetts, bypassed in a 1912 line relocation and now traversed by the Keystone Arch Bridges Trail, was viewed from Amtrak's Lake Shore Limited on 14 May 2008

The bridges were built as part of the Western Railroad, chartered in 1833 as part of an effort to connect Boston to the Hudson River to try to win back traffic that was headed to the ports around New York instead of Massachusetts Bay. The Western Railroad would be the longest (150 miles) and highest (crossing the Berkshires at an elevation of 1458 feet at Washington Summit) in the world when it opened in 1841. The eastern approach to the summit followed the west branch of the Westfield River, requiring a series of bridges especially around the West Branch Gorge. The Friends of the Keystone Arches web site describes how George Washington Whistler and Alexander Birnie surveyed and built the bridges to last, obviously quite successfully.


The West Branch of the Westfield River featured clear water 70 feet beneath the Keystone Arch Bridge "B" in Becket, Massachusetts on 1 June 2009

In 1870, the Western Railroad became part of the Boston and Albany, the name under which it would operate for most of the line's existence. The Boston and Albany was part of the New York Central system, and has since been part of Penn Central, Conrail, and today is part of CSX.


The Keystone Arch Bridge Trail crossed 1841-era Bridge "A" in Becket, Massachusetts on 1 June 2009

Since 2001, the Keystone Arch Bridges have been more accessible thanks to the Keystone Arch Bridges Trail. The 2.5 mile trail in Chester and Becket, Massachusetts parallels the Westfield River partially using the rights of way of the old Pontoonsic Turnpike horse-carriage route and the original Western Railroad. The highlight of the experience is walking over the "A" and "B" Keystone Arch Bridges with their views of the West Branch of the Westfield River far below; it's hard to believe that the robust bridges have stood for more than 170 years.


The view from Keystone Arch Bridge "A" in Becket, Massachusetts included this look down the west branch of the Westfield River toward the West Branch Gorge on 1 June 2009

The Keystone Arch Bridges Trail is accessible from Middlefield Road from Chester, Massachusetts. The sight of modern freight trains and Amtrak crossing the 1841-era "Double Arch" bridge in Chester, Massachusetts was a sight worth seeing in 2009.