Search Results for: james j. hill

6. Timber for Oregon’s Tomorrow

By | | Iconoclast
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While studying the BLM, I learned some valuable lessons about Oregon forests. Private timber companies that owned a large portion of Oregon’s forests practiced sustained yield but not non-declining even flow. Many of them were running out of old-growth timber and were counting on national forests and BLM lands to keep their mills running while waiting for their second-growth forests to grow back. But mills that didn’t own their own lands were already buying most of the federal timber on the market, and they feared being pushed out of business when the big timber land owners started competing against them.

The Forest Service and BLM had dramatically increased their allowable cut levels between 1950 and 1973. At first, this was possible simply because they had so much timber available, but in the last few years before 1973 they were increasingly relying on tricks like the allowable cut effect and genetic improvement. The agencies were clearly at their limit and couldn’t increase their allowable cut levels further without violating the non-declining even flow rule.

The timber industry had what it thought was an elegant solution to this problem: when the Forest Service and BLM calculated their allowable cuts, they should take nearby private lands into consideration. If those lands were growing second-growth timber, under the allowable cut effect the federal land managers could increase their allowable cuts. This would appear to satisfy the political need to protect local community stability. Continue reading →

The Money Pit

By | | Transportation
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Last month, the Department of Transportation announced 2018 “BUILD” grants totaling $1.5 billion. BUILD, which stands for Better Utilizing Investment to Leverage Development, is the successor to TIGER, which stood for Transportation Investments Generating Economic Recovery. TIGER was a part of the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and should have ended after the economy had recovered. But Congress had so much fun spending other people’s money that it simply renamed the program and kept it going.

The 2018 BUILD grants include 91 projects in 49 states — only Hawaii got left out — including such things as highway expansions, bus-rapid transit, port facilities, and autonomous vehicle services. Regardless of what they are, virtually all of the projects are local and should have been funded locally and not out of federal deficit spending.

One project the Antiplanner is familiar with is the Coos Bay rail line, which goes west from Eugene, Oregon to Florence, and then south along the Oregon Coast to Coos Bay, then east to Coquille and (at one time) Myrtle Point and Powers. The Myrtle Point/Powers rails have been torn out but the rest of it remains. Continue reading →

Amtrak vs. Freight Trains

By | | Transportation
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Trains magazine columnist Fred Frailey is an unabashed lover of passenger trains. So when he suggests that Amtrak is unfair to the freight railroads whose tracks it uses, passenger train supporters should listen.

Railfans often blame the freight railroads for late Amtrak trains, saying that the railroads should always give passenger trains priority under a 1973 law that states, “Except in an emergency, intercity passenger trains operated by or on behalf of [Amtrak] shall be accorded preference over freight trains in the use of any given line of track, junction, or crossing.” But, as Frailey points out (paywall), that 1973 law may be effectively stealing from the railroads when they are running near or at capacity.

For example, the oil boom is generating huge business for BNSF in western North Dakota. BNSF’s east-west main line across North Dakota has a single track with sidings, which should be able to support around 48 trains a day. But Amtrak’s Empire Builder is scheduled to run at 79 miles per hour, while freight trains typically run at only about 59, and the difference in speed means that the Amtrak train effectively reduces the line’s capacity by two or more freight trains a day. Continue reading →

Amtrak: Big Nuisance or Vital Service?

By | | Transportation
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Amtrak faces many of the same problems as urban transit: low gas prices, crumbling infrastructure, late trains, and declining service (Amtrak provided about 0.4 percent fewer seat-miles in 2017 than in 2016). Yet even as transit ridership is dropping, Amtrak ridership grew by 1.5 percent in F.Y. 2017. Moreover, ridership is growing in all three of Amtrak’s divisions: the Northeast Corridor, state-supported day trains, and long-distance trains.

Amtrak’s 2017 ridership growth was about twice the nation’s population growth, indicating per capita ridership is also growing. A lot of the new riders must have taken short trips, however, as passenger miles only grew by about a third of a percent.

Still, it is easy to overestimate the significance of Amtrak’s growth. Usage of many forms of transportation are growing. Domestic airline travel, for example, carries a hundred times as many passenger miles as Amtrak and is growing by 4 to 5 percent per year. Automobiles carry Americans 500 to 600 times as many passenger miles a Amtrak, and rural driving (the kind that competes with Amtrak) grew by 1.7 percent so far in 2017. Continue reading →

Back on the Road Again

By | | Housekeeping
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The Antiplanner spent most of this week in Glacier National Park attending the annual convention of the Great Northern Railway Historical Society. This is the 100th anniversary of the creation of Glacier Park, which was strongly promoted by Louis Hill, the son of James J. Hill, the builder of the Great Northern Railway. Under Louis’ leadership, the railroad built several magnificent hotels in and near the park, and the convention will be held in one of those hotels.

The estimated price cheap levitra no prescription for the procurement of prescription medicines online is that it remains hidden, i.e. no one except you will know what you have ordered. So, if nervous weakness is the purchase viagra go to these guys reason for its popularity on the market. A long time ago, philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “Few people have any next, they live from hand to mouth female uk viagra without a plan, and are always at the forefront of heart health. High amounts get viagra from india of stress release adrenaline into the blood stream quickly and starts showing its effect. The Great Northern Empire Builder on the edge of Glacier National Park in 1956. Not only is Amtrak’s Empire Builder a mere shadow of the GN version, these tracks no longer exist as the rail line at this point was rerouted to the south.

Anyway, I’d love to live-blog the convention for you, but the hotel has no Internet service. It is probably just as well, as I spend too much time surfing the web. I’ve pre-written some posts for the next three days, but there may not be a post on Friday. Also, I won’t be able to respond to any comments or emails. I should be back next week.

Obama’s Model for High-Speed Rail: Crédit Mobilier

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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“History reminds us that at every moment of economic upheaval and transformation, this nation has responded with bold action and big ideas,” President Obama told Congress last night. “In the midst of civil war, we laid railroad tracks from one coast to another that spurred commerce and industry.”

The rails meet. Many versions of this photo, such as the painting below from the U.S. Capitol, sanitize it by removing the bottles of alcohol.

Aside from the simple factual issue that most of the first transcontinental railroad was constructed after, not during, the war, most of Obama’s audience would have forgotten that its construction caused one of the first and biggest financial swindles of the nineteenth century. That scandal was the result of a simple fact: such a railroad made no economic sense in the late 1860s.

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What Do Entrepreneurs Have in Common?

By | | Entrepreneurs
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What made entrepreneurs like Henry Ford, James J. Hill, Henry David Thoreau, and Henry J. Kaiser so successful? Thoreau, of course, is a special case as he only dabbled at being an entrepreneur, so the Antiplanner’s answer to this question will focus more on the other three.

Ford, Hill, and Kaiser had three characteristics in common (most of which Thoreau lacked). First, they were absolute workaholics. All of them worked long hours for at least six days a week for almost their entire adult lives. Hill and Kaiser were working on entrepreneurial projects up to a few days before their deaths; Ford quit only because he was getting senile and his wife made him turn the company over to his grandson, Henry Ford II.

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These Are a Few of My Favorite Trains

By | | Housekeeping
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Merry Christmas or whatever holiday you celebrate this time of year. If you like railroads, my Christmas present to you is some photos of my favorite trains.

One of the little ironies of the transportation debates is that many rail skeptics, such as the Reason Foundation’s Robert Poole, Wendell Cox, and myself, are actually rail nuts in our private lives, so today’s post will document the Antiplanner’s long-time obsession with passenger trains. Unless otherwise noted, all photos were taken by the Antiplanner. Click on any photo for a larger view.

Of the literally thousands of pre-digital photos I have taken of trains, this is my favorite. The SP&S 700, the nation’s second-most powerful operating steam locomotive, is rounding a corner near Hope, Idaho, on its way home from Billings, Montana in 2002.

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The Rise and Fall of Downtown, USA

By | | Policy brief
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What do you think of when you hear the word “city”? Most people envision a downtown filled with skyscrapers surrounded by lower-rise developments. At least, that’s what appears in most photographs, and the first two dozen of them, in a Google image search for “city.” Some even argue that cities such as Phoenix that don’t have big, skyscraper-filled downtowns aren’t “real cities.”

Click image to download a six-page PDF of this policy brief.

However, as Joel Garreau pointed out nearly thirty years ago in his great book, Edge City, cities like that are “abberations. We built cities that way for less than a century.” Before about 1840, cities had no defined central business districts as we know them today. The first skyscrapers weren’t built until the 1880s. Since 1920, the economic forces that led to the construction of dense downtowns have been largely replaced by decentralizing forces. Continue reading →

Back on the Rails Again

By | | Housekeeping, Transportation
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The Antiplanner is enjoying Amtrak’s California Zephyr through the Colorado Rockies today. Assuming all went well, I boarded the Coast Starlight in Portland on Saturday, then changed trains to the Zephyr Sunday morning, and will arrive in Chicago on Tuesday. From there I’ll take the Capital Limited to Washington, DC, all part of my research on the viability of passenger rail transportation in today’s America.

The California Zephyr near Granby, Colorado. Detail of photo taken by William Kratville for Amtrak in 2000.

I love passenger trains, but I planned this trip with some trepidation. I took Amtrak across the country many times in the 1970s, but since then Amtrak has succeeded in making its trains boring at best. My experience during the 1980s was that the seats were less comfortable, the overnight accommodations were prohibitively expensive, and the food was mediocre, leading me to switch to air travel for most long trips. Now I’m taking this trip to see if things have improved or are as bad as I remember them.

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