Eastern U.S. railroads CSX Transportation and Norfolk Southern Railway each planned to hold groundbreaking ceremonies Monday on separate intermodal hub construction projects.
Progress in removing trucks from the highways and moving freight more efficiently.
Old school maritime transportation, an Arabian fishing dhow, seen here traveling amongst the fjords of the Musandam Peninsula, Oman. I snagged this shot while taking a tour cruise through the fjords this past weekend.
The latest figures leave 18.4 percent of the North American railcar fleet stored instead of in active freight service, up from 18.2 percent on May 1. Although that is far below the 31.9 percent stored fleet when at the depth of the recession in June and July 2009, the AAR says when the industry is healthiest only 2-3 percent of available railcars would be idle.
Hopefully this isn’t the start of a trend.
A total of 408 daily flights are scheduled between the U.S. and Europe this summer, said Craig Jenks, president of Airline/Aircraft Projects. After years of declining as airlines switched to smaller planes, the average number of seats on those flights will rise to 255.8 seats per departure this summer compared to 252.4 last summer.
The super-jumbo Airbus A380, now flown by both Air France and Lufthansa to the U.S., accounts for most of the per-departure seat increase.
(Via The Middle Seat Terminal.)
A very thorough article in Businessweek on the imminent collapse of the United States Postal Service.
“The postal service is already carrying more junk than first class,” says postal consultant Campbell. “Pretty soon it’s going to be a government-run advertising mail delivery service. Does that make any sense? It doesn’t make any sense.”
“Civilians call it junk mail,” Rice says, joking. “We don’t like that term. We call it job security.”
This just doesn’t seem even remotely tenable.
Every day (except Sunday) the USPS has 10’s of thousands of automobiles driving the same routes regardless of mail volume.
Every day (except Sunday) the USPS delivers reams of paper, in the form of junk mail, that people don’t even want.
This is not sustainable. It’s wasteful from both a economic and an environmental standpoint. This is a classic example of the government’s inability to repair itself, and for that matter it’s inability to diagnose itself.
Great video of a classic old plane doing a low-level fly-by. The sound of the old rotary-piston props is just beautiful.
From an article on Seeking Alpha I found this particular bit of information remarkable:
According to the Association of American Railroads, U.S. freight railroads averaged 484 ton-miles per gallon in 2010, a 106% improvement over the industry average of 235 ton-miles per gallon in 1980.
106% more efficient in 30 years. That’s outstanding! If only we could capture that kind of development in automobiles.
Photo by Nick (aka TRUCKPIX on Flickr).
FedEx Volvo tractor in Philidelphia.
A couple more articles on the growth of intermodal shipping within the railroads.
I’ve been running across the idea of Bus Rapid Transit lately in my reading and I’m intrigued. It seems like a great idea to bridge the gap between cars and metro rail.