Anon - not logged in Report This Comment Date: December 07, 2024 05:26AM
We have closed lines here but the buildings are in stone. Some are now shops,
others houses. Few are actually empty.
The railways dramatically transformed Australia in the days when delivery was by
horse and wagon on dirt roads. We owe a lot to them. But they were built to a
low construction cost, thus a high running cost (look at aerial photos of closed
train lines in Australia and they're winding, so the track is longer and the
trains were slower - time is money and track length is maintenance). With the
arrival of trucks and improved roads, well, where I am the shops collude to use
the same freight company, so it's viable for them to all put their orders in and
the truck arrives to the last of them by 9.30 the next morning. Rail freight
takes two days and then it's at the depot. So the line is closed.
quasi Report This Comment Date: December 07, 2024 10:41AM
My dad, who was nearly 52 when I was born, apprenticed to his dad as a
boilermaker on the railroad when steam locomotives were still the main form of
propulsion and trains were still in heavy use. The years went by, new technology
in the form of diesel electric locomotives and better highways came along, and
by 1956, the year he turned 48, his skills were no longer needed on the
railroad, but he found a good paying job with benefits in my mom's hometown (and
mine) building trucks for a major manufacturer, International Harvester, now
just International. I'm sure it was a difficult time for him, his first wife
dying of cancer in 1955 then having to change careers a year later on the cusp
of middle age, but it worked out and there's a lesson there for people today who
are resistant to changing technologies and ways of life.
Anon - not logged in Report This Comment Date: December 09, 2024 12:46AM
Lessons can be good and bad. I remember wearing nothing but undies, socks,
overalls and boots, not even a watch was allowed, so nothing could drop down in
that tight space inside a boiler, as anything that did had to be recovered. It
was summer and cleaning a boiler is not a job I remember fondly. But the
schedule was such and it had to be done. The hospital I worked at had to be
kept running. I had already been to the other end of running a boiler in summer
- the sterilizing room and autoclaves. Time to fix autoclaves had to be booked,
so the girls had everything out of the way before the man in overalls turned up
- they made absolutely sure nothing went wrong for patients at their end. Over
time, the fact that engineers with hands-on experience were in administration
meant the system improved so boiler attendants had less and less to do. Now
it's all electric and modern hospitals are built with lots of insulation.
Running cost is dramatically reduced. Yet the kids who are law graduates in the
Senior Executive Service, who don't have to understand what the government
department they're running actually does, can muck up in so many ways. They
protect the political party that appointed them, make the other party look
bad/run rings around them, pass on blame like teflon, divide and simplify their
jobs so any idiot can do them, so there are more executive positions on
executive pay.
There you have the improvements in the system and the decay in the system.
woberto Report This Comment Date: December 10, 2024 09:55AM
q-man
