Four years ago, then-President Joe Biden and both parties in Congress blocked railroad workers across the US from striking. Railroad workers tell us things have only gotten worse on the job since then.

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In 2022, the United States nearly experienced its first national railroad strike in decades, until then-President Joe Biden, along with Democrats and Republicans in Congress, stepped in to block a strike before it could begin. Rail labor unions were forced to accept contracts that did not substantively address long-brewing crises in the freight rail industry that have had disastrous consequences for frontline workers, trackside communities like East Palestine, Ohio, the passenger rail system, and the US supply chain writ large. In this episode of Working People, we speak with returning guest “Jay,” a veteran train dispatcher who’s been in the industry for 22 years, about what has changed—and what hasn’t—for rank-and-file railroad workers on the job over the last four years.

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Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated.

Maximillian Alvarez: Alright. Welcome everyone to Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network and is brought to you in partnership with In These Times Magazine and The Real News Network. This show is produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners just like you. My name is Maximillian Alvarez, and we’ve got a really important episode for y’all today. And it’s about a crisis that affects all of us, even if we don’t think that it does. And I’m really grateful to be joined by a familiar voice that listeners are going to recognize from a number of the one-on-one and panel interviews that we did with railroad workers back in 2022 when the United States was on the verge of its first national railroad strike in a generation.
To protect him and his job, we just call him Jay around here. And we won’t name the railroad company that he works for, but he’s a veteran-trained dispatcher who’s been in the industry for 22 years, basically the railroad equivalent of an air traffic controller and a 911 dispatcher rolled into one. It was rank and file workers like Jay who first alerted us to the long brewing crisis on the nation’s freight rail system, which is also impacting our passenger rail system, our whole supply chain, and the towns and cities where these trains pass through all over the country. We’d learned about the Wall Street takeover of the railroads, the deregulation, the corporate consolidation, the profits and margins obsessed mania that has led to disastrous, unsafe, and unsustainable policies and decisions that have put frontline workers, trackside communities, and the public at large at long-term risk for the sake of massive short-term profits for the rail carriers, their executives, and their shareholders cutting or automating jobs year after year, piling more work onto fewer workers, running those workers into the ground, spitting them out of the industry, and then hurriedly hiring untrained workers to replace them.
We’d learned a lot about this crisis leading up to the potential strike in 2022, which then President Joe Biden and both parties in Congress conspired to break before it even had a chance to begin. We saw the costs of this crisis with the catastrophic train derailment and chemical disaster in East Palestine, Ohio in 2023. So today we’re talking with Jay again to ask the simple question, has anything gotten better on the railroads? So Brother Jay, it is so great to have you back on the show again, man. I know it’s been a minute. First and foremost, how you doing, brother? How you been doing since we last heard from you?

Jay: It has been a minute. How many years now? What is this? 2022? What? Four years now. Already four years. Boy, I feel like it’s growing faster and faster every year, the older I get. But I’m doing well despite facing strong opposition and tough headwinds. I don’t let anything stop me. I mean, if you’re going to do something, you may as well set out, put your hand to it, you may as well do it right. And somebody’s got to tell the truth because if everybody believes someone else is going to do it, nobody’s ever going to tell anything. So here we are, and I’m looking forward to what we have to discuss today.

Maximillian Alvarez: Right on, man. And in terms of speaking the truths that need to be heard, I mean, you recently filed a formal complaint with the Surface Transportation Board. And by the looks of that complaint, it does not sound like the things that you and I were talking about four years ago have gotten much better. In fact, it sounds like they’ve gotten worse.

Jay: I would absolutely say they’ve gotten worse. Unfortunately, something that I figured out, and you continue to see this with the Wall Street syndrome that’s afflicting corporate America, I mean all across the country. It doesn’t matter what job it is, what profession it is, it’s cut, cut, cut, cut to prosperity. But in reality, there is no prosperity when you’re cutting. The prosperity is actually a false, it’s almost like a false flag operation. If a company’s not bringing in new revenues, new investment, new business, whatever the case may be, and yet you continue to show record profits, when as a portion of the company’s earnings, a very small portion often is what your new increases or new customers were, how do you support that? Where does your money come for stock buybacks? Where does the record revenue come quarter after quarter, year over year? And the reality of the situation is it’s not actual revenue.
It’s cutting conductors, it’s cutting engineers, it’s combining trains, it’s eliminating crew districts, it’s cutting car inspectors, hiring non-contracted workers, which are known as scabs to most union workers. Oftentimes these folks are paid less, and we already know with expenses the way they are, that a living wage in America probably at this point would be nothing short of about 25 bucks an hour. I mean, let’s just call it what it is. So if you’re making less than that, man, you’re struggling. Power bills are going up, school taxes are increasing, fuel goes through the roof. I mean, not as bad as it has been in the past, but at 450, 479 a gallon, that’s not exactly good either.

Maximillian Alvarez: No, it ain’t great, man. I’m dying over here.

Jay: Yeah. I mean, it’s costing me 70 bucks to fill a mid-size SUV where it used to cost me 45 or 50. And I mean, for a lot of people, you have to think, in the 1980s, if you looked at what an average conductor engineer earned then and compared it to today’s dollars, if our wages had kept up, I mean, my God, we’d be over a quarter million a year. And you think about that, it’s the middle class that drives the economic engine that is the prosperity of America. It’s the middle class that supports all of the other parts of the middle class. So your food service industry, your hospitality industry, any manufacturing company, let’s say you build lawn tractors. Well, if somebody’s going to need a lawn tractor, they’re first going to have to own a home. And if you buy a home and you want to have it built, well, guess what?
Somebody’s got to ship the lumber. Here’s where the railroad comes in. But before you even do that, somebody’s got to go log it. So there’s a lot of different hands that touch all of this stuff from the time it was a tree standing in the forest till it’s a two by four in your living room wall and all of the transportation in between. But if all you have is filthy rich and broke poor with no middle class, you don’t have anything because who needs a railroad when nobody’s buying anything to ship?

Maximillian Alvarez: Yeah, man. It’s like they’re planning for society without humans. It’s like, who’s going to buy your products if no one can afford to live? Who’s going to create anything if you’re all putting AI into your goddamn programs and operational systems? It’s like you see that same sort of blindness that has led Wall Street and corporate executives to take our vital supply chain and destroy it, doing all the things that you’re talking about, destroying the workers in the process, destroying the infrastructure in the process, destroying towns like East Palestine in the process and just moving on because they’re raking in more money than they ever have. It’s like we’re careening towards a cliff and what’s going to happen when those profits run out? Does anyone think beyond a few years in these corporate offices? It sure doesn’t seem like it. But I wanted to sort of ask in that vein, after all the attention that you guys were able to get in 2022, especially as we got to the edge of a potential strike, and then after East Palestine being such a international disaster, it felt like for a fleeting moment, the railroads were feeling like they were going to have to make some concessions and change some of their behavior a bit.
That’s what people have asked me for years ever since. I wanted to pose that question to you. Did they change at all in that aftermath? Did it just go away after a couple months?

Jay: I mean, I think as an industry, and we’re talking the class one industry, a lot of your short lines are operated by people that are trying to do what’s right. You have small companies, in some cases they’re family-owned. Now a lot of them have been getting bought up by holding companies now, but a lot of the smaller companies weren’t the problem to begin with. It’s your giant Wall Street traded companies. And everybody knows that it’s a shell game. Everybody knows the math is a fraud. And the way it’s represented is not the way it’s actually happening. So they said, “Well, there needs to be more detectors out there. We need to have better technology. They need to be fewer miles apart.” Because I think it was an article that I read last year that Transport Canada had written about a rail car wheel bearing, that if it went bad, it could catastrophically fail in as little as 12 miles.
And you got to figure, I mean, if you’ve got a 286,000 pound rail car and you’ve got, let’s see, four axles underneath of it, so that gives you eight contact points. It means you have eight bearings. You take that 286,000 pounds, divide it out by eight, and what? I don’t know, I can’t do the math in my head. It’s like 17 tons or something pressing down on that bearing, something like that, somewhere in that neighborhood. So with that kind of pressure on there, when something stops spinning the way it’s supposed to and the lubricant goes away, you could just imagine how hot that gets and how fast. An empty car will last longer, a loaded one will not. And the more the heavier it is, the quicker the thing’s going to fail because the heat’s going to build exponentially. But putting detectors every so many miles is all well and good.
I don’t disagree with that. But then you have to look at the operating rules that we have, and the operating rules haven’t changed. So for example, on our detectors, we can’t go slower than eight miles per hour over a detector, or it’ll give us a train too slow message. It causes the transducers and stuff not to read right and they lose track of what they’re counting and don’t know what to do. And when that happens, depending on the type of train it is, then the conductor will have to get down and go walk the train for an inspection. Well, that train might be 15,000 feet long now. And yeah, I said 15,000 feet. That’s insanity. A train does not need to be that big.
I saw one that was 46,000 tons, 330 loads, and the thing had nine engines on it with split multiple DP sets. And anytime you ask somebody in leadership about this, they say, “Well, give me a data-driven solution. Data, data, data, AI, models, blah, blah, blah.” Listen, let me tell you something. If you’re going to build a model, the only way you’re going to be able to build a model is on things that have already happened in most cases. Now, you can have predictive models and futuristic models and all that, but all of those are based on past behavior. So if someone like myself comes in and says, “Look, I don’t like that. And here’s why I don’t like it. I can’t put my finger on it yet, but something just doesn’t feel right. Or I can tell you this isn’t going to go the way you think it’s going to go.
And the first thing I get is, well, give me a data-driven solution.” Well, you’re dismissing my concern and you’re saying it doesn’t matter, but yet you’re willing to look at the model someone else built, which is an opinion and take it for the gospel, but you won’t listen to me because my narrative doesn’t agree with yours. That’s a bit of a problem.
And the damage to the equipment, Max, oh my God, dude. I mean, springs are missing on the side of these cars, loaded chlorine cars without springs on the side of them. Draft gear broken in places. I’ve never seen it broken, and yet somehow it’s still out there running. Bolster angularity issues, cars lifted off of the truck. So the truck is actually riding crooked down the railroad underneath the car, burning a hole through the bottom of the equipment. I’ve had two instances where the bottom of a rail car, the welds have broken and fallen out of the bottom of the car while the train was moving. Thankfully, a dragging equipment detector caught both of those. Another one, the car literally ripped in half and caused a catastrophic derailment, put cars everywhere, delayed the morning commute for all the passenger trains. I mean, it’s crazy. You had that big explosion underneath I-10 out on the BN a year or two ago.
It was caught on a tractor trailer dash cam on the TransCon. Mind you, the Southwest Chief goes scorching through there about 90 miles an hour twice a day. God forbid if that train had been coming when the tank car wrecked and blew up.
I mean, multiple pileups on the Pittsburgh line up through Pennsylvania. CSX has had multiple pileups. They’ve had bridge failures. I mean, just like, what are we doing, dude? A railroad is a capital intensive business. You’ve got to spend money to make it run. And they’re not doing that. They’re just milking the money out to make the numbers of Wall Street look good.

Maximillian Alvarez: Yeah, I think that’s very succinctly and powerfully put. It is a shell game, right? Because you can see this for yourself if you live near a railroad or drive across the country. Everyone knows our infrastructure’s going to shit. It’s just like a lot of this stuff, maybe folks don’t see it on their phones or their timelines, but if you go outside and walk around, you’ll see that everything’s kind of fallen apart while the people who are supposed to be maintaining it are making bank and the people, the workers who actually are tasked with maintaining it are getting crushed.
Yeah, I see it everywhere that I go, but I wanted to ask what that has looked like from the dispatch office. Because it’s like the country was alerted last year to the long brewing crisis in air traffic controlling as well. And the shortage of air traffic controllers that we’ve had for years that no one’s been listening to when union reps and workers are complaining about it. But I think that folks still don’t know what it looks like for a worker like yourself, all that you’re responsible for from the dispatch office. And they can understand what it’s like to be an engineer on a train that used to be a mile long that’s now three miles long. We can at least imagine that. But what does it look like to be a dispatcher who used to have the area expansion equivalent of a one-mile train going to a three-mile train?
How much terrain are you covering and how many people do you guys have to do it under these policies?

Jay: I mean, there’s nothing short of just straight up saying it’s bad. I mean, they’ve doubled the size of the territory. In fact, the job that I work is two jobs smashed together into one. And one thing that I used to do an awful lot, and this is indicative of your old heads as they call us, the ones that have been around for a while. New school, let me tell you something. The standard that we had to adhere to when I hired is not the standard now, not even close. You just do not have to be qualified like you used to have to be. Now it’s DEI this, DEI that. We have a number we have to meet, and it doesn’t really matter whether or not you actually can do the job or do the job well. They just want a body in the seat. And when they doubled the territory, I went from having time to plan, time to think about what I wanted to do, time to be deliberate about giving track time out.
So from a train dispatcher’s perspective, and most people have probably never met a train dispatcher, it’s a pretty niche craft. Just like most people will never meet a locomotive engineer. It’s pretty rare. You just don’t. I mean, you’re more likely to meet a civil engineer or a lawyer than you are a locomotive engineer. And that’s not to in any way degrade them. That just shows you how niche these jobs are. But if you consider what a train dispatcher does, I literally manage every aspect of the operation of the railroad. So I have 400 plus miles of territory. That spans multiple lines in multiple states, two telephones, numerous radio bases, sometimes anywhere from eight to as many as 18 control screens in addition to your train sheets, your bulletins, all the paperwork that you need to move trains safely. So you might have dimensional shipments on one or two trains or maybe three.
Then you have work zones for maintenance of way. So you might have three or four of those. And depending on the company you work for, those may be handled differently. You might need absolute block protection, you might need to protect switches. You might have to issue Form Ds or track authorities. I mean, all of these different things going on. Then you have people that get impatient and don’t want to wait for the three-mile long train, so they charge through the crossing and break the gate off. Well, now that’s another problem. So then I get a call from the police that I have to facilitate protecting that crossing and running trains at 15 miles an hour because the lights will stay on indefinitely. If the gate can’t go back up, the lights will just flash continuously. So we slow the train down because people come up, see the lights are flashing, not look for a train, pull out in front of it and get hit.
And I don’t need that. I’ve had enough fatalities in my career.
And I have to send a maintainer. I have to slow the trains down. And now you look at that and you say, okay, well, here comes a train that’s 15,000 feet long. I was going to put him in the siding, but there’s just one problem. He doesn’t fit by two railroad car lengths. And 30 minutes behind him is Amtrak. Now I get a broken gate. Amtrak’s still doing almost 80. He’s going to be on that guy’s rear end in a couple of minutes. I mean, literally, you’re literally going to look away and look back and boom, there he is going to be. I mean, that’s a little exaggeration, but that’s what it feels like. And that’s in addition to your rail grinders, your camping, your tying surface gangs, your rail gangs, your bridging building guys, your CNS guys that have to do their switch testing and their crossing tests.
And then you have trespassers out there messing around. We were just talking earlier, I’ve had two fatalities and a partial amputation in the last two and a half months involving trespassers. And for me, it’s a lot of paperwork. It’s a headache. It stops my trains and makes me a lot of mess to deal with. But like I said just a minute ago, I’ve had so many fatalities in my career, I’ve lost count, and I just removed myself from it. It’s just another phone call, another headache, another problem to deal with. And that might sound awful, but you have to realize trauma doctors and nurses have to do the same thing. They see horrible stuff every day. And if they let it get to them personally, they wouldn’t be effective at their jobs anymore. And nobody wants a trained dispatcher that’s not effective.

Maximillian Alvarez: Oh, and again, I was joking with you before we started recording that it’s like whether I’m talking to you or the longshore guys in the Port of Tacoma or guys on oil rigs in the Gulf, the amount of things you have to juggle in your head at once and maintain your focus and decision-making kind of capacity without getting paralyzed by the stakes of everything that you’re managing is wild to me. Because the second I start thinking about it, I start breaking out into a cold sweat because a rube like me who’s trying to envision the job that you do, I start by thinking like, okay, yeah, imagine a map where you got the trains moving at certain speeds. This one’s got to stop here so that one can go. But then the reality starts filling in of a 400 square mile area, multiple lines, trains that are now three miles long, moving a lot slower than they used to, breaking down, screwing up the flow of everything, not just on the freight system, but on the passenger rail system that’s coming up on the same line, like you said.
And then you add the layers that you’re also talking to the maintenance of way guys who are, for listeners, those are the guys on the ground checking the track, maintaining the track, fixing the track. And then you also have the bridges. Those are their own sort of interchange kind of system that you got to navigate. Do you ever have time to take a bathroom break?

Jay: You have to take one because if you don’t, you’ll never get one. Sometimes it is so bad that I literally just, I put everything down on the desk and I get up and I walk out and take a breather. I just can’t do it. I have to clear my mind for a second and just go catch my breath, go over to the bathroom, whatever it is, wash my face off, just refreshing up a little bit and maybe grab something to eat, fill my water cup, and then it’s right back in the seat and you’re charging at it again. And a lot of the policies and stuff that are being implemented don’t make sense. And you’re seeing this all across the class ones. They’re talking about technology like Trip Optimizer and Trip Optimizer now zero to zero. That’s a General Electric/Wabtec program. And what they’re doing is they’re saying, okay, well, the engineer has to use Trip Optimizer all the time on every trip.
If it’s working, he or she has to use it.
There’s a couple parts I want to touch on here. So the rip optimizer, don’t let me forget that, Max, write that down. The Trip Optimizer underpowering trains, then putting throttle restrictions in and saying, “Okay, well, the train has three engines, but over this particular piece of territory, he’s only allowed to use one.” So we run 11 daylights out of that engine. It’s wide open, notch eight full throttle. The train’s doing 16 miles per hour on 60 mile per hour track. And then here comes the UPS train behind it. And he’s all kinds of hot because he’s got, well, UPS loads on it. And hey, guess what? You ordered your package on Monday and UPS told you it was going to be there on Thursday. Well, if that’s going to happen, the train that’s carrying the trailer, your package is in needs to be on time, doesn’t it?
So he doesn’t have time to follow that big turd of a freight train doing 16 miles an hour. And they think they’re saving fuel, but dude, they’re beating a snot out of the engine. I mean, the traction motors are. Go ahead.

Maximillian Alvarez: Just a quick parentheses on that. Because again, for lay listeners, when you hear trip optimizer, it’s like so many great slogans that don’t actually mean what you think they sound like they mean. That’s

Jay: Right.

Maximillian Alvarez: Because what is being optimized here is basically they’re like, how can we pay as little as possible with the fuel we have with the trains as long as they are going as slow as 16 miles an hour when they should be going 60? Is that a fair sort of summation of what is being optimized here? Absolutely. It’s not making the package delivery more efficient.

Jay: No, what you said is literally what it’s doing. And here’s the interesting thing. So statistics. My grandfather told me this years ago, he was actually a corporate executive for Black & Decker a long time ago. He said, “Jay, there’s a lie, a damn lie, and then there’s statistics.” I said, “Well, tell me what you mean by that.” And he’s like, “Listen, you can make a statistical output be anything you want it to be by manipulating the input.” So they’ll say they’re saving fuel, but they’ll only calculate the fuel burn on the lead unit. They don’t calculate the distributed power unit that’s a hundred cars back in the train that’s been in notch eight for the last eight hours, guzzling fuel like crazy, and the train still can’t make two-thirds of track speed on if it’s lucky. And then they’ll say, “Well, we’re saving fuel. All right, we’re saving fuel.
But okay, well, how far under track speed did you go to save that fuel?” So they’re not lying about what they’re saying. It’s truthful. It’s just missing the information that actually would tell you that it’s actual bullshit.

Maximillian Alvarez: Well, and the bullshit, and again, I’m just making sure, A, that I have this right and that listeners are following along. Because all these things like the railroads themselves are interconnected. And to put it back in the kind of understanding that we were getting from you and your fellow railroad workers from 2022, it’s that the whole TripOptimizer thing, the whole precision scheduled railroading racket is basically this system implemented from the top down into the corporate structure and strategy of the railroads to maximize profits and cut costs and maximize shareholder dividends year after year. And so that’s where you get a railroad system that maybe your average person thinks like, “Well, the whole point of the railroads is to deliver good freights, rail service, get the freight there on time, yada, yada, yada.” But what we’ve come to learn is that it’s almost like the whole point of the railroads that we though we knew is secondary to the fact that the railroads are just this money-making widget that these bloodsuckers can squeeze a lot of profit out of.
And so that’s why they don’t care about delivering things on time or more efficiently. They don’t care about higher speed rail or faster trains or anything like that. That’s why they’re piling all these cars onto these trains and getting rid of more and more of the workforce. And the trains are going slower. They’re stalling, they’re braking, they’re breaking the track. But all those sorts of costs are still worth it to them because all this other crap is generating massive profits for them, even if it’s putting all of us at risk. And I guess the last point I’ll say is that the thing that everyone got into in 2022 was what this was doing to the workers, particularly the conductors and the engineers who have to be on these trains and who have to be on call basically twenty four seven now because with these trains being so inefficient, big, breaking down, all that stuff, the workers still have to be on call and they have to be there whenever the damn train gets there and they have to stay on that train wherever it breaks down.
So do I have that sort of right, Jay, that it’s like all these things are different interlocking parts of the same kind of problem, But the TripOptimizer stuff and everything else that we’ve been talking about are basically all designed to maximize profits in the short term. And they’re not about making the freight rail system any better for anyone other than the people getting those dividend payouts.

Jay: It’s calculated vandalism. I mean, that’s what it is. Think about capital expenditures and operating expenses, capital investment. So if you have capital expenditure versus operating expense, you consider that an overworked train dispatcher, for example, can’t effectively plan to let a maintenance of way gang out, can’t effectively plan to let a real grinder out, can’t effectively plan to get thermite welding done or any of the other stuff that needs to be done to maintain the infrastructure. Because at the end of the day, I mean, yeah, you might run big trains and think you’re saving money, but tonnage is tonnage and tonnage causes damage. Now what causes even more damage is excessive in-train force. That can really wear your curves out a lot quicker. That can cause track to shift. If a train goes in emergency and all of a sudden the front end sits down and the ASN runs into it, I mean fricking boom.
And all of a sudden it shifts the track out to the side by three or four inches. You say, “Well, how did that happen?” Listen, energy’s got to go somewhere. And if you can control a train safely, you can dissipate the energy with a dynamic brake as heat. You can dissipate it with friction brakes as heat or what have you. But when the train gets too big and it gets unruly and decides it’s going to do whatever it wants to do, and you combine that with Trip Optimizer, which causes engineer skill atrophy because he or she never exercises their skills any longer, and there’s no government policy to force a railroad to make them let the engineer run 50% of his or her monthly miles to keep his or her skills sharp. What you run into is a situation where the trip optimizer is programmed to work within a given set of parameters.
So you have a group of nerds sitting in a room somewhere, usually from a foreign country, and they’re plugging away at zeros and ones, and they build a model of what they think trip optimizer should do. Here’s your territory, here’s your grade. This has been all GIS and spatial mapped, and the train should run like this. And they plug it in, and most of the time it does a decent job. But then you introduce a variable you can’t control. You introduce a train as a kicker. So as soon as you touch the air to try to stop the train, boom, it goes in emergency. Or you introduce a snowstorm or ice, which will ice up the brake shoes. And then when you go for the brakes, nothing happens for the first 12 or 15 miles because you’re busy melting ice off of the brake shoe.
Well, most of the new dispatchers have no idea what that means to a train crew. They’re not qualified like we used to be. I mean, I used to watch the weather, dude, constantly. I had the weather pulled up from my entire territory. I knew where there were thunderstorms. I knew where there was thunder snow. I knew where there was sleet. I knew if there was going to be tornado warnings or watches. I knew all that. And that was always in my head and I was thinking about that stuff. And for a locomotive engineer, if you got this train going and you think, okay, I haven’t set the air in a minute because it’s snowing outside, you might need to drag the train with the brakes on every so many miles just to keep those brakes nice and up. Because God forbid you have the dispatcher that decides, oh, hey, I’m 22 and I don’t know how to put my phone down.
And here I am in a job that requires my attention, but I need to go check Facebook. So I’m not going to line the signal up for that train on this downhill mountain grade. And here comes an engineer that he’s been qualified for six months. He hasn’t touched a throttle in six months because every single trip he has optimizer. So all of a sudden he thinks, man, this thing’s doing a decent job. I think I can trust it. And then the snowstorm comes and the unexpected approach signal comes because the dispatcher’s out playing on the phone. And he goes to take over the train, sets the air, and nothing happens. Goes for the dynamic brake, the engines start to load up, and the wheels lock up and start slipping because of the ice and snow. So you start spraying sand to try to get the wheels to spin again.
Because what you need is for the wheels to rotate to be effective for dynamic braking. So more air, nothing happens. More air, nothing happens. Unbeknownst to him at the bottom of the hill, here comes an Amtrak train with 300 people on it and they’re crossing over in front of him. And this train blows through the stop signal at 45 miles an hour and slams into the Amtrak train right in the side and kills 30 people. And the company’s going to say, well, the engineer was qualified. He was supposed to have control of his train. We tested him. He had good operating rules, exams, and we wrote him up 32 times for these minor violations. Nobody wants to talk about the degradation of the skills because he never ran the damn train. And that dude, that pisses me off. Because

Maximillian Alvarez: It’s like, again, I know I’m using very caveman style metaphors here, but just bear with me. But when you say the atrophy of engineer skills, it’s like imagine a long-haul trucker sitting behind the wheel and the trip optimizer is basically a cruise control that is driving the damn thing for him, but it’s driving it 18 miles an hour on the highway with – That sounds like

Jay: Georgia and Alabama and Mississippi.

Maximillian Alvarez: Yeah, but with 50 trucks hitched to it. And so then yeah, you’re just sitting there and you have to be watching, you have to be vigilant, but the damn autopilot is doing everything for you, not because it’s what you have been trained to do as an engineer, but because it is what the program has been trained to do so that it makes more money for the rich assholes who’ve never been in a cab like you are sitting in at that moment. And then the worst part is that, like you’re saying, that if you’re sitting there and then something goes wrong and you have these sort of cascading failures, the finger’s all going to be pointed at the person sitting in that seat.

Jay: Yeah, 100%. And at the end of the day, and this is kind of sad, but I think we need to be honest about this. When a person is involved, we all want blood. It seems to be human nature. If a computer does it, nobody seems to care. I mean, you might get mad, then stomp around and snort and carry on, steam, come out your dose, whatever else. But nobody really does anything. But if a person screws up, man, you just want to destroy their life for some reason. You want to go after that person and we all have that in us. And even if we want to deny it, we know it’s true, which it’s a sad thing. And this is kind of where you have to really keep this stuff in perspective. You have to remember, until you know the whole story, and I’m guilty of this myself, it’s easy to draw a conclusion.
It’s easy to judge, it’s easy to devalue something or whatever. But if you don’t know everything that happened behind it, boy, you feel like a real asshole when you finally figure it out. I wanted to make a point earlier and I forgot, I said about capital expenditures and operating expenses. And I said about this being a capital intensive business, fuel expenses, things like that. So you can hide that under an operating expense. And let me just make this point quick because this is good stuff.
And to Wall Street, that’s great. Operating expenses, diesel costs, cost of rail, whatever the case may be, or not cost of rail rather, cost of labor. And then you have capital investment. Now, this is where you’re going to buy your rail, you’re going to have these huge capital plans that they spend every year. We’re going to replace 13 bridges. We’re going to do X number of hundred miles of rail, ballast ties, blah, blah, blah, blah. So to anybody investing in a company that doesn’t really understand how it operates, and I’m an investor too, but I don’t personally want to see record profit continually because I know it’s not possible. It’s a damn bubble that you’re sitting on, and sooner later that damn thing’s going to pop and you’re pew, down you go. So you better know how to move your money quick. I’d rather see a steady earnings report with a little bit of growth and a little bit of loss here and there.
That tells me a company is healthy in my opinion. And believe me, I’m no hedge fund manager and I wouldn’t want to be. But you can tell Wall Street, oh, we’re going to buy rail, blah, blah, blah. Capital investment’s the best thing. And to somebody who doesn’t know any better, this looks like a growing company. It looks like the company’s doing great. Oh, look at all the money they’re spending on all this stuff. The company’s growing surely. Bullshit. It’s smoke and mirrors. The company’s not growing it freaking all. Dude, listen, when the war on coal started and started destroying coal miners jobs and everything else in the name of green, whatever have you, closing the power plants, all of that, the coal was the bread and butter for the railroad for decades. I mean, you made money on coal like you wouldn’t believe me. I mean, dude, it’s crazy.
Intermodal, there’s not really a lot of money in. It’s a tight market. The pricing structure is tight. You’re competing directly with trucks. And the performance, honestly, since precision scheduled railroading, I mean, look at the shift from rail back to truck. That tells you how bad the performance is. And you know who pays the price? The captive shippers, the chemical shippers, the agriculture companies have to ship trainloads of grain over to the ports to get it exported or their grain rots. That grain has to move in a couple of weeks, literally from the bread basket of America to the port to get loaded on a ship and go, or the grain’s going to be gone and the farmers are going to lose all of their revenue for the year. A loss like that would be devastating to them. And the railroad can’t provide the service. So what do they do?
They say, “Well, we’re just going to raise the rates on those people.” And then you hear about the merger that’s being proposed right now between Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern. And it’s being met with some serious resistance by shippers. Why? Because of what I just said. They know what’s going to happen. Honestly, the way I see it from the class one perspective right now is a house of carts. They’ve gotten themselves to a point where there’s nothing else left to continue cutting, and the truth is going to come out. And when it does, the stock price is going to tank. The people that should have gotten rich are going to lose hundreds of millions of dollars, and they don’t want that to happen. They want to get their golden parachute and jump out of the plane and let you on the damn thing. All the engines are shut off because nobody put fuel in it.
I hate to say it, but that’s the truth.

Maximillian Alvarez: Well, as we turn the final corner here, let’s talk about that. I don’t want to beat people over the head with the doom and gloom, and we’re not saying that this is the only way it has to be. We’re having this conversation so that we can do something to avoid the disastrous horizon that we’re careening towards right now. But I think it’s important that we sort of look clear-eyed at what we are heading towards. And I wanted to ask, Jade, if you could just impress upon folks the stakes of what we’re talking about. Because some people may be interested in this for different reasons. I mean, you were mentioning the coal and the environmentalists who had their message about the destructive nature of coal. And I think a lot about that because I’ve interviewed these union coal miners. We’ve reported on deep red striking coal miners in Alabama, but I’ve also interviewed coal mining families in West Virginia where the coal is extracted that ends up at the port here in Baltimore.
And I’ve talked to the working class people here in Baltimore who are dying because of all the coal dust coming off those uncovered CSX rail cars for generations. So I don’t think it’s just the environmentalists did this or that. I think, again, the corporations fucked everybody. And working people across the board from the inside the coal mines to the port side communities here in Baltimore are left with the toxic remains or the black lung. But that’s not to say that we always got things right in the past. I think we didn’t. The whole point is to sort of learn, okay, pitting environmentalism and labor against each other was always a stupid idea. In fact, the UAW was one of the driving forces for the environmentalist movement in the first Earth Day because the Cuyahoga River kept catching on fire. And Walter Ruther was like, “What good is a union contract and a vacation if you take your family to a lake that’s poisonous?” I mean, the divide and conquer from the top, it’s been pushed on us for so long.
And now we’re in a state where it’s just like life is getting harder. Everything’s getting scarier. I think society, the things that made us feel like neighbors to each other has been eroding and we fear each other. We don’t know each other. We feel alienated, we feel forgotten, we feel beaten down. And the thing is we’re right. We are. That’s the kind of common feeling that I hear from folks across industries, across states, across ethnicities, across the political spectrum. Everyone feels that way. And yet the people who don’t feel that way are the ones becoming trillionaires, the ones raking in these record profits because they have massive shares in the railroad companies or the people raking in money from government contracts to plop AI data centers in rural red counties or blue cities here in Baltimore. It’s kind of an all-out attack. And so it can be hard to wrap your head around all of this and see the monstrous future that we’re heading towards.
So I wanted to ask you, Brother Jay, because the last time we talked, I’m sorry I’m talking so much, but it’s been so long. And whenever you and I talk, we have such a great back and forth and I wish we could talk for hours more, but this just reminded me of the fact that the last time we talked was six months before East Palestine. And you were warning me and anyone who would listen that something like that, you didn’t know it was going to be vinyl chloride. But a lot of what you described ended up basically being what happened in East Palestine. A lot of those conditions you talked about, a lot of the fallout. And so here we are six years later. And I hope folks heed your warning more now than we did then. But if we don’t address these issues, what are we in store for on the freight rail system?
And why should people care about that even if they don’t know anything about the freight railroads? Because this is impacting passenger rail, the economy, everything. People do need to care about that, but I wanted to give you the final words about why they should.

Jay: I mean, honestly, Max, well, there’s a lot to unpack there, which we don’t have time to unpack all of it. But if I had to think about what people could do now to try to address these things, I would say your best course of action, and as much as nobody wants to hear politics, would be to get politically active. And when I say that, that doesn’t mean go out and terrorize people. It doesn’t mean burn things down. It doesn’t mean any of that. It means educate yourself. Who are these people that are running for office? What do they believe? Do they share the values that you share? Just because somebody has a college degree doesn’t mean they’re qualified to be a politician.
Oftentimes, I find that the people that have the most sense are the people that grew up, they had a hard life. They know what it is to work for a dollar. They know what it is to have to pay for things, and they know what it is to want something and not be able to afford it. And in some cases, they know what it is to need something and not be able to afford it. And honestly, a lot of the policy shifts need to take place to reign in on these things are going to happen at the polls. That’s where they’re going to start. They’re going to start your city councils and you could run. I mean, just because somebody thinks they can’t do it, why can’t you do it? Now, I will tell you, the political system is heavily stacked so that particular people, either the left or the right, you have to have the right people backing you with a lot of money if you’re going to go anywhere.
And that’s because we left it go as long as we did without addressing it. And I kind of think it’s almost like a cancer. You want to catch cancer early if you’ve got a skin cancer or something. You catch it early, usually no problem. They cut it off, done. Dude, let that shit go and you may as well go buy a box because that’s where you’re going to be. And I feel like this is the same thing. It’s this corporate greed has been let go for too long. It’s been unchecked. It’s been left to fester. It’s a malignancy in our society. It’s not just the railroad, it’s the airlines, it’s every freakingwhere. And what happened to America building our own things? I mean, my God, dude, are you kidding me? Look at that steam engine. It just ran across the country. What a marvel. That thing is just the big boy, right?
Wow. We built that here in America. We built that in the 1940s going into the World War II. I mean, men literally grabbed wrenches the size of a daggone computer monitor and were cranking on nuts and bolts that you hold it the size of your hand to build these machines. We did that here. And now because of what we’re dealing with, everything’s been outsourced. The skills that we once had are gone. Nobody knows how to build a bridge anymore like the Pennsylvania Railroad did. The Keystone bridges. They literally had that keystone. They held them together. Nobody knows how to do that anymore. It’s lost. It’s gone. All of the skills that we used to have in the country to.
I mean, I don’t even. Dude, it’s hard to even. I can’t even process it. My mind’s going a thousand miles an hour right now thinking of what we’ve lost because we’ve not been good stewards of what we were given. Artificial intelligence. What is the first word in artificial intelligence? Artificial in all capital letters. Come on, hello. Wake up. Self-driving cars, all well and good. Have I used the technology? Yes. Do I trust it? Absolutely not. I watch that shit like a hawk. And if it does something I don’t like, man, I am on it. But we’ve seen people posted videos online sleeping in their Teslas and running into tractor trailers and hitting pedestrians and whatever else. I mean, it’s out there. It’s not like this hasn’t been reported before. But that ultimately ties back to skill atrophy once again. You trust the computer because it does just good enough, just often enough that you think you can.
And boy, that’s a dangerous place to be, dude. That’s a dangerous place to be. And it’s happening everywhere. Honestly, if the FAA would allow it, the airlines would fly the damn plane with one engine on and the other one shut down because they could save fuel. And I’m here quoting that. Oh, it’d save. Look how much money we’d save. Oh my gosh. But they wouldn’t consider the fact, not that they wouldn’t consider it, they wouldn’t give a fuck. If the left engine’s the one that’s running and the right engine’s shut down, the plane’s trying to turn right the whole time. So you have the rudders or whatever those things are called, ailerons, whatever, facing the opposite direction to counter the force from the engine just to keep the plane straight. Well, that would cause fatigue and then the damn thing would snap off and down you go.
And then everybody would say, “Oh, what happened?” Well, corporate greed happened. “Look at Boeing, dude. Are you kidding? How did Boeing get away with what they got away with? They killed hundreds of people. They lied about it. They found the emails that they were deceiving the government. What happened? Nothing. Not a single executive went to jail and they knew their names. What does that tell you? That’s pretty disgusting. And honestly, I know that some people don’t believe in faith, some people don’t believe in that kind of stuff. But for me, I look at it and I say, if men did what men were supposed to do and led the way they were supposed to lead, got out there, got involved in their school board meetings, got involved in their local governmen