Blog: 2016

This year’s ASLRRA regional meetings were a little bit different in content than in years past. With the advent of the Short Line Safety Institute (SLSI), it was decided that the first morning of the meetings would be dedicated to showcasing what the SLSI would be looking at and for when they were doing a site evaluation.

For those of you who remember the Tom Wolfe book and movie The Right Stuff, their catch phrase for describing what happens when funding is short for the space program: “No bucks, no Buck Rogers.” For railroads, it isn’t that different. Yes, we are businesses, and yes, we do try to make a profit, but, we have far different infrastructure costs than any other form of transportation. This is because we must pay for our own right of way and the infrastructure that goes with it. How do we do this?

Today we are going to start with a bit of an introduction. This person is a 48-year-old father of two who lives in Morris County, N.J., with his wife and family. He grew up in Maplewood, a New Jersey suburb, and graduated from Columbia High School in 1986. He works for a railroad, and has had a career that has lasted over 20 years in the industry.Right now many of you are saying, “Wait a second Friedland, that sounds a lot like you.” Well, it does. However, while it is almost a duplicate copy of my career, it is not a description of me.

Who here remembers the Ferrari Testarossa? I’m talking about the one from the late 1980’s early 1990’s, the one that Don Johnson drove on Miami Vice and was a car that many of us of a certain age only dreamed of driving. The Testarossa was considered a super car, and for its time was a rocket ship with a 0-60 time of 5.2 seconds and a price tag approaching $200,000 (and it looked pretty cool too).

It is no secret that I write a lot about the American Short Line and Regional Railroad Association on these pages. It is an organization that I believe in, and one that provides services and representation to our industry that would otherwise be too expensive or impossible to find by a small company.

Anyone who has flown on an airline in the last couple of years has had to deal with the reality of charges for things that were previously included in the fare you paid (I’m sorry, but the reality of life is that there are really no free things included with something you have paid for, you just haven’t paid for them directly).

Every once in a while, my mother will call me at work. Most of the time it is to ask about something that is going on with the family, or she might have a question about something in general. We will get through whatever she called about, and she will ask me if everything is ok, because I sound distracted. 99% of the time, she has called while I am in the middle of something else, and because I don’t want to be rude or get into a game of phone tag with her, I take the call.

Can’t We All Just Get Along?If you were expecting that, with the title above, I am going to write about police involved shootings and police being killed, sorry, I’m going to leave that for those who think they have an opinion.

It is well-known that once you hit December 15^thon the calendar, you might as well wait until the new year to get something of any substance done in business. The fact is, between shopping, holiday parties, shutdowns, vacations, and the holidays themselves, the business year ends then and doesn’t restart until the first week of January.

A number of years ago we were putting together the opening video for the general session at the ASLRRA Connections, and after doing the typical pictures of locomotives videos for the open in previous years, we decided that this year we wanted something different. We asked for pictures of people. And we got people pictures. Lots of them, and in the end we created a video that in a little over two minutes showed the faces of our industry, the people who made the freight move.

Search form

Blog: 2016

Pages