Word: freight
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Sensing an untold story, Sidey hit the rails to interview people at all levels of the freight industry. He rode a Conrail train up the west side of the Hudson River Valley, getting an engineer's-eye view of spectacular scenery; half a continent away, he observed the switchings, couplings and uncouplings at a vast freight yard in North Platte, Nebraska. These experiences called up memories of his Iowa childhood and his long romance with railroads: "I remember as a four-year-old hearing the train whistle on a winter morning and pressing my nose against an icy windowpane...
...assignment also brought some unexpected drama when, near the end of Sidey's reporting tour, floods overwhelmed the upper Mississippi valley. Flying over the inundated areas, Sidey looked down on the Midwest of his youth utterly changed. Taking a break from freight, he gave us vivid reporting from the centers of devastation...
...Newark, New Jersey, and up the west side of the Hudson River, three locomotives lug 63 flatbed freight cars -- almost a mile of Conrail train for United Parcel and the U.S. Postal Service, due in California in 72 hours. Engineer Jim Metzger, 42, flicks his eyes like beacons from digital screens inside his cab to the roadbed and back -- right hand on the throttle controlling 11,400 horses, left hand on the three-tone whistle, two longs, a short and a long at every crossing. Past suburban backyards and friendly waves, through the West Point tunnel, rolling from 35 m.p.h...
...given 24 hours, there are 20,000 freight trains moving somewhere in this nation, growling over the plains, clanging through urban switches and laboring up mountain passes, carrying 37% of the stuff the country produces and consumes. Their long tails, sometimes stretching two miles behind, are mostly hidden in the swells and crevices of the land. Their mournful calls are filtered to whispers inside the hermetic minivans and campers off on the highways -- out of sight, out of sound and largely out of the national mind...
...great freight routes, which bear 90% of the business of the 535 surviving railroads, are all profitable these days. They make up a $27.5 billion industry that nets $1.95 billion and can easily absorb the $200 million damage from the Midwest flood that inundated 500 miles of track and caused 1,000 trains to be rerouted. Emerging from a century and a half of wild venture, corruption and the suffocating hand of government, they are a gathering economic force, destined to get stronger in a transport picture dotted with troubled ships, planes and trucks...