Thursday, December 16, 2004, 4:05pm
Thursday, December 16, 2004, 4:05pm
We drift this afternoon atop a flattened wheel into the otherwise smooth sailing of the Back Bay Tunnel. Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, creak, creak, thump. At Back Bay Station the rest of the outbound crowd shuffles up the stairs into the cabins of this 4:10 Worcester Express train – gray hair, and brown hair, and blond hair, and hats of all colors, and no hair at all. Some find seats. Others stand for the trip to West Natick. Underway again. Away to the west; Away to whatever fate awaits us – we move with added speed and added weight, away from the sound of the tapping wheel as well.
Twilight bleeds slowly into the truer night beyond the western Back Bay tunnel mouth as we lose ground to a sun racing away from us over the western horizon. Even a passenger jet at this latitude would have a hard time keeping up with that sun. Aboard a creaking train, it is a ludicrous notion to be chasing the sun at all.
Buildings along the north side of the Pike loom with their toes against the highway guardrails. Every inch of land seems used and re-used and used again – the truest definition of a city if ever there was! Beyond this, containers have arrived since morning at the freight yards, likely heading to or from some huge ocean-going cargo ship, though the net effect at the yards for the moment is to block my view of the fading twilight. A moment later we are leaving the valley of shadows without incident.
Shipping containers are like scaled up Lego-blocks, stacked using the concept of a standardized form factor. As a result, there is far less need for specialized dock handling and armies of longshoremen. Like the eyelets welded atop these passenger cars, the containers can be hoisted from above, and with alignment pins these are stacked one atop the next like giant brick fortresses aboard specialized freighters traveling the world to where the stacking process is run in reverse and the blocks piled back onto rail cars and lorries to complete their sorties.
The hard part in design is very often not so much the inventing itself as it is the resistance of those committed to older ideas hanging on to fight their looming obsolescence – for example, in the face of the containerization revolution old-style longshoremen struggling to keep their old-style jobs.
Often old ideas seem so sensible and practical, that even when a much better idea comes along, the old ways improve just enough to hang on a little longer – if not indefinitely. New ideas need a revenue stream and can be defeated as long as time can be bought and the cost of transition exponentially increased.
Old freighters are refitted to match the new containerized geometries. Half-height scrap-carrying rails cars are modified in the same way. Neither are terribly efficient, yet are cheaper in the short run to buying all-new vehicles and ships.
Sometimes those pushing back win the long term battle with a terrific idea of their own, and perhaps most oddly of all are those ‘bad’ new ideas rescued by happenstance. When first conceived as an improved horse-drawn carriage roadway, the iron railroads, for example, were doomed to utter failure by a cost structure that could never support a slight improvement over the dirt roadways of the day. Yet with the timely invention of the steam engine the railroads grew a century later into highly efficient mile-long freight trains weighing 10,000 tons pulled by several 3,000 horsepower locomotives.
Almost always, if a weak idea can be improved and made to work reasonable well, that is typically the first choice – even if not the quite the best choice (or far from it). And often to instigate a ‘true’ technological revolution requires the passing of an entire generation of capitalists and thinkers, and sometimes even that isn’t enough, because sometimes there a powerful business model is so entrenched that it simply will never yield until running the entirety of its natural course – such as the worldwide mining of petroleum destined for consumption like Nineteenth Century whale oil until every last recoverable molecule has been harpooned from the Earth.
At the moment I am droopy with fatigue. Unusually, sleep came easily last night and it lasted from before 11:00pm until 7:00 the next day. Yet this hardly reinstates the hours lost earlier in the week. Every year Christmas is hard and each year I seem to find a new way to escape – much of which involves staying up late until I simply cannot stay awake another minute. So rather than typing more drivel. I’ll sign off until tomorrow morning.
