Freedom's Mortar

A Guest Editorial by John Sipple

America is about freedom. While the very notion of freedom is a great ideal, the actual application of it is economic. Free trade and free enterprise, these are not terms that mean someone trades something for nothing or sells it for free, it means that the trader or entrepreneur is free to choose a line of business and the terms by which it is run. Thus, America’s freedom is rooted in economics.

The mortar which holds together the wall of freedom is transportation. You can have enterprise without cash (we call it bartering) but somehow, some way, goods and services have to get from the seller to the buyer. It is a concept so fundamental that most people don’t even think about it. But in the face of a new attack on our nation, we must go back to the fundamentals of what we enjoy, what we must defend.

It is not coincidental that the main target for the attacks on 9/11/2001 was the World Trade Center. The war being fought by terrorists is as much against our economic system as anything else. And it is not coincidental that a transportation tool was used to destroy the place whose middle name was “Trade.” There is a bitter irony about it all: transportation used to destroy trade.

On 10/25/2001, MRN publisher Mike Lindsay and I took a ride in the cab of a Central Oregon & Pacific Railroad (CORP) diesel locomotive, enjoying the fall foliage from Medford to Glendale, Oregon and back. Five 2,000 hp GP38 locomotives pulled 44 cars weighing a total of 2,660 tons a one-way distance of 64 miles. Railroading in Southern Oregon is arduous business, with an abundance of mountains, tough grades, tunnels, and difficult geology, yet CORP runs trains both ways on a daily basis. The round trip journey takes some nine hours, and we both came away dirty but happy.

Behind us both ways were centerbeam flat cars loaded with lumber products, bunk flats loaded with logs, tank cars filled with methanol, boxcars of general merchandise, and hoppers of rock and cement. It was transportation used to create trade. CORP is one of more than 500 short line railways in North America, sharing the transport task with regional and Class 1 railroads, truck lines, ship lines, and air lines.

I will admit that I am fascinated by transportation in all its forms. However, the granddaddy of American transport is the railroad. Trains always have been and still remain the ton-mile champs, and that inspires me. Like most model railroaders, I not only model trains, I chase them, read about them, watch videos of them, and ride them when I get the chance.

As I rode through the verdant evergreen forests with splashes of changing broadleaf colors mixed in, I could smell autumn in the air as the breeze blew past my open window. A single track is never far from nature on either side, and we saw deer by the track. Horses in pastures raced around as we rumbled past. People gave friendly waves from backyards and cars at crossings. I thought about railroaders at work all over America at the same time, and a new thought came to me. I don’t think the terrorists understand what they are trying to destroy or the utter futility of their quest. All of America is the World Trade Center, and our trade goes on exactly because we can still move goods from place to place. The forces of hate may see their doom in our military, but their defeat will come from the strength of our massive transportation systems — the trains, trucks, ships, barges, planes, and pipelines of the United States of America.


John Sipple
Contributing Editor