Isn't Warren Buffett the new Jim Taggart? I know he is benefiting from his buddy the prez not approving the Keystone pipeline so the oil has to go by rail.

I'm sure the government will come to the rescue just like in AS. How'd that work out? [Sarcasm]

It's time for Ellis Wyatt to demand the upgrading of his rail capacity and for Dagny Taggart to build The John Galt Line. Seriously, this news item does read like it came out of the first few hundred pages of AS.

So wait a minute. If one of the primary reasons for shortage is the transportation of oil, wouldn't the Keystone pipeline help to alleviate this and allow the rail lines to get back to hauling these other commodities?

I wonder how the soybean harvest is going....

Do you remember the horrendous cost of propane last winter? That was because there was no rail capacity to deliver it in tank cars and it was being trucked from Texas to the northern plains states. While driving through the corn belt two weeks ago I heard a radio farm report about MN farmers losing hundreds of $millions because there was no rail capacity to ship their crops to market. I boat on the upper Mississippi River and the rails on both sides of the river are choked with oil trains and with frac sand trains. The sand needs to move by rail but the oil is far better moved by pipeline. Why are no new rail routes being added? Because no matter which way the route is planned there are small governments and small people who use lawyers and judges and endangered species and environmental regulations and eye pollution and mob rule to block any form of national improvement.

Its interesting how a lot of people that have heard or read a little about AS tend to dismiss it because of the technology base.

They dismiss it because Taggart Transcontinental is such a central focus of the story.

Those same people do not realize just how much cargo moves around by rail. On land rail is the most efficient way to move lots of mass and cubage around.

One of the ways AS remains so relevant today.

Of all the headlines which evoke a sense of AS, this one takes the cake hands down. The content, structure, and even the tone could be copied right from it.

The Minnesota harvest debacle.

Time to build the John Galt Line.

Is that the Twilight Zone music I hear in the background? You might sub-title Atlas Shrugged, Back to the Future. The book is five or six hundred pages, takes some hours to read, but real time moves more slowly. However, the ball is rolling downhill and gathering speed.

I just read in the local grand junction paper that people in towns around grand junction at this moment have no source for coal since the local coal company has been closed since December 2013. thank you 0

come to think of it, replace the John Galt line with the Keystone pipeline and we get even closer to the story. Except in this version the John Galt line does not apparently get built.

So AS isn't fiction, after all.

So build the XLPipeline. Problem solved.

Day-ja view all over again.

The article is really evocative of AS, though the article says the strain is because the yield is almost double last year (which is not exactly the fault of government). What I would be very interested to know is if there currently is a regulator price cap on rail rates. I would expect any caps to cause shortages during these peaks in demand.
Does anybody know if a price cap is in effect?

Let's not get too carried away - not the same situation as in AS.