Letter to the Editor
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By Don D. Tague and a reporting daughter
September 14, 2020
The Santa Fe Railroad is busy. Very busy. What is going on?
Two national news articles of Sept. 11 and Sept. 13 (cited below) say that the Santa Fe Railroad is not just troubled taking cargo from west to east but now cargo is being refused AT THE WEST COAST (not just delayed) by Burlington Northern Santa Fe (BNSF) and United Pacific (UP) at western ports. What is up?
Don D. Tague told a daughter that Trump and China are working together, not to get ordered items from China to the interior of the United States, but rather to get grain from US grain bins to China in order to feed those starving people (starving as a result of flooding in China). Tague says China is shipping “junk” and as much of it as possible in order to keep the trains running back westward with our grain to China.
Tague, a man born 95 years ago with an address of Gorin, Missouri, is certainly not your ordinary news pundit but he has a relationship to the Santa Fe Railroad, interrupted only by a Patton’s Third Army soldier “all expenses paid” trip to Europe, then another “all expenses paid” Korean trip to the Chosin Reservoir and back. Is Tague right?
Tague tells his idea about what is happening with today’s railroad traffic based on his life never far those Gorin railroad tracks, the tracks he traversed back and forth to go to school, and the tracks he lived near at mile 278 to raise a family. One of his daughters is telling this report with facts asserted by Tague in addition to Tague’s opinions.
One fact according to Tague: former Santa Fe cars previously used to transport sands from Minnesota (or the northern states) to Texas for fracking are no longer, according to Tague, going north-south, but rather east-west, carrying cargo instead of sand. According to Tague, these types of transport cars have been added only recently and have not been used for a long time.
Another fact according to Tague: more trains are running overall.
Another fact according to Tague: each and every weekend, Tague says, a train is pulled to the side in Gorin, headed east and this is important because the side-rail lines in Gorin have not been used for a while. Note: the daughter narrator of this editorial remembers reading about numerous cars being pulled to the side-rail lines in Gorin during economic upheavals of the past (according to the old Memphis Democrats, formerly published under another name). Perhaps the important information is not – in this case – any economic upheaval, rather the knowledge that Gorin has been equipped with side tracks sufficient to hold such a train?
Whether or not Tague is correct, he is an observant man, who was called upon to trek from France, through Germany, and finally to Austria, toting a Browning Automatic Rifle (a B.A.R. man) under the guidance of a General by the name of Patton, a man who could be counted on to see objects better at night than anybody else – so he was called on to see things at night (like an old-fashioned night-vision goggle). Ask Tague about him seeing items loaded off of railroad cars in Germany, items he could describe but no one else could see.
Railroads, thusly, have been integral to the continual life of Don Tague, and with his intuition and insight, Tague may indeed be correct in what is going on with the present upsurge in rail traffic on the Santa Fe.
The two articles of reference above are:
https://www. wsj.com/articles/ todays-logistics-report-freight-networks-overfilling-financing-for-suppliers-waiting-for-delivery-11599835354
https://www. zerohedge.com/ markets/ive-never-seen-anything-shippers-using-west-coast-ports-cant-book-rail-bnsf-and-union
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