So, it does look like Enterprise service made a lot of sense. People could see a show, or go out on an evening in Toronto, and leave for Montreal late – getting in in time for work the next day. That’s a valuable service. The 2 hour layover in Kingston makes it sensible.

How to get it back up? Three things.

Price – it has to be affordable. In terms of overnight Toronto-Montreal travel, the bus oppertunity cost is very low – megabus trips start (and actually do start) at 2$. So, basically every dollar above free has to reflect how much better a travel experience Via is than the bus – since people can already effectively travel for free if they are willing to have a shitty experience. What does this mean? No coach. Or, maybe, Coach cars from overnight trains like the Canadian that have leg rests No day trip coachs. Period.

Scalability – it has to be able to run with very few people, or very many. I realize RDC cars are inappropriate, but you need some kind of way of moving just 2 or 3 carriages that isn’t a full 200 ton locomotive – or the weight to passenger ratio is just crap. Perhaps more important than the fuel costs are the staffing costs. Limit the amount of staff required to a minimum. I don’t know how to do this – but its essential to be able to keep a service operable even when its popularity is in a drought. The fact the service exists is the best advertising the service can have. Maybe the Turbo was onto something with Engines that also had passenger space.

Variety – don’t just have Montreal to Toronto service. Have overnight service on the entire Corridor. Leave Windsor at 5pm, connect with sleepers from Sarnia at London at 7:30, pass through Toronto picking up more sleepers and coach passengers at midnight. Drop off sleepers and coach passengers in Montreal at 5:30am, and be in Quebec city in time for work at 8:30am. I think that schedule is do-able, roughly.

The Canadian and Super Continental use to swap sleepers in Winnipeg so that travelers from Montreal could head onto destinations along the CP line, or from Toronto to the CN line, without having to change trains. That’s the kind of logic that needs to be used to get overnight sleeper service going in Canada – lots of middle of the night car shunting meaning few trains serving lots of destinations.

How was that marketed as an overnight run? What was the schedule? Did it just go very slowly?

What would it take to get that service started again? Simply money, or a change in attitude?

I would put it online now, but I need to have material automatically publishing while I am away at the family reunion in Vermont.

which means “yes”, if by “living our lives” means mindlessly going along with the endless stream of manufactured crap, whose violence is concealed behind shiny packaging and sale pricing.

Mindfulness of “things” does not mean “being concerned with things” in the sense of “desiring to have more and more things”. Desiring things is not yet mindfulness.

Being mindful of things means becoming aware of their qualities which are concealed by the shining song of “culture”. It requires us to re-evaluate what we surround ourselves with, not for the sake of acquiring more objects, but for the sake of being sensitive to the violence done to us by the acquisition and consumption of “cultural artifacts”. It means being-aware of what’s going on.

The particular ways in which this would change one’s behavior can’t be determined in advance.

An executable contract is base on some form of equality and can be expressed as a mathematically as an equation. If gasoline cost $2.50 a gallon and you wish to buy 10 gallons, you pay the attendant $25.00 and he pumps 10 gallons: 10 gallons of gasoline = $25.00.

In the case of fractional reserve lending there is a fundamental mathematical inequality revealing an inherent flaw in the system: an impossible contract. Since all of the Nation’s money, with the exception of coins comprising just 0.08% of the money supply, is created as the principal of loans that must be repaid with interest, and repaying the principal would require the entire amount of money created, leaving no money to pay the required interest, the contract is impossible to fulfill when seen as a whole.

The appearance of fiscal stability is created by lending institutions continually creating new and large loans, using the newly created money to service old loans while expanding the debt base and increasing bank profits. This is a pattern often seen in investment schemes, and has been given the name of a notorious practitioner: it is a Ponzi scheme.

Good post. Interesting extension of the argument at the end there about suicide. An extension in the other direction is Al Gore, or someone like him. Arguably he has a large impact in terms of climate change/alt energy lobbying etc, but does he do enough to offset his constant jetsetting and 10 house lifestyle?

If you could do the cost benefit … Read Moremath and draw two lines, one for the impact of your personal actions, and another for the effect your actions have on others, where would your net effect switch signs from positive to negative? Along a similar line, could you have someone who was so terrible at consumption that their life could inspire others to not be like them enough to offset their own life of materialism and wastage?

Just a thought experiment, and a stupid one at that. I’ve been drinking.