Constantinople
Banned
Could you provide either a link to the appropriate page, or a quick run down of the state of healthcare and healthcare reform in the US? Are there any single payer state systems?
The Land of Milk and Honey: An American TL
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I figure it's located on the part of the site north of I-70, in what is called the Northfield Section IOTL. That's a good spot. And it allows the New Urbanist Community of Stapleton to be built south of I-70, like OTL.
It's Manchester Square, which may become an intermodal hub or rental car facility 10-20 years from now IOTL. Or, an automobile plant or high-tech plant like TTL.
Think we're at single payer already ITTL. Kennedy passed health care reform in 1985 that included a Medicare Buy-In.
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Several states (California, Michigan, New Jersey, Wisconsin, Washington, Oregon, Maryland, Nevada, Florida, DC, Hawaii, New Mexico and Illinois) have single-payer systems. The rules with regards to private health care coverage were first set out by the Advancement of American Health Care Act in 1985 and tightened by Congress a couple times since then, while states also have the explicit right to enact stronger rules if they require it. Denying coverage over any pre-existing condition or lifetime cost limit is explicitly illegal (and has been since 1985), and rate raises require approval by control boards, which were set up in the federal government. (All states with Single-payer systems must also have such control boards.) An acrimonious court battle between Blue Cross Blue Shield and the state of California in the mid-1990s over insurers basing themselves in the loosest-regulated states having the right to sell across state lines was settled in favor of California's position by the SCOTUS in 1997, and a revision to the law in 2005 allowed single-payer systems to completely replace private systems if states choose to do so. As in many federal states (including Germany, Canada and Australia), health care laws are considered primarily a state responsibility. Health insurance firms are well aware the way the winds are shifting, and they have moved to cover less urgent care and more to the coverage of prescription drugs, dental coverage and other such products. Paying for such insurance in single-payer states is almost always done through payroll taxes, and in most of those states the rates for the program are set to make the programs pay their own bills. States without single-payer systems have various laws existing to limit the actions of the health insurance industry, some far stricter than others (Colorado, New York, Montana and Pennsylvania are the tightest at this, Alabama, Louisiana and Oklahoma among the weakest) but all are able to function. The industry tends to fight viciously against single-payer systems, but supporters of them point out that many of the single-payer systems have very cheap rates, and many in the industry believe that universal single-payer health insurance across the nation is an inevitability that will one day come. The better insurance industry companies, though, have begun acting both as insurers and assistants to allow their customers to get the best treatment possible.
The actual healthcare industry hasn't changed all that much in many of its tactics, but as the costs that they can charge for their products are strictly regulated (and both Congress and many states look down on profit-driven price increases), the industry has had to get smart and efficient. Until the passage of constitutional amendments about money in politics in the 2010s, one way the pharmaceutical industry tried to get around this was being cozy with regulators, but in modern times most such companies have spread out into other industries and been involved in mergers, attempting to improve their profits in those ways. Actual care companies have a different reality - the majority of privately-owned hospitals are owned by their staff, and these facilities usually do very well for both their patients and their staff. There is no restrictions on who can own hospitals, but their ability to charge customers is limited, and agreements with insurance companies, states or Medicare and Medicaid limit their ability, which in practice means that the ownership of such facilities more often than not goes to front-line workers. (This has had the additional effect of forcing pharmaceutical companies to do a better job of customer relations, something the likes of Pfizer and Merck found out the hard way.)
One provision of the 1985 law was the ability for Americans to buy into Medicare at the age of majority, with their premiums going off at the age of 65. The Medicare-for-all provision is a popular one, particularly among low-income earners in many of the states without single-payer systems, as its cost is very low for such people, though many private plans are far more comprehensive in coverage than the Medicare plan is. (Most companies, even in single-payer states, have supplemental plans that cover what the Medicare plan doesn't.) The single-payer state systems all allow one to choose between the state system or Medicare (federal law requires this). The overall result is that all Americans are covered by one system or another, and many states have purchasable coverage for visitors and coverage programs for illegal immigrants. Computer databases of such people make tracking things easier, and it has been many years now since an American citizen died from being unable to get health care for financial reasons....
Correct. And the people who work for Tesla quite like where they work. Making Teslas isn't all that similar to how other cars are made, namely because of the way the plants and the cars themselves are made.
No single-payer across the nation (yet), but everyone is covered and at reasonable rates, and the health insurance industry is only able to advance their profits through better coverage and better customer relations, which means their tactics of IOTL are long gone.
I love the recent explanation of Health Care 2.0 in the US.
Since this TL is the triumph of common sense from roughly 1970 on... the Feds (Congress and Presidents as well as SCOTUS) sent clear enough signals and made single-payer muscular enough to force the HMO's to play ball or die for either the German UHC model or Canadian UHC model to take hold.
I don't really see the US doing a full-on British syle NHS after 1950.
Truman could've made it work but Korea scuttled his political capital and will. Another debate for another thread.
What really infuriates me is that the US OTL was clearly on the path to UHC in the early 1970's- Obamacare is essentially nerfed Nixoncare rebadged and enacted by Romney, vilified by current GOP b/c..."socialism".
FWIW thank EMK throwing a tantrum nixing Nixoncare and punting it into the gutter for a couple of generations. So political idiocy is a bipartisan issue.
It just proves Churchill's qup right- "Americans always do the right thing... after doing everything else."
It wasn't the only reason things went economically and politically awry in the US since then but the biggest symptom.
Since this TL is the triumph of common sense from roughly 1970 on... the Feds (Congress and Presidents as well as SCOTUS) sent clear enough signals and made single-payer muscular enough to force the HMO's to play ball or die for either the German UHC model or Canadian UHC model to take hold.
I don't really see the US doing a full-on British syle NHS after 1950.
Truman could've made it work but Korea scuttled his political capital and will. Another debate for another thread.
What really infuriates me is that the US OTL was clearly on the path to UHC in the early 1970's- Obamacare is essentially nerfed Nixoncare rebadged and enacted by Romney, vilified by current GOP b/c..."socialism".
FWIW thank EMK throwing a tantrum nixing Nixoncare and punting it into the gutter for a couple of generations. So political idiocy is a bipartisan issue.
It just proves Churchill's qup right- "Americans always do the right thing... after doing everything else."
It wasn't the only reason things went economically and politically awry in the US since then but the biggest symptom.
Orville_third
Banned
On the health care topic, has the pharmaceutical industry had the string of major mergers that it had OTL, or are those prevented by antitrust laws or shareholder decisions? (Most people hate Pfizer for controversial marketing (which many companies do) or controversial experiments (which others don't do as much). Others have a more economic reason to hate them. Pfizer has a tendency to engulf rivals or up-and-coming companies, close plants and laboratories, sell off (profitable) non-core businesses and generally run the business in a way that does not reward the shareholders with share value.)
The mergers have been allowed in a bunch of cases, but much more active government regulations makes sure that the controversial experiments are much less common, and the FTC has nailed practically every phramaceutical company for deceptive advertising on multiple occasions, with some big fines involves - Johnson and Johnson holds the record for the largest fine by the FTC at $435 million plus $25 million in restitution, for trying to market Retin-A for treating sun-wrinkled skin, then not only lying about it to the FTC but trying to destroy the evidence of it - and most pharmaceutical industries are trying to improve their profits beyond health care products by branching out massively into consumer healthcare products, cosmetics, chemicals and the like. Pfizer's bad reputation (like Merck), resulted in them losing markets in many cases in the 1980s and 1990s, as other companies jumped in, and Pfizer and Merck's attempt at restricting competition in the marketplace by lobbying Congress in 1995 fell on its face in a very public fashion. End result was several European makers (GlaxoSmithKline, Sanofi-Aventis, Novartis) massively expanded their operations and several American players branched out into other areas.
There are no laws restricting who can buy from where and many of the tactics once done by the pharmaceutical companies are now expressly illegal, and many healthcare providers have come to prefer buying from smaller companies rather than deal with pressure tactics from the bigger ones. In modern times, American companies have come to realize the problems that pressure can cause and have backed off some, but the European companies have in some ways become worse for such sales maneuvers.
One Last Train Post, this one being about the freight-haulers, by region:
Northeast/New England/Rust Belt
Conrail
The government-owned freight railroad formed from the bones of the Pennsylvania, Milwaukee Road, Reading Lines, Boston and Maine, New Haven and several smaller railroads in 1977, Conrail spent the 1970s and early 1980s first rebuilding infrastructure and then taking advantage of 1980's Staggers Act which massively improved the regulatory environment for common carrier railroads. Conrail's creation was controversial and its spending of over $3.5 Billion in infrastructure rebuilding didn't help, but by the mid-1980s the company was a profitable company, and by 1997 it was the largest single railroad in North America by freight movements. By far the dominant player in the Northeast, Conrail's former Milwaukee Road main line from Chicago to Seattle and Tacoma is also one of the most busy freight rail routes in the world. Conrail's continued ownership by Washington is primarily because the company hasn't failed to make a profit since 1984, and it has now added far more to government coffers than it ever took away from it. In Modern times, Conrail's HQ is in Philadelphia, PA (at Conrail Plaza in the city center), and its operations run out of several facilities, most notably the company's vast shops at Bensenville, IL and Altoona, PA. Conrail's diesels are almost all blue (its executive diesels and some specialized diesels are dark green), while its electric fleet is mostly silver with blue in color and its freight cars are mostly painted in the dark Tuscan Red made famous by the Pennsylvania Railroad.
New York Central
A legend in the Northeast that managed to live through the rough times of the 1960s and 1970s by being flexible, fast and above all efficient, the line run for 25 years (January 1958 until his death in April 1983) by legendary boss Alfred Perlman is the second-largest line in the Northeast, even as it battles mighty Conrail and the big Norfolk and Western and Chessie System. New York Central's modern business focuses on the moving of freight from Chicago and St. Louis to New York, Boston, Toronto and Montreal, as well as serving the auto industries along its route and providing bulk service in the Midwest. The "Central System", as it is often called today, retains that tradition of technical and efficiency expertise, and it's 'Water Level Route' from New York to Chicago via Albany, Syracuse, Buffalo, Erie, Cleveland, Toledo and Fort Wayne is one of the most important rail lines in the whole country. Perlman's successors and their successors (including Perlman's son, Michael Perlman) run the company to this day, and NYC in modern times is held in a very high regard by the communities they serve. The NYC may take its name from New York, but it has since 1988 been based in Buffalo, NY, at an office building adjacent to the massive station they built there in the 1920s, which today is the junction point between the Midwestern System, Empire Corridor and St. Lawrence River high-speed rail systems. NYC locomotives have nearly all regained by 'lightning stripe' black, silver and dark grey paint scheme, replacing the austere black paint that most NYC locomotives began sporting in the 1960s.
Erie Lackawanna
While a small line compared to its rivals, the Erie Lackawanna also operates its own Chicago-New Jersey main line, and competition between the EL and New York Central has largely forced the EL to adapt many of the larger competitor's tactics, but having a shorter route between the two cities (even if the NYC's has lower grades) has made sure that the EL has remained a prospering railroad and was able in the 1980s to acquire several lines to allow for gaps in its system to be closed. While the NYC has invested heavily in electrification, Erie Lackawanna is a major user of high-powered diesels, including a long history of operating gas turbine locomotives and of experimentation with alternative fuels. The company and NYC may be rivals, but both are heavily influenced by competition with Conrail and with rivals in the Rust Belt states, which offer the densest railroad competition in the country. EL's biggest adavantage, however, is in its huge container operations - the company runs no less than 18 daily container trains on its Chicago-New Jersey main line, and its massive main line is primarily used for this and fast-freight traffic - and its vast terminals in Hoboken, Jersey City, Newark and Seacaucus and its equally-huge trucking and transfer operations. EL has been based in Cleveland, OH, since its formation, and remains there today. EL locomotives are easy to see by their silver-grey, yellow and dark red paint.
Chessie System
The Chessie, formed in 1973 by the merger of the Chesapeake and Ohio, Baltimore and Ohio and Western Maryland railroads, is often called the "Carmakers' Railroad", and the company's massive midwestern operations and its serving practically every auto plant in the Rust Belt and most in the Midwest, while its huge coal operations in Kentucky and West Virginia made sure profits were little problem - indeed, the moratorium on mergers posted by the Interstate Commerce Commission in 1982 killed Chessie's hopes for mergers, but the massive Chessie and its only slightly-smaller and equally-tough rival the Norfolk and Western can give Conrail and each other as good a run for each other's money as is likely possible. Chessie has since 1991 based its operations out of the B&O District in Baltimore, MD and Chessie Plaza in Detroit, MI. Their motive power and much of the company's rolling stock carries the famous "Chessie Cat" logo and is painted bright yellow, with locomotives being that yellow, with dark blue on top and brown as a contrast color.
Norfolk and Western
The railroad best known for being the last major mainline operator of steam in North America (not finally retiring steam until 1961), the N&W began life a coal-hauling bridge line between Norfolk and Cincinatti and Columbus, but the company's merging of the Nickel Plate Road, Wabash and Pittsburgh and West Virginia railroads in 1964. This massive expansion turned a small-size high-traffic coal hauler into a major bridge road, and as with Chessie System, its merger plans were scuttled by the ICC moratorium in 1982, but the company responded to this by expanding its fast-freight operations and its handsome blue-and-gold "Pocahontas Fleet" diesels, which by the 1980s had allowed it to expand its share of the growing intermodal markets. N&W, which has owned a sizable chunk of the Erie Lackawanna since 1964, remains a major partner for the other Northeastern railroad, and both lines regularly team up to serve markets and often utilize each other's motive power. N&W, appropriately, is based in Norfolk, VA. Unlike the colorful schemes and graphics of its rivals, N&W locomotives are most often the big black workhorses of the past, but the Pocahontas Fleet units, which now make up over a quarter of the systems' total power, still use the deep blue and gold paint.
Delaware and Hudson
A minnow among monsters which lives through being a part of the Alliance of smaller railroads formed by the Rock Island in 1983, The Delaware and Hudson is a small but smart railroad. Owned by its employees since 1984, the Delaware and Hudson primarily runs from the Erie Lackawanna at Scranton, PA and Binghamton, NY and Conrail at Elmira and Albany, NY, the D&H lives with Conrail to its east and south, the NYC and EL to its West and acting as a bridge line. Despite that, the D&H is a small but tough little road, lugging EL and Conrail traffic into Canada from Upstate New York and Northern Pennsylvania. Based in Albany, NY, the small company remains owned almost entirely by its employees and local businesses and institutions and has a fabulous reputation among the area it serves. D&H motive power is all of the silver and light blue color scheme first shown off on the company's Alco PA passenger units first shown off in 1967, and the D&H in modern times is perhaps the most fastidious of the image of its physical plant, and D&H units are majority of the time either spotlessly clean or close to it.
Grand Trunk Western
The American division of Canada's state-owned Canadian National Railways has all of the plusses and minuses that go with it, but its many miles of track in Indiana, Illinois, Michigan and Ohio running out from its border crossing points at Detroit and Port Huron, MI, the company's primary job is moving freight between interchanges in Chicago and CN's giant Vaughan and Dundas yards in metro Toronto as well as the massive auto industry traffic in that part of the world, a business that GTW competes with Chessie, N&W and Conrail for. The company's striking blue and red paint is in time giving way to Canadian National's red and black, but the GTW logo is still prominent, and GTW's efforts in the 1970s and 1980s at both efficiency and safety have earned the company the name "The Good Track Road" during that time period and a good relation with its operating unions and customers. GTW has been based in Downtown Detroit since 1951 and remains there today.
South / Southeast
Southern Railway
The Southern is the dominant player in the Southern United States, operating over 8,000 route miles in the Dixie states as well as some branches out to St. Louis, Washington, Cincinnati and Little Rock. A powerhouse in every sense of the word with its dense lines in the Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, Mississippi and Florida, the Southern's dark green black fleet of high-hooded locomotives and its huge, diverse fleet of cars, as well as its long history of innovation (the Southern was one of the first big railroads to fully retire steam, build modern back and running shops and the developer of positive train control and radio-controlled helper units) has given it a strong hand in the railroad markets. Long allied with Norfolk and Western and New York Central, these alliance in modern times has given it big new jobs in moving auto parts and container traffic. The Southern today is based at its offices in Alexandria, VA, just south of Washington.
Louisville and Nashville
The South's massive coal and bulk goods hauler with a bread and butter job serving the coal mines of Kentucky, Tennessee and Alabama, the L&N retains its massive operations hauling both bulk goods as well as lucrative traffic from the ports of Houston, New Orleans and Mobile to the northern regions (particularly to Chicago and to Detroit via the Chessie System), most of the time onto Conrail and Chessie operations. L&N's profitable heavy coal operations got multiple winds from first the coal boom of the 1970s and then the shifting to the use of coal for synthetic crude in the 1980s. Being one of the few railroads to always avoid insolvency, the company's nickname "The Old Reliable" is a particularly apt one, but its lack of coastal markets has left it heavily reliant on North-South traffic and its massive bulk traffic. This situation was improved when the L&N became the owner of the Central of Georgia in 1964, giving the company a Chicago-Savannah mainline after this, and the Florida East Coast connection there gives the company a route as far as Miami. Joined at the hip with Chessie and Seaboard Coast Line, the firm's many operational aspects are similar to its partner railroads. The company was born in Louisville, KY, and remains based in its famed Louisville and Nashville Building there, and the alliances with the Seaboard Coast Line and Chessie System have resulted in the three roads using similar graphics schemes, but with L&N diesels silver-blue and yellow with red accent colors.
Seaboard Coast Line
The fast line of the American South and the company that most signifies the massive companies that today dominate railroading, the Seaboard Coast Line, formed in 1967 by the merger of the Atlantic Coast Line and Seaboard Air Line, the merger between these two once-tough competitors is one of the great success stories of mergers. The Seaboard Coast Line's primary job is connecting the Northeastern systems with Southern cities, and the company's parallel main lines from Richmond, Virginia, to Miami and Tampa, Florida, are also joined by its outer mains to Atlanta, Montgomery and Birmingham. Joined at the hip to the Louisvile and Nashville and allied with Chessie System, plans for the merger of these railroads was scuttled by the 1982 merger moratorium and resulting legal demands that ultimately broke up the co-ownership of these railroads, though the three remain intertwined and they use a similar graphic scheme. The Seaboard is based in Jacksonville, FL, and operates primarily out of there and its major terminals at Waycross, GA and Hamlet, NC.
Florida East Coast
Small but tough and feisty but having a very long history of labor difficulties which ultimately left it nearly bankrupt in the 1970s, the FEC is the smallest in length of the major haulers in North America with just under 700 miles of route from Jacksonville to Orlando, Miami and Homestead, Florida, and yet despite this the port traffic at the port of Miami and the line's fast services have made sure that this tiny route is one of the most efficient small lines in the country, and perhaps ironically, has been owned by the very employees the company fought bitterly with in the 1960s and 1970s since 2007. Among the employee-pushed changes was the return of its bright orange, red and yellow painted locomotives and flashy graphics and the company's involvement in the Florida High-Speed Rail System. Based in Jacksonville, FL, the tiny road is heavily aligned with the Louisville and Nashville (despite the L&N's connections to rival Seaboard Coast Line) and the Southern Railway, the two companies feeding practically all of the company's traffic northward.
Midwest
Rock Island
The Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific is one of the four "core" systems that serve just the Midwest (joined by the Chicago and North Western, Illinois Central and Wisconsin Central), and having spent the 1960s, 1970s and early 1980s being nearly destroyed by both governmental issues and meddling by rivals (particularly Union Pacific), the Rock Island was one of the sour railroads that created the Railroad Alliance in 1983, the company has since the 1980s forcibly asserted its independence and its goals, and despite the fact that is rivalled by Union Pacific and its core rivals, the Rock Island is almost entirely dealers with the other railroads of the Alliance (today, this is Rio Grande, Western Pacific, Erie Lackawanna, Wisconsin Central and Delaware and Hudson), and the Alliance is capable of moving trains in practically all directions from its tracks and is a major piece in the transcontinental link. The Rock's traffic is not only bridge traffic and industrial goods but also moving huge amounts of grain to ports and food processors and coal and potash, much of the latter two cargoes coming off of the mineral-rich Rio Grande to the West of it. Based in Chicago, the Rock Island in modern times is one of the most profitable of any American railroad.
Chicago and Northwestern
One of the medium-sized freight haulers of the Midwest and with the longest tradition of being owned by employees (it has been since 1972), the C&NW was the first railroad to make it clear just what an employee-owned railroad could do. Far from being hard to operate or struggling to keep afloat, the C&NW's 1970s and 1980s were years of massive prosperity - but wisely, the company chose to build up a huge amount of cash and spend hundreds of millions of dollars improving the railroad's physical plant and equipment. C&NW has been joined at the hip with Union Pacific since the late 1970s, but its strength ultimately led to the Wisconsin Central (formed almost entirely from disused C&NW, Soo Line and Milwaukee Road lines) joining the Railroad Alliance led by the Rock Island, forming a potent rival to the C&NW across Iowa, Wisconsin and Minnesota. C&NW's locomotives and rolling stock all proudly display "Employee Owned" logos and insignia, and the company's Power River Basin lines, built in the late 1970s, became a bedrock of the company's success as the very good coal headed to refineries, steel mills and power stations from the Basin proved a cash cow for the company, and the company's development of fast perishable services set up patterns of operations that remain to this day. The C&NW is based in Chicago, IL, and while over half of its mileage is today abandoned, the remaining lines form a profitable network.
Illinois Central
The third of the "Core Lines" of the Midwest, the staid, conservative Illinois Central is one of the primary main lines of the Midwest, largely operating as a bridge line along with partner Kansas City Southern of traffic between Chicago and Mexico and connections with other railroads in Chicago as well as lines West from Chicago to Omaha, NB. This alliance of convenience began after the IC and KCS jointly outbid Union Pacific, Santa Fe and Southern Pacific for a vast chunk of National Railways of Mexico in 1993, with both sides selling off billions in assets to pay for upgrades and improvements to allow their lines to carry such traffic. The gamble paid off handsomely as the movements allowed IC and KCS to gain several massive concessions (mostly from Southern Pacific) to get access to the lucrative traffic out of Mexico. (IC and KCS are both trying to get the Surface Transportation Board to allow them to merge their operations.) The move and the considerable amount of south-to-Midwest traffic has allowed the IC to have a strong future, and the company enjoys this, though typically-conservative management has allowed this to only manifest itself in the company`s bank balances. The company today is based alongside its KCS allies in Kansas City, KS.
Wisconsin Central
Born as a result of Conrail and contractions by the C&NW, Conrail, Soo Line and Rock Island, the Wisconsin Central is the newest of the Class 1 railroads, born in 1985 to a management team seeking to keep the lines slated for closure alive. The company expanded rapidly after its formation, eventually buying the Algoma Central in Ontario in 1995 and an ex-BN line to Winnipeg in 1997. The system today operates lucrative freight traffic across eight states and two Canadian provinces, and has had lucrative deals with Canadian National to funnel its traffic from Winnipeg to Chicago since 2000. The Wisconsin Central became part of the Railroad Alliance in 1997, and was instrumental in the Alliance doing deals with Canadian National, Southern and Southern Pacific in order to shore up the Alliance's portion of lucrative intermodal and priority freight businesses and with the Kansas City Southern to get more of the loads coming out of Mexico. The Wisconsin Central was born and based for much of its history in Fond du Lac, but today operates out of Madison, WI.
Kansas City Southern
Perhaps more than any other railroad made relevant by involvement in Mexico, the Kansas City Southern's world changed when they, along with the Illinois Central, got the rights to operate a sizable chunk of the former National Railways of Mexico. The company's moves since then have seen the firm integrate over 800 miles of new and purchased lines to connect itself to its Mexican subsidiaries, as well as its own new line from Eagle Pass, TX, to the Mexican steel city of Monterrey. More ambitious than its Illinois Central partners, the company's operations today include the operation of the Panama Canal Railway and the Railways of Jamaica, as well as numerous Gulf shipping subsidiaries and trucking businesses. Based in Kansas City alongside its partner, they have been among the most vocal in wanting to end the merger moratorium, but concerns over problems with lack of competition have made this effort so far fruitless.
The West
Santa Fe
The Santa Fe Railway may have a greater legend than just about any other railroad, namely for the Super Chief and El Capitan passenger trains, the Harvey Houses and in modern times its flashy silver and red 'Warbonnet' paint schemes. Beyond that, though, it has been true since WWII that the company's primary main line networks, both its 'California Main Line' from Chicago to Los Angeles and its 'Mexico Main Line' from Topeka, KS to Torreon, Mexico, via southeastern Colorado, New Mexico (including its namesake city) and El Paso, are both critically important not just to the company but also to trade across the country and with Mexico. The company's operations across Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri and Illinois are full of competition, but Santa Fe in modern times largely considers the resurgent Southern Pacific as its biggest rival, as both largely parallel each other from Southern California to New Mexico, and SP's former Cotton Belt mainline also largely parallels the Santa Fe from Tucumcari, New Mexico, to Chicago (SP's good relationship with the Railroad Alliance, allowing them to use Rock Island tracks to help with this, doesn't help Santa Fe's competition), and as a result both roads have since the early 1990s engaged in multiple competitions with each other, both in terms of technical advancements and innovations but also in public, with both sides using flashy paint schemes, event and facility sponsorships, high-profile PR campaigns and TV commercials in an attempt to one-up the other. Despite their tough competition, both roads and their employees, from senior management all the way down, have immense respect for the other. The company was for many years based in Chicago, but today they are based in their namesake city, having moved there in one of their high-profile events in 2005.
Southern Pacific
The management of this company one could say is both like others and unlike others. Southern Pacific is by far America's largest employee-owned firm, with it and its subsidiaries having nearly 60,000 employees, nearly all of whom are stock holders in SP. Having been stymied by the ICC from merging with the Santa Fe in 1981, the company was sold off by the combined corporation to its employees in 1984....and began one of the most remarkable rebirths of a major American company. Over $3.2 Billion in capital investments between 1985 and 1996, involvement with the American President Lines ocean shipping company, several involvements with electronic industries (including a share in Apple Computer purchased in 1991 from $850 million that is now worth over $35 billion), telecommunications (SP's Southern Pacific Communications division became the nexus of CenturyLink Communications) and energy companies, involvement in organizing trucking co-ops and the California High Speed Rail system and high-profile PR campaigns, including a massive 70-story new San Francisco headquarters opened in 2004 and such moves as buying a Super Bowl commercial in 2000 (the year the San Francisco 49ers won the game, which also resulted in a two-page spread from SP in the San Francisco Examiner congratulating them for the victory) and numerous innovations, including the advancement of the mile-long 90-mph California produce trains for which the company is now famous and the company's very good relations with its employees. SP's business moves have made a number of its dedicated employees millionaires, a fact the company likes to boast about, as well as boasting that some of these employees continue to work for the company. Flashy paint from this company, from its black, orange and red 'Daylight' and black, silver and orange 'Black Widow' schemes, is par for the course, as its proudly advertising who is shipping on SP freight cars, a fact that many of its customers approve of. Operating in Mexico since 2007 on its line to Puerto Vallarta, and its opening of a new line from San Diego and Tijuana all the way to Cabo San Lucas in Baja California in 2013, the company also retains trackage rights on UP from Odgen, UT to Chicago on Union Pacific, though a bitter 1990s fight over their usage led SP to funnel traffic on the Rio Grande and Rock Island instead to serve Salt Lake City and Denver, and the company bought trackage rights in 1986 to serve Seattle and Tacoma via Conrail and BN lines. Southern Pacific is based in it's HQ in San Francisco across from the Transbay Transportation Terminal.
Union Pacific
One of the oldest railroads in the United States with an unbroken history dating to 1862, the Union Pacific built the first line across the United States, and in modern times it is often called 'The Big Yellow Borg' for the company's distinctive Armour Yellow paint and the company's massive expansions by way of mergers, with its original lines running from Omaha and Kansas City to Salt Lake City, then northwest to Portland and Seattle and southwest to Los Angeles. Purchases of the Colorado and Southern, Missouri Pacific, St. Louis and San Francisco and Missouri-Kansas-Texas in the 1970s caused the company's network to explode in size. But what shaped the company's future was the company's attempts to merge with the Rock Island in the 1960s and 1970s. The UP-RI merger application was legendary in its slowness, taking over a decade and producing 250,000 pages of legal documents. In the end, the merger was approved - but UP, not wanting the RI now that its finances had declined precipitously in the 1970s, first denied the merger....than pushed associates to buy the company's bonds, trying to force the company into bankruptcy and then acquire the assets it wanted. This move, exposed by a series of investigations between 1978 and 1980, ultimately resulted in the merger moratorium, and enraged Rock Island management created the Railroad Alliance as a consequence, seeking to beat UP at their own game. Their long and acrimonious battle with SP over trackage rights in the 1990s didn't help the company's public image, but UP by 1995 had given up on its moves and instead began seeking to improve their services. Able to offer a wider network than its competitors and with far less gradients than the parallel Railroad Alliance system, the UP has a major share of California-Chicago markets, but it has been slow to adapt to innovations, which causes issues for them when competing with the fast-acting Southern Pacific and Santa Fe and the customer-hungry Railroad Alliance. The company has its legal HQ in Denver but operates out of Omaha.
Rio Grande
The "Main Line Through The Rockies" is today the critical cog over the Continental Divide for the Railroad Alliance, and having been rebuilt massively in the 1930s and 1940s and since then having been a lover of innovation, the Rio Grande has since the 1960s been chasing destiny, both through moving massive quantities of bridge traffic and huge amounts of minerals, particularly coal, iron ore and potash. The company's scenery allowed it to have regular passenger service until 1983 and today several Amtrak transcontinental trains, including its flagship American President, use the Rio Grande mainline from Denver to Salt Lake City, and SP trackage rights are a lucrative source of earnings, particularly SP's fast-moving perishables trains. Rio Grande began a vast project in 1995 to electrify its Salt Lake to Denver and Pueblo main lines over Tennessee Pass and through the Moffat Tunnel, completing the job in 2002, improving the economics of the line between the lower energy cost and faster speeds the huge electrics of the line allow. The company remains, as it has always been, based in Denver, CO.
Western Pacific
The Little Guy of the original alliance but critically important nonetheless to it, the Western Pacific is the line for the Alliance between Salt Lake through Nevada and California to the docks in Oakland, San Jose and Vallejo, California. The company struggled with profitability for many years (largely owing to its neighbors), but its 1950s to 1970s resulted in a series of brilliant managers and operators, and its inclusion in the Railroad Alliance in 1983 assured its future by assuring that Rio Grande and Rock Island traffic would go via the WP, which when combined with massive dock expansions in Oakland in the 1980s gave the company more traffic than it could at first handle. They didn't take long to fix that, of course - the ex-SP line through Altamont Pass as bought to parallel their original, and most of the line was double-tracked and improved. Expansions north eventually to Eugene, Oregon (which WP began service to in 1991) and to Bakersfield, CA, and then via trackage rights on SP to Los Angeles (which began in 1994), added to the traffic base. By 2000, the Western Pacific was had nearly every inch of its operations be very busy. The bridge traffic focus no longer bothers the WP, namely because there is quite a lot of it, and the Railroad Alliance's attempts at good PR also saw the WP (as with its partners) shed austere paint. Black gave way to silver and orange for some locomotives and two-tone green with feather graphics for others. Shippers and railfans alike approve of WP's 90-mph "Racetrack" priority freight trains on its Oakland-Salt Lake City main line, and the company's pushing aggressively to remove level crossings on its line is done to allow speeds to stay high, and the company in modern times has little difficulty maintaining profitability. The company is based and runs most of its operations out of Oakland, CA.
Burlington Northern
By route mileage, Burlington Northern, the 'Green Giant' as many call it, is the largest railroad in the United States, encompassing just shy of 28,000 miles of route, but what sets BN apart from others is the Northwest, where they absolutely dominate it....except for Conrail. The Conrail-BN rivalry for traffic across Washington, Oregon, Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, the Dakotas, Nebraska and Minnesota is perhaps only matched by the Santa Fe-Southern Pacific rivalry across the Southwest. BN's network, however, is massive, and its huge unit trains of coal, grain, chemicals, iron ore, limestone, cement, ethanol, petroleum products, potash and crude oil give it huge profits on its own, though the company's greatest source of pride is its tough rivalry with Conrail over the Cascades - the Conrail route over Snoqualamie Pass and the BN route over Stampede Pass run almost completely parallel (in some cases, within sight of each other from Tacoma to Spokane, WA, and while Conrail operates its electrified main using electric locomotives, Burlington Northern's need to keep up has caused them to run hundreds of high-horsepower diesels to try and keep up the pace. BN is also notable for never having a problem with profitability in its existence, and its 'Cascade Green' locomotives are well known and well liked in most of the area it serves, and BN has in many cases maintained tracks where they were not profitable in the goal of getting an industry or a customer to a community, a move which has been done in quite a number of cases. BN's money is made on the unit trains and fast freights, but the company's other involvements includes many property and terminal businesses and subsidiaries. While not nearly as prolific as the Southern Pacific, Union Pacific, Rock Island or New York Central in terms of subsidiaries, BN's subsidiaries are namely in the mining and energy business, and they to have often provided assistance to co-ops and in one famous case in 2000 went to bat for several South Dakota co-ops in a battle between them and Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland, a move which both helped the shipper itself as well as gave the company a giant PR boost. Burlington Northern, owing to its huge system, operates two headquarters, one in Chicago and the other in Seattle.
Northeast/New England/Rust Belt
Conrail
The government-owned freight railroad formed from the bones of the Pennsylvania, Milwaukee Road, Reading Lines, Boston and Maine, New Haven and several smaller railroads in 1977, Conrail spent the 1970s and early 1980s first rebuilding infrastructure and then taking advantage of 1980's Staggers Act which massively improved the regulatory environment for common carrier railroads. Conrail's creation was controversial and its spending of over $3.5 Billion in infrastructure rebuilding didn't help, but by the mid-1980s the company was a profitable company, and by 1997 it was the largest single railroad in North America by freight movements. By far the dominant player in the Northeast, Conrail's former Milwaukee Road main line from Chicago to Seattle and Tacoma is also one of the most busy freight rail routes in the world. Conrail's continued ownership by Washington is primarily because the company hasn't failed to make a profit since 1984, and it has now added far more to government coffers than it ever took away from it. In Modern times, Conrail's HQ is in Philadelphia, PA (at Conrail Plaza in the city center), and its operations run out of several facilities, most notably the company's vast shops at Bensenville, IL and Altoona, PA. Conrail's diesels are almost all blue (its executive diesels and some specialized diesels are dark green), while its electric fleet is mostly silver with blue in color and its freight cars are mostly painted in the dark Tuscan Red made famous by the Pennsylvania Railroad.
New York Central
A legend in the Northeast that managed to live through the rough times of the 1960s and 1970s by being flexible, fast and above all efficient, the line run for 25 years (January 1958 until his death in April 1983) by legendary boss Alfred Perlman is the second-largest line in the Northeast, even as it battles mighty Conrail and the big Norfolk and Western and Chessie System. New York Central's modern business focuses on the moving of freight from Chicago and St. Louis to New York, Boston, Toronto and Montreal, as well as serving the auto industries along its route and providing bulk service in the Midwest. The "Central System", as it is often called today, retains that tradition of technical and efficiency expertise, and it's 'Water Level Route' from New York to Chicago via Albany, Syracuse, Buffalo, Erie, Cleveland, Toledo and Fort Wayne is one of the most important rail lines in the whole country. Perlman's successors and their successors (including Perlman's son, Michael Perlman) run the company to this day, and NYC in modern times is held in a very high regard by the communities they serve. The NYC may take its name from New York, but it has since 1988 been based in Buffalo, NY, at an office building adjacent to the massive station they built there in the 1920s, which today is the junction point between the Midwestern System, Empire Corridor and St. Lawrence River high-speed rail systems. NYC locomotives have nearly all regained by 'lightning stripe' black, silver and dark grey paint scheme, replacing the austere black paint that most NYC locomotives began sporting in the 1960s.
Erie Lackawanna
While a small line compared to its rivals, the Erie Lackawanna also operates its own Chicago-New Jersey main line, and competition between the EL and New York Central has largely forced the EL to adapt many of the larger competitor's tactics, but having a shorter route between the two cities (even if the NYC's has lower grades) has made sure that the EL has remained a prospering railroad and was able in the 1980s to acquire several lines to allow for gaps in its system to be closed. While the NYC has invested heavily in electrification, Erie Lackawanna is a major user of high-powered diesels, including a long history of operating gas turbine locomotives and of experimentation with alternative fuels. The company and NYC may be rivals, but both are heavily influenced by competition with Conrail and with rivals in the Rust Belt states, which offer the densest railroad competition in the country. EL's biggest adavantage, however, is in its huge container operations - the company runs no less than 18 daily container trains on its Chicago-New Jersey main line, and its massive main line is primarily used for this and fast-freight traffic - and its vast terminals in Hoboken, Jersey City, Newark and Seacaucus and its equally-huge trucking and transfer operations. EL has been based in Cleveland, OH, since its formation, and remains there today. EL locomotives are easy to see by their silver-grey, yellow and dark red paint.
Chessie System
The Chessie, formed in 1973 by the merger of the Chesapeake and Ohio, Baltimore and Ohio and Western Maryland railroads, is often called the "Carmakers' Railroad", and the company's massive midwestern operations and its serving practically every auto plant in the Rust Belt and most in the Midwest, while its huge coal operations in Kentucky and West Virginia made sure profits were little problem - indeed, the moratorium on mergers posted by the Interstate Commerce Commission in 1982 killed Chessie's hopes for mergers, but the massive Chessie and its only slightly-smaller and equally-tough rival the Norfolk and Western can give Conrail and each other as good a run for each other's money as is likely possible. Chessie has since 1991 based its operations out of the B&O District in Baltimore, MD and Chessie Plaza in Detroit, MI. Their motive power and much of the company's rolling stock carries the famous "Chessie Cat" logo and is painted bright yellow, with locomotives being that yellow, with dark blue on top and brown as a contrast color.
Norfolk and Western
The railroad best known for being the last major mainline operator of steam in North America (not finally retiring steam until 1961), the N&W began life a coal-hauling bridge line between Norfolk and Cincinatti and Columbus, but the company's merging of the Nickel Plate Road, Wabash and Pittsburgh and West Virginia railroads in 1964. This massive expansion turned a small-size high-traffic coal hauler into a major bridge road, and as with Chessie System, its merger plans were scuttled by the ICC moratorium in 1982, but the company responded to this by expanding its fast-freight operations and its handsome blue-and-gold "Pocahontas Fleet" diesels, which by the 1980s had allowed it to expand its share of the growing intermodal markets. N&W, which has owned a sizable chunk of the Erie Lackawanna since 1964, remains a major partner for the other Northeastern railroad, and both lines regularly team up to serve markets and often utilize each other's motive power. N&W, appropriately, is based in Norfolk, VA. Unlike the colorful schemes and graphics of its rivals, N&W locomotives are most often the big black workhorses of the past, but the Pocahontas Fleet units, which now make up over a quarter of the systems' total power, still use the deep blue and gold paint.
Delaware and Hudson
A minnow among monsters which lives through being a part of the Alliance of smaller railroads formed by the Rock Island in 1983, The Delaware and Hudson is a small but smart railroad. Owned by its employees since 1984, the Delaware and Hudson primarily runs from the Erie Lackawanna at Scranton, PA and Binghamton, NY and Conrail at Elmira and Albany, NY, the D&H lives with Conrail to its east and south, the NYC and EL to its West and acting as a bridge line. Despite that, the D&H is a small but tough little road, lugging EL and Conrail traffic into Canada from Upstate New York and Northern Pennsylvania. Based in Albany, NY, the small company remains owned almost entirely by its employees and local businesses and institutions and has a fabulous reputation among the area it serves. D&H motive power is all of the silver and light blue color scheme first shown off on the company's Alco PA passenger units first shown off in 1967, and the D&H in modern times is perhaps the most fastidious of the image of its physical plant, and D&H units are majority of the time either spotlessly clean or close to it.
Grand Trunk Western
The American division of Canada's state-owned Canadian National Railways has all of the plusses and minuses that go with it, but its many miles of track in Indiana, Illinois, Michigan and Ohio running out from its border crossing points at Detroit and Port Huron, MI, the company's primary job is moving freight between interchanges in Chicago and CN's giant Vaughan and Dundas yards in metro Toronto as well as the massive auto industry traffic in that part of the world, a business that GTW competes with Chessie, N&W and Conrail for. The company's striking blue and red paint is in time giving way to Canadian National's red and black, but the GTW logo is still prominent, and GTW's efforts in the 1970s and 1980s at both efficiency and safety have earned the company the name "The Good Track Road" during that time period and a good relation with its operating unions and customers. GTW has been based in Downtown Detroit since 1951 and remains there today.
South / Southeast
Southern Railway
The Southern is the dominant player in the Southern United States, operating over 8,000 route miles in the Dixie states as well as some branches out to St. Louis, Washington, Cincinnati and Little Rock. A powerhouse in every sense of the word with its dense lines in the Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, Mississippi and Florida, the Southern's dark green black fleet of high-hooded locomotives and its huge, diverse fleet of cars, as well as its long history of innovation (the Southern was one of the first big railroads to fully retire steam, build modern back and running shops and the developer of positive train control and radio-controlled helper units) has given it a strong hand in the railroad markets. Long allied with Norfolk and Western and New York Central, these alliance in modern times has given it big new jobs in moving auto parts and container traffic. The Southern today is based at its offices in Alexandria, VA, just south of Washington.
Louisville and Nashville
The South's massive coal and bulk goods hauler with a bread and butter job serving the coal mines of Kentucky, Tennessee and Alabama, the L&N retains its massive operations hauling both bulk goods as well as lucrative traffic from the ports of Houston, New Orleans and Mobile to the northern regions (particularly to Chicago and to Detroit via the Chessie System), most of the time onto Conrail and Chessie operations. L&N's profitable heavy coal operations got multiple winds from first the coal boom of the 1970s and then the shifting to the use of coal for synthetic crude in the 1980s. Being one of the few railroads to always avoid insolvency, the company's nickname "The Old Reliable" is a particularly apt one, but its lack of coastal markets has left it heavily reliant on North-South traffic and its massive bulk traffic. This situation was improved when the L&N became the owner of the Central of Georgia in 1964, giving the company a Chicago-Savannah mainline after this, and the Florida East Coast connection there gives the company a route as far as Miami. Joined at the hip with Chessie and Seaboard Coast Line, the firm's many operational aspects are similar to its partner railroads. The company was born in Louisville, KY, and remains based in its famed Louisville and Nashville Building there, and the alliances with the Seaboard Coast Line and Chessie System have resulted in the three roads using similar graphics schemes, but with L&N diesels silver-blue and yellow with red accent colors.
Seaboard Coast Line
The fast line of the American South and the company that most signifies the massive companies that today dominate railroading, the Seaboard Coast Line, formed in 1967 by the merger of the Atlantic Coast Line and Seaboard Air Line, the merger between these two once-tough competitors is one of the great success stories of mergers. The Seaboard Coast Line's primary job is connecting the Northeastern systems with Southern cities, and the company's parallel main lines from Richmond, Virginia, to Miami and Tampa, Florida, are also joined by its outer mains to Atlanta, Montgomery and Birmingham. Joined at the hip to the Louisvile and Nashville and allied with Chessie System, plans for the merger of these railroads was scuttled by the 1982 merger moratorium and resulting legal demands that ultimately broke up the co-ownership of these railroads, though the three remain intertwined and they use a similar graphic scheme. The Seaboard is based in Jacksonville, FL, and operates primarily out of there and its major terminals at Waycross, GA and Hamlet, NC.
Florida East Coast
Small but tough and feisty but having a very long history of labor difficulties which ultimately left it nearly bankrupt in the 1970s, the FEC is the smallest in length of the major haulers in North America with just under 700 miles of route from Jacksonville to Orlando, Miami and Homestead, Florida, and yet despite this the port traffic at the port of Miami and the line's fast services have made sure that this tiny route is one of the most efficient small lines in the country, and perhaps ironically, has been owned by the very employees the company fought bitterly with in the 1960s and 1970s since 2007. Among the employee-pushed changes was the return of its bright orange, red and yellow painted locomotives and flashy graphics and the company's involvement in the Florida High-Speed Rail System. Based in Jacksonville, FL, the tiny road is heavily aligned with the Louisville and Nashville (despite the L&N's connections to rival Seaboard Coast Line) and the Southern Railway, the two companies feeding practically all of the company's traffic northward.
Midwest
Rock Island
The Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific is one of the four "core" systems that serve just the Midwest (joined by the Chicago and North Western, Illinois Central and Wisconsin Central), and having spent the 1960s, 1970s and early 1980s being nearly destroyed by both governmental issues and meddling by rivals (particularly Union Pacific), the Rock Island was one of the sour railroads that created the Railroad Alliance in 1983, the company has since the 1980s forcibly asserted its independence and its goals, and despite the fact that is rivalled by Union Pacific and its core rivals, the Rock Island is almost entirely dealers with the other railroads of the Alliance (today, this is Rio Grande, Western Pacific, Erie Lackawanna, Wisconsin Central and Delaware and Hudson), and the Alliance is capable of moving trains in practically all directions from its tracks and is a major piece in the transcontinental link. The Rock's traffic is not only bridge traffic and industrial goods but also moving huge amounts of grain to ports and food processors and coal and potash, much of the latter two cargoes coming off of the mineral-rich Rio Grande to the West of it. Based in Chicago, the Rock Island in modern times is one of the most profitable of any American railroad.
Chicago and Northwestern
One of the medium-sized freight haulers of the Midwest and with the longest tradition of being owned by employees (it has been since 1972), the C&NW was the first railroad to make it clear just what an employee-owned railroad could do. Far from being hard to operate or struggling to keep afloat, the C&NW's 1970s and 1980s were years of massive prosperity - but wisely, the company chose to build up a huge amount of cash and spend hundreds of millions of dollars improving the railroad's physical plant and equipment. C&NW has been joined at the hip with Union Pacific since the late 1970s, but its strength ultimately led to the Wisconsin Central (formed almost entirely from disused C&NW, Soo Line and Milwaukee Road lines) joining the Railroad Alliance led by the Rock Island, forming a potent rival to the C&NW across Iowa, Wisconsin and Minnesota. C&NW's locomotives and rolling stock all proudly display "Employee Owned" logos and insignia, and the company's Power River Basin lines, built in the late 1970s, became a bedrock of the company's success as the very good coal headed to refineries, steel mills and power stations from the Basin proved a cash cow for the company, and the company's development of fast perishable services set up patterns of operations that remain to this day. The C&NW is based in Chicago, IL, and while over half of its mileage is today abandoned, the remaining lines form a profitable network.
Illinois Central
The third of the "Core Lines" of the Midwest, the staid, conservative Illinois Central is one of the primary main lines of the Midwest, largely operating as a bridge line along with partner Kansas City Southern of traffic between Chicago and Mexico and connections with other railroads in Chicago as well as lines West from Chicago to Omaha, NB. This alliance of convenience began after the IC and KCS jointly outbid Union Pacific, Santa Fe and Southern Pacific for a vast chunk of National Railways of Mexico in 1993, with both sides selling off billions in assets to pay for upgrades and improvements to allow their lines to carry such traffic. The gamble paid off handsomely as the movements allowed IC and KCS to gain several massive concessions (mostly from Southern Pacific) to get access to the lucrative traffic out of Mexico. (IC and KCS are both trying to get the Surface Transportation Board to allow them to merge their operations.) The move and the considerable amount of south-to-Midwest traffic has allowed the IC to have a strong future, and the company enjoys this, though typically-conservative management has allowed this to only manifest itself in the company`s bank balances. The company today is based alongside its KCS allies in Kansas City, KS.
Wisconsin Central
Born as a result of Conrail and contractions by the C&NW, Conrail, Soo Line and Rock Island, the Wisconsin Central is the newest of the Class 1 railroads, born in 1985 to a management team seeking to keep the lines slated for closure alive. The company expanded rapidly after its formation, eventually buying the Algoma Central in Ontario in 1995 and an ex-BN line to Winnipeg in 1997. The system today operates lucrative freight traffic across eight states and two Canadian provinces, and has had lucrative deals with Canadian National to funnel its traffic from Winnipeg to Chicago since 2000. The Wisconsin Central became part of the Railroad Alliance in 1997, and was instrumental in the Alliance doing deals with Canadian National, Southern and Southern Pacific in order to shore up the Alliance's portion of lucrative intermodal and priority freight businesses and with the Kansas City Southern to get more of the loads coming out of Mexico. The Wisconsin Central was born and based for much of its history in Fond du Lac, but today operates out of Madison, WI.
Kansas City Southern
Perhaps more than any other railroad made relevant by involvement in Mexico, the Kansas City Southern's world changed when they, along with the Illinois Central, got the rights to operate a sizable chunk of the former National Railways of Mexico. The company's moves since then have seen the firm integrate over 800 miles of new and purchased lines to connect itself to its Mexican subsidiaries, as well as its own new line from Eagle Pass, TX, to the Mexican steel city of Monterrey. More ambitious than its Illinois Central partners, the company's operations today include the operation of the Panama Canal Railway and the Railways of Jamaica, as well as numerous Gulf shipping subsidiaries and trucking businesses. Based in Kansas City alongside its partner, they have been among the most vocal in wanting to end the merger moratorium, but concerns over problems with lack of competition have made this effort so far fruitless.
The West
Santa Fe
The Santa Fe Railway may have a greater legend than just about any other railroad, namely for the Super Chief and El Capitan passenger trains, the Harvey Houses and in modern times its flashy silver and red 'Warbonnet' paint schemes. Beyond that, though, it has been true since WWII that the company's primary main line networks, both its 'California Main Line' from Chicago to Los Angeles and its 'Mexico Main Line' from Topeka, KS to Torreon, Mexico, via southeastern Colorado, New Mexico (including its namesake city) and El Paso, are both critically important not just to the company but also to trade across the country and with Mexico. The company's operations across Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri and Illinois are full of competition, but Santa Fe in modern times largely considers the resurgent Southern Pacific as its biggest rival, as both largely parallel each other from Southern California to New Mexico, and SP's former Cotton Belt mainline also largely parallels the Santa Fe from Tucumcari, New Mexico, to Chicago (SP's good relationship with the Railroad Alliance, allowing them to use Rock Island tracks to help with this, doesn't help Santa Fe's competition), and as a result both roads have since the early 1990s engaged in multiple competitions with each other, both in terms of technical advancements and innovations but also in public, with both sides using flashy paint schemes, event and facility sponsorships, high-profile PR campaigns and TV commercials in an attempt to one-up the other. Despite their tough competition, both roads and their employees, from senior management all the way down, have immense respect for the other. The company was for many years based in Chicago, but today they are based in their namesake city, having moved there in one of their high-profile events in 2005.
Southern Pacific
The management of this company one could say is both like others and unlike others. Southern Pacific is by far America's largest employee-owned firm, with it and its subsidiaries having nearly 60,000 employees, nearly all of whom are stock holders in SP. Having been stymied by the ICC from merging with the Santa Fe in 1981, the company was sold off by the combined corporation to its employees in 1984....and began one of the most remarkable rebirths of a major American company. Over $3.2 Billion in capital investments between 1985 and 1996, involvement with the American President Lines ocean shipping company, several involvements with electronic industries (including a share in Apple Computer purchased in 1991 from $850 million that is now worth over $35 billion), telecommunications (SP's Southern Pacific Communications division became the nexus of CenturyLink Communications) and energy companies, involvement in organizing trucking co-ops and the California High Speed Rail system and high-profile PR campaigns, including a massive 70-story new San Francisco headquarters opened in 2004 and such moves as buying a Super Bowl commercial in 2000 (the year the San Francisco 49ers won the game, which also resulted in a two-page spread from SP in the San Francisco Examiner congratulating them for the victory) and numerous innovations, including the advancement of the mile-long 90-mph California produce trains for which the company is now famous and the company's very good relations with its employees. SP's business moves have made a number of its dedicated employees millionaires, a fact the company likes to boast about, as well as boasting that some of these employees continue to work for the company. Flashy paint from this company, from its black, orange and red 'Daylight' and black, silver and orange 'Black Widow' schemes, is par for the course, as its proudly advertising who is shipping on SP freight cars, a fact that many of its customers approve of. Operating in Mexico since 2007 on its line to Puerto Vallarta, and its opening of a new line from San Diego and Tijuana all the way to Cabo San Lucas in Baja California in 2013, the company also retains trackage rights on UP from Odgen, UT to Chicago on Union Pacific, though a bitter 1990s fight over their usage led SP to funnel traffic on the Rio Grande and Rock Island instead to serve Salt Lake City and Denver, and the company bought trackage rights in 1986 to serve Seattle and Tacoma via Conrail and BN lines. Southern Pacific is based in it's HQ in San Francisco across from the Transbay Transportation Terminal.
Union Pacific
One of the oldest railroads in the United States with an unbroken history dating to 1862, the Union Pacific built the first line across the United States, and in modern times it is often called 'The Big Yellow Borg' for the company's distinctive Armour Yellow paint and the company's massive expansions by way of mergers, with its original lines running from Omaha and Kansas City to Salt Lake City, then northwest to Portland and Seattle and southwest to Los Angeles. Purchases of the Colorado and Southern, Missouri Pacific, St. Louis and San Francisco and Missouri-Kansas-Texas in the 1970s caused the company's network to explode in size. But what shaped the company's future was the company's attempts to merge with the Rock Island in the 1960s and 1970s. The UP-RI merger application was legendary in its slowness, taking over a decade and producing 250,000 pages of legal documents. In the end, the merger was approved - but UP, not wanting the RI now that its finances had declined precipitously in the 1970s, first denied the merger....than pushed associates to buy the company's bonds, trying to force the company into bankruptcy and then acquire the assets it wanted. This move, exposed by a series of investigations between 1978 and 1980, ultimately resulted in the merger moratorium, and enraged Rock Island management created the Railroad Alliance as a consequence, seeking to beat UP at their own game. Their long and acrimonious battle with SP over trackage rights in the 1990s didn't help the company's public image, but UP by 1995 had given up on its moves and instead began seeking to improve their services. Able to offer a wider network than its competitors and with far less gradients than the parallel Railroad Alliance system, the UP has a major share of California-Chicago markets, but it has been slow to adapt to innovations, which causes issues for them when competing with the fast-acting Southern Pacific and Santa Fe and the customer-hungry Railroad Alliance. The company has its legal HQ in Denver but operates out of Omaha.
Rio Grande
The "Main Line Through The Rockies" is today the critical cog over the Continental Divide for the Railroad Alliance, and having been rebuilt massively in the 1930s and 1940s and since then having been a lover of innovation, the Rio Grande has since the 1960s been chasing destiny, both through moving massive quantities of bridge traffic and huge amounts of minerals, particularly coal, iron ore and potash. The company's scenery allowed it to have regular passenger service until 1983 and today several Amtrak transcontinental trains, including its flagship American President, use the Rio Grande mainline from Denver to Salt Lake City, and SP trackage rights are a lucrative source of earnings, particularly SP's fast-moving perishables trains. Rio Grande began a vast project in 1995 to electrify its Salt Lake to Denver and Pueblo main lines over Tennessee Pass and through the Moffat Tunnel, completing the job in 2002, improving the economics of the line between the lower energy cost and faster speeds the huge electrics of the line allow. The company remains, as it has always been, based in Denver, CO.
Western Pacific
The Little Guy of the original alliance but critically important nonetheless to it, the Western Pacific is the line for the Alliance between Salt Lake through Nevada and California to the docks in Oakland, San Jose and Vallejo, California. The company struggled with profitability for many years (largely owing to its neighbors), but its 1950s to 1970s resulted in a series of brilliant managers and operators, and its inclusion in the Railroad Alliance in 1983 assured its future by assuring that Rio Grande and Rock Island traffic would go via the WP, which when combined with massive dock expansions in Oakland in the 1980s gave the company more traffic than it could at first handle. They didn't take long to fix that, of course - the ex-SP line through Altamont Pass as bought to parallel their original, and most of the line was double-tracked and improved. Expansions north eventually to Eugene, Oregon (which WP began service to in 1991) and to Bakersfield, CA, and then via trackage rights on SP to Los Angeles (which began in 1994), added to the traffic base. By 2000, the Western Pacific was had nearly every inch of its operations be very busy. The bridge traffic focus no longer bothers the WP, namely because there is quite a lot of it, and the Railroad Alliance's attempts at good PR also saw the WP (as with its partners) shed austere paint. Black gave way to silver and orange for some locomotives and two-tone green with feather graphics for others. Shippers and railfans alike approve of WP's 90-mph "Racetrack" priority freight trains on its Oakland-Salt Lake City main line, and the company's pushing aggressively to remove level crossings on its line is done to allow speeds to stay high, and the company in modern times has little difficulty maintaining profitability. The company is based and runs most of its operations out of Oakland, CA.
Burlington Northern
By route mileage, Burlington Northern, the 'Green Giant' as many call it, is the largest railroad in the United States, encompassing just shy of 28,000 miles of route, but what sets BN apart from others is the Northwest, where they absolutely dominate it....except for Conrail. The Conrail-BN rivalry for traffic across Washington, Oregon, Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, the Dakotas, Nebraska and Minnesota is perhaps only matched by the Santa Fe-Southern Pacific rivalry across the Southwest. BN's network, however, is massive, and its huge unit trains of coal, grain, chemicals, iron ore, limestone, cement, ethanol, petroleum products, potash and crude oil give it huge profits on its own, though the company's greatest source of pride is its tough rivalry with Conrail over the Cascades - the Conrail route over Snoqualamie Pass and the BN route over Stampede Pass run almost completely parallel (in some cases, within sight of each other from Tacoma to Spokane, WA, and while Conrail operates its electrified main using electric locomotives, Burlington Northern's need to keep up has caused them to run hundreds of high-horsepower diesels to try and keep up the pace. BN is also notable for never having a problem with profitability in its existence, and its 'Cascade Green' locomotives are well known and well liked in most of the area it serves, and BN has in many cases maintained tracks where they were not profitable in the goal of getting an industry or a customer to a community, a move which has been done in quite a number of cases. BN's money is made on the unit trains and fast freights, but the company's other involvements includes many property and terminal businesses and subsidiaries. While not nearly as prolific as the Southern Pacific, Union Pacific, Rock Island or New York Central in terms of subsidiaries, BN's subsidiaries are namely in the mining and energy business, and they to have often provided assistance to co-ops and in one famous case in 2000 went to bat for several South Dakota co-ops in a battle between them and Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland, a move which both helped the shipper itself as well as gave the company a giant PR boost. Burlington Northern, owing to its huge system, operates two headquarters, one in Chicago and the other in Seattle.
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@orville-third- Excellent points re: Big Pharma.
IDK if TTL's take on patents would be quite so restrictive, as long as "generic" manfuacturers pay the proper royalties to the folks holidng the patent licensing strings.
Funny thing about that, since NIH research is what every Big Pharma lab goes to for proof of concept before "developing" whatever drug or therapy,
why not make licensing whatever was developed via NIH/DARPA/research a nominal fee sort of thing paid to HHS to fund further research and so forth.
What I'm going for is that a bunch of generic firms could make different takes on various drugs instead of say Pfizer coming up with unobtanium they try screwing everyone in the first-adopter phase for 20K/course of treatment.
The basic argument with UHC is that the drug cos find themselves forced to sell at prices Medicare won't gag on.
IF they try, they could find themselves with all kinds of issues, their current products getting blacklisted and so forth.
@TheMann
Interesting write-up of TTL Big Pharma with some brakes on it. IMO your fine was way too low. I'd multiply it by ten and have the Board RICO'd to send a message to corporate criminals. Screw up shareholder value, blacklisted from medicare reimbursement, and folks going to the joint for twenty years?
Folks'd rather sell their mothers before they do that again. That's serious regulation with teeth.
Left-field question though- I love railroads and all, but it seems like a plethora of boutique lines survive ITTL that would've gone under by 1980, barring Ghidorah-level changes in commerce, regulation, etc.
You made some splendid arguments previously about why railroads made sense and got the 1950's and 1970's federal help.
Maybe I'm looking at this the wrong way, but could alliances between railroads work a bit like code-sharing among OTL airlines?
I look at your descriptions and think, hmm, nice if I want to stay in a region, and work with whichever 400 lb gorilla is competitive there, but if I offload cargo in LA and want to go to Chicago I'd be swtiching lines three times, which wouldn't work real well.
YMMDV.
IDK if TTL's take on patents would be quite so restrictive, as long as "generic" manfuacturers pay the proper royalties to the folks holidng the patent licensing strings.
Funny thing about that, since NIH research is what every Big Pharma lab goes to for proof of concept before "developing" whatever drug or therapy,
why not make licensing whatever was developed via NIH/DARPA/research a nominal fee sort of thing paid to HHS to fund further research and so forth.
What I'm going for is that a bunch of generic firms could make different takes on various drugs instead of say Pfizer coming up with unobtanium they try screwing everyone in the first-adopter phase for 20K/course of treatment.
The basic argument with UHC is that the drug cos find themselves forced to sell at prices Medicare won't gag on.
IF they try, they could find themselves with all kinds of issues, their current products getting blacklisted and so forth.
@TheMann
Interesting write-up of TTL Big Pharma with some brakes on it. IMO your fine was way too low. I'd multiply it by ten and have the Board RICO'd to send a message to corporate criminals. Screw up shareholder value, blacklisted from medicare reimbursement, and folks going to the joint for twenty years?
Folks'd rather sell their mothers before they do that again. That's serious regulation with teeth.
Left-field question though- I love railroads and all, but it seems like a plethora of boutique lines survive ITTL that would've gone under by 1980, barring Ghidorah-level changes in commerce, regulation, etc.
You made some splendid arguments previously about why railroads made sense and got the 1950's and 1970's federal help.
Maybe I'm looking at this the wrong way, but could alliances between railroads work a bit like code-sharing among OTL airlines?
I look at your descriptions and think, hmm, nice if I want to stay in a region, and work with whichever 400 lb gorilla is competitive there, but if I offload cargo in LA and want to go to Chicago I'd be swtiching lines three times, which wouldn't work real well.
YMMDV.
By the way, one amazing thing Conrail did was to essentially electrify the entire former Milwaukee Road Pacific Extension from Chicago to Seattle/Tacoma--a huge engineering feat considering Milwaukee Road only electrified a small portion of that line to the Pacific Northwest. Indeed, it even allowed Conrail to restore three of the famous Little Joe EP-4's to operational status, and they are often seen pulling Conrail executive business trains on all electrified Conrail lines (though the decision to paint the EP-4's into the Conrail executive business train livery was a very controversial one).
They didn't quite get that far. The Pacific, Cascades, Continental, Big Sky, Blackfoot and McLaughlin divisions, which run from the Pacific Ocean ports to McLaughlin, SD, are electrified. The electrified routes from Seattle and Tacoma to Harlowton, MT, were built by the Milwaukee Road in the 1920s and rebuilt by them and General Electric in the early 1970s, and Conrail extended the electrified main from Harlowton to Terry, MT, in 1979 and then to McLaughlin, SD in 1982. Their initial plan was to extend the electrification across the entire New York/Philadelphia-Seattle/Tacoma mainline, but westward electrification ended at Canton, OH (extended there from Harrisburg in stages between 1977 and 1982) and McLaughlin for economic reasons. Despite this, Conrail's Rocky Mountain divisions are an engineering masterpiece, but with Burlington Northern all around them, they kinda have to be.
Conrail's electrified divisions include its freight lines in the Northeast from Jersey City/Bayonne/Newark to Harrisburg, Reading to Atlantic City via Philadelphia and from Harrisburg to Baltimore and Hagerstown, these rebuilt after Amtrak kicked Conrail freight trains off of the Northeast Corridor in April 1987. Conrail also electrified its traffic-heavy main lines out of Toledo north to Ann Arbor and Detroit, east to Sandusky and south to Marion, OH, in the early 1990s, largely pushed by General Motors and Detroit Edison to do so that the former could use these lines to test out their electric locomotives.
That Little Joe was only controversial because of what it was originally built for. The Little Joes got a new lease on life with Conrail's electrification extension (which also resulted in them getting AC rectifiers to use the new 25kV electrical system installed by GE) and remained in freight service until 1985. Conrail retains one EP-4 and one GG1, along with an A-B-A set of Alco PA2s and EMD E9s and two FP45s, for its business trains, and all have been rebuilt as more modern locomotives in terms of how they operate.
Alas, the GG1 is rarely run even with modernization because the cab design does not meet current Federal safety standards for locomotive cabs in terms of forward visibility. In fact, it requires a special exemption just to run it on any Conrail electrified main line. The EP-4 does run fairly frequently, though.
The GG1 falls under a heritage exemption, and Conrail's rebuild of it did include modern safety gear (including cab signals, positive train control and all systems needed for NEC operation), so the exemption is pretty solid. It only really sees use out east, but it is quite well loved by railfans there, particularly since Conrail repainted it in Tuscan Red.
People who've actually sat in the Pennsylvania Railroad GG1 #4800 at the Americas Railroad Museum said that forward visibility was pretty poor--in fact, not much better than most steam locomotives! Small wonder why even with the modernized cab, the surviving GG1 in Conrail colors rarely runs on any Conrail mainline. (In fact, limited forward visibility is why it requires a very special exemption from the FRA to run steam locomotives--including Union Pacific 3985 and 844, Santa Fe 3750 and 3571, Southern Pacific 2472, 2479 and 4449, and Norfolk & Western 611 on any Class I mainline railroad. Interestingly, Southern Pacific 4293 and 4294 are common sights on SP lines in California's Central Valley even now, mostly because being cab-forward locomotives they actually meet the current FRA forward visibility requirement, though both locomotives ended up with larger tenders than original with larger water and heating oil tanks (4293 and 4294 were rebuilt to run off heating oil, not the much dirtier Bunker C heavy oil) due to relatively few water and oil replenishment stops on the current SP lines.)
What about Nigeria and Thailand in this timeline?
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The birth of an Empire:The Dreamworks-Hasbro Story[on hiatus]
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The birth of an Empire:The Dreamworks-Hasbro Story[on hiatus]
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I had to be realistic, but I get your point. That being said, if Johnson and Johnson's misconduct had caused people to die or be disfigured, that fine would have been far, far higher. The law allows corporate officials who knowingly mislead the public in a way that causes deaths to be charged with homicide. Medicare doesn't screw around, either - they use a three strikes rule there, third time you're done providing them with goods and services for good. RICO'ing people for stuff like that wouldn't fly in a courtroom, as RICO statutes are meant for busting companies engaging in monolithic practices, which that Johnson and Johnson situation wasn't. Of course, the changes to drug patent law and the government here's willingness to use RICO suits to bust such companies in the chops tends to make sure nobody tries it.
Many still did go under. The Railroad Alliance in 1983 assuredly kept Western Pacific and probably kept Erie Lackawanna from going under, and Delaware and Hudson and Wisconsin Central joined it to make their reach bigger. The others all made it through because they have good management. Illinois Central and Kansas City Central would likely be merged into somebody else if they didn't have the huge Mexican operations - Santa Fe and Southern Pacific, as well as Ferromex itself, operate in Mexico, but SP and SF don't have the size of network the two Midwestern roads do. All of the others are big systems (at least 3,000 route miles), and several of them are very big systems, with Burlington Northern and Union Pacific being over 25,000 route miles, Conrail just about 20,000, Santa Fe and Southern Pacific being over 15,000. The moratorium on mergers is what stopped there being fewer of them, and in this case once the moratorium came into play the response was first to wait it out, but by 1985 the railroads' management had realized that the moratorium was not gonna end soon, and thus they had better figure out some alliances of their own.
You nailed it. The whole reason for the alliances are for railroads to be able to say to shippers "You need that to go where? Oh, there? Yeah, we can do that." even if the destination requested is not on the railroad's trackage. The way it works is that when a car is sent to a shipper and loaded, its number, owner, destination, priority and cargo is entered into the computer systems of the company which is picking it up. Once it reaches a yard, its weighed to give it a weight number for manifests (it's been law since 1990 that if no weight is entered that the railroads assigns it a weight equaling its maximum load limit. That done, it goes across the lines in question, and when it changes railroad, its data is sent to the destination railroad.
To give an example, GM wants to send 300 new cars to a distributor in Los Angeles. A standard tri-level autorack holds 15 new cars, so 20 empty autoracks are sent to the shipper, with the cars' owners and numbers entered then. Once loaded, the shipper has a few options. Detroit is served by the New York Central, Conrail, Chessie System and Norfolk and Western, each of which has western partners. If it goes by Conrail, it goes south to Toledo and then west to St. Louis, where Conrail will pass them off to its primary partner, in this case Union Pacific, who will take it to Los Angeles. In this case, since Union Pacific is taking it the majority of the way, they will get the majority of the money for hauling the load, though that will be up to Conrail and UP. NYC teams up with Santa Fe, so if NYC gets that load, they take it to Chicago, where the Santa Fe takes over. Chessie and N&W both work with Southern Pacific, so their loads would also go to Chicago, then west on SP lines.
If you are sending something from LA to Chicago, you don't have to switch lines. You choose Union Pacific, Southern Pacific or Santa Fe, with any of the three carrying the load end to end.
Chapter Twenty-Four: America's New Realities
By 2030, the United States of America, by this time the world's wealthiest nation as well as its fastest growing in terms of population (with India and China having seen their populations level off, whereas America was growing at a rate of nearly 3 million a year), was facing a number of realities. Despite its military, industrial, diplomatic, cultural and financial power having been nearly unchallenged through the second half of the 21st Century, America by 2030 was facing real challenges to its supremacy....but unlike the competitions between global empires in human history that often as not ended with armed conflicts, this conflict was singularly unlikely to do so, namely because the economic growth of the two powers most likely to challenge America - India and China, two countries themselves rivals in several places in their own right - were both reliant on trade with the West for economic growth and had vast quantities of capital tied up in these nations, a situation that was also true in reverse. It was also true with most of the world's developed economies - Europe, Latin America, most of the Middle East and even most of Africa were also involved in the world's economic growth, and the opportunities for those who were chasing were vast, but rivalries existed everywhere. With several countries (count America, China, India, Britain, France, Russia, Germany, Canada, Australia, Brazil, Iran and Japan among these by 2030) operating naval forces which could operate around the world and the development of faster technology allowing communications to go around the world in moments, the world was moving away from armed conflicts in general, in large part due to diplomats, economics and military forces, all of which combined to make wars much too expensive for nations to undertake unless the payoff was vast, but such payoffs were nearly non-existent in this world.
By 2030, there was new worlds to explore in any case. Climate change was opening new territories to live in in areas that were once very hard to live in (particularly northern Canada and northern Russia) as well as massively increasing the rainfall and thus making it easier to live in places that had once been deserts where water concerns had always been paramount. (Australia, the United States and North Africa were particular beneficiaries of this.) Greenland, which had gained independence from Denmark in 2026, was one of the world's new frontiers for mining firms, as the deposits there - uranium and thorium, rare earth metals, iron ore, rubies and diamonds, zinc and nickel - were massive, and companies fought over these, and Greenland by the end of the 2030s would be one of the world's most wealthy nations as a result of the vast minerals under its soil. Despite this, Greenland's strict environmental laws made sure that people had to do it properly, or else the Greenlanders would come down hard on them.
Also making lives for people was the ocean, but not in traditional ways. Sustainable fisheries were by the late 2020s required by most nations (and the Ocean Resources Treaty of 2033 made this law in many of those), but the beginning of the building of several new nuclear fusion power stations by the 2030s required the production of a sizable amount more tritium and deuterium for these plants to use than was existent in world stocks, and so major producers took to the oceans to extract deuterium from seawater. Several smaller companies got into this industry using converted freighters or tankers outfitted with electrolytic systems, but it didn't take long before the ships on the water began to be built for the purpose. NS Energy Revolution, built by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries in Japan for Japan Nuclear Energy Corporation using South African-manufactured nuclear reactors, was the first of these, and the ship was capable of making 4,500 pounds a month of deuterium (though in the process, the ship used over 400,000 tons of water to do so), making the ship's considerable cost worthwhile. The development of nuclear fusion beyond the four ITER reactors had resulted in new plants using many ITER technologies being built at new reactors at Dounreay in the United Kingdom, Kudankulam in India, Jervis Bay in Australia, Dimona in Israel, Bushehr in Iran, Changjiang in China, Koeberg in South Africa and Turkey Point in the United States. The advancing development and near-limitless power potential of nuclear fusion was such that by now many fossil fuel, energy and infrastructure companies were scrambling to get on board, which when combined with the growth of energy demands was making the need to get the problems of nuclear fusion settled more important. Indeed, electric cars and trains, new electronics, electric heating of homes, magnetic refrigeration, increasingly-advanced display technologies and increasing use of electric power in heavy industrial applications was making things more difficult, though the development of wireless electric transmission in low-current applications was making wiring houses simpler and removing wiring in some places in major cities. With the world's climate issues forcing reductions in the use of fossil fuels and the advantages of electric-powered forms of transport being quite obvious, this demand was not falling, and it was felt by many that the companies and nations who could settle the problems of nuclear fusion would make unimaginable quantities of wealth from it.
The new realities manifested itself in that industries that it had once dominated at were now being challenged, both at home and abroad. The share of the American market occupied by the Detroit automakers sank to just over 70% by 2030s, namely by the Japanese and German automakers, though by now the Tata Europa and Tata Deriva were selling strongly to economy-minded American customers (neither was exactly a bad car, just a less-expensive one) and the Chinese makers were looking to get into the North American markets, though BYD's attempts were buried by a lawsuit from Toyota, claiming that BYD had ripped off their Sienna minivan in the BYD M6. Detroit (and Chicago, Toronto and Los Angeles) worked on fixing that by continually improving their products, and by the 2020s most cars had been designed with similar bodies on separate chassis for cars powered by internal combustion engines or electric cars, with the electric cars using a different chassis. The development of electric cars had seen many former gas stations rebuilt as charging stations for electric cars, even as other gas stations now in many cases stocked not only gasoline but also diesel, alcohol fuels, isobutanol and/or biodiesel. The fuels each had their own benefits and downsides, but by 2030 the sales of vehicles powered by such fuels were outstripping gasoline, and indeed by then the car world was shifting. While the luxury car market outside of North America had long been dominated by European cars, the 1990s had seen the Lexus and Infiniti take Japan into the big leagues, and then Cadillac, Lincoln and Chrysler into that club, particularly in the world in the 2000s. While the small car and SUV club grew massively as others from around the world got into it, American luxury cars began to show up in other nations, particularly in China (GM's Buick brand was by 2020 second only to Volkswagen for sales among foreign car brands there), India and much of Africa (where the Lincoln LS, Cadillac Seville and Deville and Chrysler 300 became status symbols). These export markets ultimately caused these companies to wisely expand their offerings, with cars like the Chrysler 200, Lincoln Zephyr and Cadillac Catera. Also growing was sports and muscle cars, as these cars gained popularity in much of the world among those who wanted to portray an image. Also challenged was America's supremacy in airliners - long a triopoly of Boeing, McDonnell Douglas and Airbus, the world's airliner markets had been shaken up first by the Bombardier WA Series and the Ilyushin IL-98, and then by Embraer's Futura series, the Sukhoi Superjet and the merger between Mitsubishi Aerospace and McDonnell Douglas that created Mitsubishi McDonnell Douglas and created a series of superb aircraft. Boeing's market share fell as rivals hit it from everywhere - the long-ranged 777 was rivalled by the fast Bombardier WA310 and the even longer-ranged Airbus A340, while the 'superjumbo' Airbus A380 locked horns with Boeing's venerable 747-8 and th small jet market got crowded as the 737NG faced off with the Airbus A320, Bombardier CSeries, Embraer E-175 and E-190, MMD MD-14A and the Sukhoi Superjet 100, all of which could do everything the 737 did - and making matters worse for the small jets was the fact that a great many of the world's markets for these were increasingly being served by high-speed trains, which were better for the environment and in most cases could go downtown-to-downtown in major destinations, a feat in most cases impossible with airliners. But as with other industries, Boeing and MMD took to the challenges with aplomb, developing new and better variants of their products and improving their build quality in an attempt to make their products better.
Indeed, the fact that all of America's major industrial sectors faced rivals at home and abroad that could match them shot for shot was taken seriously by the high officials at said companies, and most responded to them in similar ways. Knowing that cost-cutting could only work to a point - there was no way to make American workers work for what Indian or Russian or Chinese counterparts did - the response by many was the same, that being make the products as good as possible, both in terms of capability and durability. Boeing was happy to boast that its airliners had unparalleled build quality and durability, and by that point American-built cars, trucks and motorcycles already had a reputation for durability in their bodies and mechanical components. The electronics made by the likes of Apple, Dell, Cisco Systems, Bose, RCA, Motorola, Hewlett-Packard, General Electric, Nvidia, Intel, Microsoft, Alienware and Atari all made sure that their products were known for durability, and this led to a massive shift in the 2010s and 2020s as the companies involved found themselves in a bind - rising costs in Asian contractors caused concerns with quality control that most of the companies were unwilling to deal with, and that caused a raft of companies to restart or expand North American production of such electronics, accepting higher production costs in return for better quality control and lower logistics costs. This reality also had effects on the suppliers of materials and goods for this industry, and it was estimated that the massive expansion of employment in the electronics industry in America caused an estimated 325,000 jobs added in California alone in this field between 2015 and 2030 and caused the so-called "Silicon Valley" by then long established in San Jose and the Santa Clara Valley of California to expand up both sides of the bay to bohemian San Francisco and middle-class Oakland, education-focused Berkeley and industrial Vallejo, as well as creating a nexus of electronics industries in several other major cities, including Seattle, Austin, Denver, Portland, Albuquerque and Dallas, and the industries expanded far beyond the American West, with electronics plants being established in other places, particularly in the industrial Midwest and parts of the Northeast. Just as American shipbuilders, automakers and materials producers before them had learned to deal with competition, so it was with electronics firms and aerospace ones, and the result was almost entirely hugely beneficial.
The sociology of the United States was also changing. With a massively-growing Hispanic population and growing numbers (percentage-wise) of African, Indian, Asian and Native Americans, the non-Hispanic white majority of the United States sank from 62.5% in 2001 to 53.7% in 2031, despite the country's sizable population growth in that same timeframe, even though all major demographic groups in the United States by then had birthrates well above the replacement fertility rate. Additionally, by this point the urban population of the United States, which in the 2031 Census made up some 85.5% of the total population, was congregated in cities that were increasingly racially-diverse, with cities once dominated by one race or gender now becoming more cosmopolitan, and increasing gentrification of neighborhoods and growing population density in many cities, even in widespread ones like Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, Houston, Miami and Phoenix, was rising and it showed in the skylines of many of these places. Los Angeles and New York were the vanguards of this - Los Angeles' once nearly all-black South Central regions had gone from some of the city's poorer regions to many of its most comfortably integrated middle-class ones in the 2010s and 2020s, helped along by middle-class jobs and investments and growing population diversity, starting with big waves of Hispanics in the 2000s and 2010s and then big numbers of Indians in the 2020s. In many places, the most outer-most suburban regions began to sink as better mass transit, higher population density (and the greater amenities that went with it) and falling crime numbers caused population to move back into cities. Unlike urban renewals of the past, though, many of these projects made sure that local residents would be able to stay there (in many cities, this was a requirement for major redevelopment projects), and in more than a few cases, local residents took it upon themselves to try to improve this. Cities began to show off their own regional identities in terms of local designs, styles, customs and pastimes in attempts to draw in new businesses and residents, usually with good results. This, along with changing work habits (by the 2030s, communications tech was allowing more and more people to work by telecommuting, with people working from home in many white-collar industries) and growing leisure time was contributing to city centers that sought out better amenities.
The future was also being seen on the oceans. By the early 2030s, floating 'energy islands' were becoming a reality in many tropical areas, taking advantage of the temperature difference between deep water and surface water to both desalinate water and produce electricity, with these plants first seeing use in warm-climate nations such as the Philippines, Japan, Indonesia, South Africa, Iran, Morocco, Mexico and Brazil. This also leads to water tankers and other vessels meant for transporting water to land. Also acting from many of these floating islands are systems to extract natural gas from methane hydrate deposits, with most of these islands using wind turbines or self-produced OTEC power to run these operations. The huge amounts of natural gas produced this way led to a new fleet of vessels meant to deliver these fuels to ports - and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and Austal Global led the way here, developing a catamaran LNG carrier meant to deliver the natural gas from these ports at cruising speeds of up to 35 knots, far faster than existing vessels, while also having better fuel efficiency running on biodiesel-fueled gas turbine engines. It didn't take long for others to copy this, and soon LNG-powered gas tankers began arriving at the islands to make pickups and deliveries.
America marked a milestone in 2033 - the last coal-fired power station in the country, in this case the massive General James M. Gavin power plant in Cheshire, Ohio, was closed in March by owner American Electric Power for conversion to firing by natural gas, municipal refuse and biomass. This didn't mean that coal mining didn't continue to happen, but rather it had other uses - some 57 plants existed in the country for the turning of coal into synthetic crude, and coal was also used for making of coking coal for making steel, as well as low-sulfur coals (particularly anthracite) being used for the extraction of carbon for the production of carbonfiber, which by the 2030s was being used in thousands of places, many of these replacing steel or aluminum. The brittleness of carbon-fiber and its being more challenging to work with meant that steel was still being used in structural and heat-sensitive applications, but by the 2030s automobiles were almost entirely made from aluminum and carbon fiber as well as various plastics, a situation mirrored in aerospace, where nearly all modern airliners were made overwhelmingly from carbon fiber. Dr. Paul Washington (by 2030 by some margin the wealthiest black man in America with a net worth of $16 Billion) and his employers at 3M and Kenosha Material Science, who had developed the revolutionary Washington Process for developing carbonfiber from carbon dioxide, by this time were rapidly becoming seen as the people who were making possible a materials revolution, and it also resulted in many places (including at the Gavin power plant) smokestacks becoming a thing of the past, with some 15,000 local residents on hand to watch the stacks at the Gavin Plant brought down on May 19, 2034. With the last large municipal landfills now also history - the last of these were closed in the mid-2020s - the biggest single source of fuel for burning in such power plants was refuse, and these facilities produced some 9% of the United States electrical generation, operating with nuclear energy (60%), renewables including hydroelectricity (19%) and natural gas (12%) for the country's electrical capacity.
The later 2020s also saw the first serious talk of expanding the United States, a situation largely centered on Cuba. Being one of the last truly communist states on Earth after the 1990s saw Communism fade in China and collapse violently in Europe, Cuba was eventually forced to begin changing its economy in the 1990s and 2000s. While Cuban-American relations improved substantially in the 2000s and the embargo was lifted in 2005, the country's political problems remained visible, and the 2010s saw Raul Castro, the brother of famed revolutionary Fidel Castro (who died in 2016 from cancer) and President of Cuba until 2018, change the way the country existed. Cuba's economy changed in the 2010s, but by the end of the decade saw the situation in Cuba go south. Hurricane Adriana's devastation of a sizable chunk of the island in April 2020 saw its tourism revenue badly fall off, and the growth of such destinations in the Bahamas, Turks and Caicos, Jamaica, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico and the Antillies saw a major drop-off in revenues for the country's largest single source of foreign currency, and the allowance of visits to Cuba by American expats after the 2005 embargo removal, made the people of Cuba realize just what they were missing. After Fidel's death, the country's social problems got ugly - and they got uglier in the 2020s, as social problems crippled the country. Just as with the glasnost-era Soviet Union, social disruptions resulted from the decision to open the nation to the world. The loss of the tourist industry and the economic problems of major energy patron Venezuela caused both a deep economic recession, making the social problems worse. Massive protests crippled the country in 2021 and early 2022, and the communist system in Cuba collapsed in 2022, with the new governments of the 2020s proving unable to keep the country's social safety net from crumbling - it remained in existence, but as the country's skilled people (of which there were many) began to leave the nation and the country's post-communist era saw major economic difficulties, the number of those who fled Cuba grew, and it almost entirely went north to the United States.
After a tropical storm foundered a massively-overloaded fishing boat heading from Cuba to Key West on June 19, 2023, Canadian destroyer British Columbia and American cruiser Gettysburg were forced to rescue some 130 people from the Florida Straits, but an estimated 450 people died as a result. The disaster caused Cuban Americans to loudly demand that the United States do something about the situation in Cuba, but Washington wisely was cautious, though the country's continuing economic problems in the 2020s caused a movement on the island and in Miami for Cuba to join the United States as its 53rd state. The issue was repeatedly deferred by Washington and was not particularly popular in Cuba, but the country's economic problems and the fact that by 2030 over 2.8 million Cuban Americans lived in the United States and the country needed help that there was little hope of anyone aside from the United States providing.
The Cuba situation was somewhat a result of the huge Hispanic involvement in American politics. By the 2030s, with Hispanics being a majority in Florida, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada and California and with huge numbers in several other states, the issues that this huge and relatively-new population of Americans posed to traditional power structures. Widely regarded as swing voters and more religious than the norm, Hispanic Americans proved to be a key voting bloc in several national elections in the first half of the 21st Century, and their sizable power and considerable organization allowed them to advance their rights, but having created and grown alliances with others in earlier years, their victories were almost immediately shared with many others, most notable their pushing for greater government services in other languages being good for several other new immigrant populations and their shoving for money specifically to improve the housing stocks in several cities being highly beneficial to several heavily black-dominated poorer areas such as Houston's infamous Fifth Ward, Detroit's Black Bottom and the still predominantly-black areas of the Bronx in New York City. It was not a surprise to many that this was reciprocated where possible, and by the 2020s multiple civil rights organizations and activist communities formed to advance the needs of their individual communities were merging their goals, operations and in many cases their staff, aiming to use numbers to get more done, moves that many say almost certainly influenced the 2032 American Presidential election (a very narrow victory for the Governor of Michigan, Democrat Robert Kennison over Arizona Republican Senator Meghan McCain) and was by the 2020s forcing states to adapt to new social realities - good organization and get-out-the-vote campaigns, helped by President Obama's 2022 move resulting in November voting days being declared a statutory holiday (which caused a considerable rise in turnout), caused voter turnout to stay very high in American elections among its poorer classes, a reality that made sure that these people had a powerful voice in America's houses of power.
Societally, what was also happening was that Americans were living longer, healthier lives. By 2030, the prevalence of tobacco smoking by Americans had dropped to under 10%, down from nearly 40% in 1970, and the number of Americans who were considered obese was falling. Alcoholism was also becoming less prevalent, and drug abuse had fallen spectacularly from the highest numbers of the 1970s. This isn't to say that people were getting smaller - the average height for an American male by 2030 had grown to just a hair under six feet and the average female height of just over 5'7", an average rise of three inches in just over 30 years, one of the fastest rises in human history. Many figured that this was the result more than anything of the country's prosperity. (It was also worth noting that the tallest population on average was black Americans, who averaged just over 6'2" for men and 5'8" for women.) Part of this was that agricultural science had long since begun producing healthier foods - the near-total elimination of trans fats in foods and massive reductions of saturated fats in fast foods that came from deep frying being replaced by high-temperature flash cooking methods was a help in this, as was the fact that corn demand had swelled to such a degree that high-fructose corn syrup had fallen out of favor in many sweetened products in favor of purer forms of cane sugar for economic reasons. (Climate change helped this, as sugar production in the world grew substantially in the 2020s in many parts of North Africa, as well as in Australia and parts of North America.) As both agroscience and climate change lengthened growing seasons in many parts of the world and made possible foodstuffs that otherwise would not have been possible to grow (as well as higher wealth in much of the world growing the demand for foods beyond staple foodstuffs), many fields in the United States began shifting, a trend encouraged by many scientists as a way of reducing soil nutrient loss. Higher food demand in the developing world was somewhat counteracted by growing food production in most of the Western World, and by the growing development of 'artificial food', meats, grains and dairy products grown entirely in greenhouses and laboratories. Development of these foods creates the potential to massively expand the world's production from many energy and land-intensive forms of agriculture, a prospect greatly welcomed in much of the world.
TBC....
By 2030, the United States of America, by this time the world's wealthiest nation as well as its fastest growing in terms of population (with India and China having seen their populations level off, whereas America was growing at a rate of nearly 3 million a year), was facing a number of realities. Despite its military, industrial, diplomatic, cultural and financial power having been nearly unchallenged through the second half of the 21st Century, America by 2030 was facing real challenges to its supremacy....but unlike the competitions between global empires in human history that often as not ended with armed conflicts, this conflict was singularly unlikely to do so, namely because the economic growth of the two powers most likely to challenge America - India and China, two countries themselves rivals in several places in their own right - were both reliant on trade with the West for economic growth and had vast quantities of capital tied up in these nations, a situation that was also true in reverse. It was also true with most of the world's developed economies - Europe, Latin America, most of the Middle East and even most of Africa were also involved in the world's economic growth, and the opportunities for those who were chasing were vast, but rivalries existed everywhere. With several countries (count America, China, India, Britain, France, Russia, Germany, Canada, Australia, Brazil, Iran and Japan among these by 2030) operating naval forces which could operate around the world and the development of faster technology allowing communications to go around the world in moments, the world was moving away from armed conflicts in general, in large part due to diplomats, economics and military forces, all of which combined to make wars much too expensive for nations to undertake unless the payoff was vast, but such payoffs were nearly non-existent in this world.
By 2030, there was new worlds to explore in any case. Climate change was opening new territories to live in in areas that were once very hard to live in (particularly northern Canada and northern Russia) as well as massively increasing the rainfall and thus making it easier to live in places that had once been deserts where water concerns had always been paramount. (Australia, the United States and North Africa were particular beneficiaries of this.) Greenland, which had gained independence from Denmark in 2026, was one of the world's new frontiers for mining firms, as the deposits there - uranium and thorium, rare earth metals, iron ore, rubies and diamonds, zinc and nickel - were massive, and companies fought over these, and Greenland by the end of the 2030s would be one of the world's most wealthy nations as a result of the vast minerals under its soil. Despite this, Greenland's strict environmental laws made sure that people had to do it properly, or else the Greenlanders would come down hard on them.
Also making lives for people was the ocean, but not in traditional ways. Sustainable fisheries were by the late 2020s required by most nations (and the Ocean Resources Treaty of 2033 made this law in many of those), but the beginning of the building of several new nuclear fusion power stations by the 2030s required the production of a sizable amount more tritium and deuterium for these plants to use than was existent in world stocks, and so major producers took to the oceans to extract deuterium from seawater. Several smaller companies got into this industry using converted freighters or tankers outfitted with electrolytic systems, but it didn't take long before the ships on the water began to be built for the purpose. NS Energy Revolution, built by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries in Japan for Japan Nuclear Energy Corporation using South African-manufactured nuclear reactors, was the first of these, and the ship was capable of making 4,500 pounds a month of deuterium (though in the process, the ship used over 400,000 tons of water to do so), making the ship's considerable cost worthwhile. The development of nuclear fusion beyond the four ITER reactors had resulted in new plants using many ITER technologies being built at new reactors at Dounreay in the United Kingdom, Kudankulam in India, Jervis Bay in Australia, Dimona in Israel, Bushehr in Iran, Changjiang in China, Koeberg in South Africa and Turkey Point in the United States. The advancing development and near-limitless power potential of nuclear fusion was such that by now many fossil fuel, energy and infrastructure companies were scrambling to get on board, which when combined with the growth of energy demands was making the need to get the problems of nuclear fusion settled more important. Indeed, electric cars and trains, new electronics, electric heating of homes, magnetic refrigeration, increasingly-advanced display technologies and increasing use of electric power in heavy industrial applications was making things more difficult, though the development of wireless electric transmission in low-current applications was making wiring houses simpler and removing wiring in some places in major cities. With the world's climate issues forcing reductions in the use of fossil fuels and the advantages of electric-powered forms of transport being quite obvious, this demand was not falling, and it was felt by many that the companies and nations who could settle the problems of nuclear fusion would make unimaginable quantities of wealth from it.
The new realities manifested itself in that industries that it had once dominated at were now being challenged, both at home and abroad. The share of the American market occupied by the Detroit automakers sank to just over 70% by 2030s, namely by the Japanese and German automakers, though by now the Tata Europa and Tata Deriva were selling strongly to economy-minded American customers (neither was exactly a bad car, just a less-expensive one) and the Chinese makers were looking to get into the North American markets, though BYD's attempts were buried by a lawsuit from Toyota, claiming that BYD had ripped off their Sienna minivan in the BYD M6. Detroit (and Chicago, Toronto and Los Angeles) worked on fixing that by continually improving their products, and by the 2020s most cars had been designed with similar bodies on separate chassis for cars powered by internal combustion engines or electric cars, with the electric cars using a different chassis. The development of electric cars had seen many former gas stations rebuilt as charging stations for electric cars, even as other gas stations now in many cases stocked not only gasoline but also diesel, alcohol fuels, isobutanol and/or biodiesel. The fuels each had their own benefits and downsides, but by 2030 the sales of vehicles powered by such fuels were outstripping gasoline, and indeed by then the car world was shifting. While the luxury car market outside of North America had long been dominated by European cars, the 1990s had seen the Lexus and Infiniti take Japan into the big leagues, and then Cadillac, Lincoln and Chrysler into that club, particularly in the world in the 2000s. While the small car and SUV club grew massively as others from around the world got into it, American luxury cars began to show up in other nations, particularly in China (GM's Buick brand was by 2020 second only to Volkswagen for sales among foreign car brands there), India and much of Africa (where the Lincoln LS, Cadillac Seville and Deville and Chrysler 300 became status symbols). These export markets ultimately caused these companies to wisely expand their offerings, with cars like the Chrysler 200, Lincoln Zephyr and Cadillac Catera. Also growing was sports and muscle cars, as these cars gained popularity in much of the world among those who wanted to portray an image. Also challenged was America's supremacy in airliners - long a triopoly of Boeing, McDonnell Douglas and Airbus, the world's airliner markets had been shaken up first by the Bombardier WA Series and the Ilyushin IL-98, and then by Embraer's Futura series, the Sukhoi Superjet and the merger between Mitsubishi Aerospace and McDonnell Douglas that created Mitsubishi McDonnell Douglas and created a series of superb aircraft. Boeing's market share fell as rivals hit it from everywhere - the long-ranged 777 was rivalled by the fast Bombardier WA310 and the even longer-ranged Airbus A340, while the 'superjumbo' Airbus A380 locked horns with Boeing's venerable 747-8 and th small jet market got crowded as the 737NG faced off with the Airbus A320, Bombardier CSeries, Embraer E-175 and E-190, MMD MD-14A and the Sukhoi Superjet 100, all of which could do everything the 737 did - and making matters worse for the small jets was the fact that a great many of the world's markets for these were increasingly being served by high-speed trains, which were better for the environment and in most cases could go downtown-to-downtown in major destinations, a feat in most cases impossible with airliners. But as with other industries, Boeing and MMD took to the challenges with aplomb, developing new and better variants of their products and improving their build quality in an attempt to make their products better.
Indeed, the fact that all of America's major industrial sectors faced rivals at home and abroad that could match them shot for shot was taken seriously by the high officials at said companies, and most responded to them in similar ways. Knowing that cost-cutting could only work to a point - there was no way to make American workers work for what Indian or Russian or Chinese counterparts did - the response by many was the same, that being make the products as good as possible, both in terms of capability and durability. Boeing was happy to boast that its airliners had unparalleled build quality and durability, and by that point American-built cars, trucks and motorcycles already had a reputation for durability in their bodies and mechanical components. The electronics made by the likes of Apple, Dell, Cisco Systems, Bose, RCA, Motorola, Hewlett-Packard, General Electric, Nvidia, Intel, Microsoft, Alienware and Atari all made sure that their products were known for durability, and this led to a massive shift in the 2010s and 2020s as the companies involved found themselves in a bind - rising costs in Asian contractors caused concerns with quality control that most of the companies were unwilling to deal with, and that caused a raft of companies to restart or expand North American production of such electronics, accepting higher production costs in return for better quality control and lower logistics costs. This reality also had effects on the suppliers of materials and goods for this industry, and it was estimated that the massive expansion of employment in the electronics industry in America caused an estimated 325,000 jobs added in California alone in this field between 2015 and 2030 and caused the so-called "Silicon Valley" by then long established in San Jose and the Santa Clara Valley of California to expand up both sides of the bay to bohemian San Francisco and middle-class Oakland, education-focused Berkeley and industrial Vallejo, as well as creating a nexus of electronics industries in several other major cities, including Seattle, Austin, Denver, Portland, Albuquerque and Dallas, and the industries expanded far beyond the American West, with electronics plants being established in other places, particularly in the industrial Midwest and parts of the Northeast. Just as American shipbuilders, automakers and materials producers before them had learned to deal with competition, so it was with electronics firms and aerospace ones, and the result was almost entirely hugely beneficial.
The sociology of the United States was also changing. With a massively-growing Hispanic population and growing numbers (percentage-wise) of African, Indian, Asian and Native Americans, the non-Hispanic white majority of the United States sank from 62.5% in 2001 to 53.7% in 2031, despite the country's sizable population growth in that same timeframe, even though all major demographic groups in the United States by then had birthrates well above the replacement fertility rate. Additionally, by this point the urban population of the United States, which in the 2031 Census made up some 85.5% of the total population, was congregated in cities that were increasingly racially-diverse, with cities once dominated by one race or gender now becoming more cosmopolitan, and increasing gentrification of neighborhoods and growing population density in many cities, even in widespread ones like Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, Houston, Miami and Phoenix, was rising and it showed in the skylines of many of these places. Los Angeles and New York were the vanguards of this - Los Angeles' once nearly all-black South Central regions had gone from some of the city's poorer regions to many of its most comfortably integrated middle-class ones in the 2010s and 2020s, helped along by middle-class jobs and investments and growing population diversity, starting with big waves of Hispanics in the 2000s and 2010s and then big numbers of Indians in the 2020s. In many places, the most outer-most suburban regions began to sink as better mass transit, higher population density (and the greater amenities that went with it) and falling crime numbers caused population to move back into cities. Unlike urban renewals of the past, though, many of these projects made sure that local residents would be able to stay there (in many cities, this was a requirement for major redevelopment projects), and in more than a few cases, local residents took it upon themselves to try to improve this. Cities began to show off their own regional identities in terms of local designs, styles, customs and pastimes in attempts to draw in new businesses and residents, usually with good results. This, along with changing work habits (by the 2030s, communications tech was allowing more and more people to work by telecommuting, with people working from home in many white-collar industries) and growing leisure time was contributing to city centers that sought out better amenities.
The future was also being seen on the oceans. By the early 2030s, floating 'energy islands' were becoming a reality in many tropical areas, taking advantage of the temperature difference between deep water and surface water to both desalinate water and produce electricity, with these plants first seeing use in warm-climate nations such as the Philippines, Japan, Indonesia, South Africa, Iran, Morocco, Mexico and Brazil. This also leads to water tankers and other vessels meant for transporting water to land. Also acting from many of these floating islands are systems to extract natural gas from methane hydrate deposits, with most of these islands using wind turbines or self-produced OTEC power to run these operations. The huge amounts of natural gas produced this way led to a new fleet of vessels meant to deliver these fuels to ports - and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and Austal Global led the way here, developing a catamaran LNG carrier meant to deliver the natural gas from these ports at cruising speeds of up to 35 knots, far faster than existing vessels, while also having better fuel efficiency running on biodiesel-fueled gas turbine engines. It didn't take long for others to copy this, and soon LNG-powered gas tankers began arriving at the islands to make pickups and deliveries.
America marked a milestone in 2033 - the last coal-fired power station in the country, in this case the massive General James M. Gavin power plant in Cheshire, Ohio, was closed in March by owner American Electric Power for conversion to firing by natural gas, municipal refuse and biomass. This didn't mean that coal mining didn't continue to happen, but rather it had other uses - some 57 plants existed in the country for the turning of coal into synthetic crude, and coal was also used for making of coking coal for making steel, as well as low-sulfur coals (particularly anthracite) being used for the extraction of carbon for the production of carbonfiber, which by the 2030s was being used in thousands of places, many of these replacing steel or aluminum. The brittleness of carbon-fiber and its being more challenging to work with meant that steel was still being used in structural and heat-sensitive applications, but by the 2030s automobiles were almost entirely made from aluminum and carbon fiber as well as various plastics, a situation mirrored in aerospace, where nearly all modern airliners were made overwhelmingly from carbon fiber. Dr. Paul Washington (by 2030 by some margin the wealthiest black man in America with a net worth of $16 Billion) and his employers at 3M and Kenosha Material Science, who had developed the revolutionary Washington Process for developing carbonfiber from carbon dioxide, by this time were rapidly becoming seen as the people who were making possible a materials revolution, and it also resulted in many places (including at the Gavin power plant) smokestacks becoming a thing of the past, with some 15,000 local residents on hand to watch the stacks at the Gavin Plant brought down on May 19, 2034. With the last large municipal landfills now also history - the last of these were closed in the mid-2020s - the biggest single source of fuel for burning in such power plants was refuse, and these facilities produced some 9% of the United States electrical generation, operating with nuclear energy (60%), renewables including hydroelectricity (19%) and natural gas (12%) for the country's electrical capacity.
The later 2020s also saw the first serious talk of expanding the United States, a situation largely centered on Cuba. Being one of the last truly communist states on Earth after the 1990s saw Communism fade in China and collapse violently in Europe, Cuba was eventually forced to begin changing its economy in the 1990s and 2000s. While Cuban-American relations improved substantially in the 2000s and the embargo was lifted in 2005, the country's political problems remained visible, and the 2010s saw Raul Castro, the brother of famed revolutionary Fidel Castro (who died in 2016 from cancer) and President of Cuba until 2018, change the way the country existed. Cuba's economy changed in the 2010s, but by the end of the decade saw the situation in Cuba go south. Hurricane Adriana's devastation of a sizable chunk of the island in April 2020 saw its tourism revenue badly fall off, and the growth of such destinations in the Bahamas, Turks and Caicos, Jamaica, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico and the Antillies saw a major drop-off in revenues for the country's largest single source of foreign currency, and the allowance of visits to Cuba by American expats after the 2005 embargo removal, made the people of Cuba realize just what they were missing. After Fidel's death, the country's social problems got ugly - and they got uglier in the 2020s, as social problems crippled the country. Just as with the glasnost-era Soviet Union, social disruptions resulted from the decision to open the nation to the world. The loss of the tourist industry and the economic problems of major energy patron Venezuela caused both a deep economic recession, making the social problems worse. Massive protests crippled the country in 2021 and early 2022, and the communist system in Cuba collapsed in 2022, with the new governments of the 2020s proving unable to keep the country's social safety net from crumbling - it remained in existence, but as the country's skilled people (of which there were many) began to leave the nation and the country's post-communist era saw major economic difficulties, the number of those who fled Cuba grew, and it almost entirely went north to the United States.
After a tropical storm foundered a massively-overloaded fishing boat heading from Cuba to Key West on June 19, 2023, Canadian destroyer British Columbia and American cruiser Gettysburg were forced to rescue some 130 people from the Florida Straits, but an estimated 450 people died as a result. The disaster caused Cuban Americans to loudly demand that the United States do something about the situation in Cuba, but Washington wisely was cautious, though the country's continuing economic problems in the 2020s caused a movement on the island and in Miami for Cuba to join the United States as its 53rd state. The issue was repeatedly deferred by Washington and was not particularly popular in Cuba, but the country's economic problems and the fact that by 2030 over 2.8 million Cuban Americans lived in the United States and the country needed help that there was little hope of anyone aside from the United States providing.
The Cuba situation was somewhat a result of the huge Hispanic involvement in American politics. By the 2030s, with Hispanics being a majority in Florida, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada and California and with huge numbers in several other states, the issues that this huge and relatively-new population of Americans posed to traditional power structures. Widely regarded as swing voters and more religious than the norm, Hispanic Americans proved to be a key voting bloc in several national elections in the first half of the 21st Century, and their sizable power and considerable organization allowed them to advance their rights, but having created and grown alliances with others in earlier years, their victories were almost immediately shared with many others, most notable their pushing for greater government services in other languages being good for several other new immigrant populations and their shoving for money specifically to improve the housing stocks in several cities being highly beneficial to several heavily black-dominated poorer areas such as Houston's infamous Fifth Ward, Detroit's Black Bottom and the still predominantly-black areas of the Bronx in New York City. It was not a surprise to many that this was reciprocated where possible, and by the 2020s multiple civil rights organizations and activist communities formed to advance the needs of their individual communities were merging their goals, operations and in many cases their staff, aiming to use numbers to get more done, moves that many say almost certainly influenced the 2032 American Presidential election (a very narrow victory for the Governor of Michigan, Democrat Robert Kennison over Arizona Republican Senator Meghan McCain) and was by the 2020s forcing states to adapt to new social realities - good organization and get-out-the-vote campaigns, helped by President Obama's 2022 move resulting in November voting days being declared a statutory holiday (which caused a considerable rise in turnout), caused voter turnout to stay very high in American elections among its poorer classes, a reality that made sure that these people had a powerful voice in America's houses of power.
Societally, what was also happening was that Americans were living longer, healthier lives. By 2030, the prevalence of tobacco smoking by Americans had dropped to under 10%, down from nearly 40% in 1970, and the number of Americans who were considered obese was falling. Alcoholism was also becoming less prevalent, and drug abuse had fallen spectacularly from the highest numbers of the 1970s. This isn't to say that people were getting smaller - the average height for an American male by 2030 had grown to just a hair under six feet and the average female height of just over 5'7", an average rise of three inches in just over 30 years, one of the fastest rises in human history. Many figured that this was the result more than anything of the country's prosperity. (It was also worth noting that the tallest population on average was black Americans, who averaged just over 6'2" for men and 5'8" for women.) Part of this was that agricultural science had long since begun producing healthier foods - the near-total elimination of trans fats in foods and massive reductions of saturated fats in fast foods that came from deep frying being replaced by high-temperature flash cooking methods was a help in this, as was the fact that corn demand had swelled to such a degree that high-fructose corn syrup had fallen out of favor in many sweetened products in favor of purer forms of cane sugar for economic reasons. (Climate change helped this, as sugar production in the world grew substantially in the 2020s in many parts of North Africa, as well as in Australia and parts of North America.) As both agroscience and climate change lengthened growing seasons in many parts of the world and made possible foodstuffs that otherwise would not have been possible to grow (as well as higher wealth in much of the world growing the demand for foods beyond staple foodstuffs), many fields in the United States began shifting, a trend encouraged by many scientists as a way of reducing soil nutrient loss. Higher food demand in the developing world was somewhat counteracted by growing food production in most of the Western World, and by the growing development of 'artificial food', meats, grains and dairy products grown entirely in greenhouses and laboratories. Development of these foods creates the potential to massively expand the world's production from many energy and land-intensive forms of agriculture, a prospect greatly welcomed in much of the world.
TBC....
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I caught the latest update TheMann! Very tasty stuff.
Being a techie, seeing fusion take off, as well as OTEC and meaningful clathrate exploitation, plus SPS, geothermal, and other sources developed and exploited means energy crises are done. Sweet!
Greenland becoming exploitable means 20% of Earth's freshwater rejoined the ocean, so seas rise enough to imperil coastal cities around the globe.
As a semi-Green, sustainable fisheries is a massive step in the right direction.
Finding solutions to oceanic polution, acdification, and habitat loss could butterfly the worst die-off since the Permian-Triassic boundary @ 252 mya. 95% of oceanic species and 70% of terrestiral species died then.
By some estimates, it took 30 million years for various species to recover b/c the oceanic climate and thermohaline circulation were so jacked up.
For the tl;dr crowd, the earth will be fine, life finds a way, but it doesn't give a fig about you personally.
Clathrate exploitation to me is a rather touchy subject- plenty of energy, but methane's role as a greenhouse gas (60X more powerful than CO2) and how huge the quantitites involved happen to be could really jack the climate up for millennia.
Beyond global disaster to s/t less vexing, like Cuba- hmm...Cuba's not as bloody minded as or delusional as DPRK. Why couldn't it find a migration plan away from socialism a la Yugoslavia or Vietnam or China?
If the gates between Cuba and US were opened in 2005, give folks a decade to process the new info and find ways to exploit the situation with a lot of help from the Cuban-Americans as the Chinese diaspora helped the PRC once it opened up, things could be developing at explosive-levels of growth from 2015 on.
How much the average Cuban benefits from it's another story.
Sure politics are a mess, but I just can't see Cuba imploding that bad.
Cuba petitioning to be a US state?
Really?
NEUMA! Ni en un millon anos! I refuse to say ASB, but no.
The only time I see Cuba becoming a US state is basically butterflying the Platt Amendment and assurances Cubans are American citizens able to vote, regardless of what color they are really early (ca 1905) which would make US Southerners blanch, catch the vapors, whatever.
By the 1930's or 1940's they were used to running themselves and doing pretty well. People talk about how bad Argentina lost ground in the 20th century, but Castroite Cuba barbecued its economy and quality of life to a degree only rivalled by Cambodia when the Khmer Rouge took over.
Puerto Rico's had its massive problems with 1/20th the population that the mainland could comfortably ignore and did.
Cuba OTOH would be a bleeding mess for decades. People in DC and troops on the ground in Cuba in 1900 knew it and wanted no part of it,
It didn't hurt that the Moro insurgency in the Philippines gave the US army and marines a vivid, current example of how ugly that could get.
At any rate, love the TL but find a couple of quibbles.
Being a techie, seeing fusion take off, as well as OTEC and meaningful clathrate exploitation, plus SPS, geothermal, and other sources developed and exploited means energy crises are done. Sweet!
Greenland becoming exploitable means 20% of Earth's freshwater rejoined the ocean, so seas rise enough to imperil coastal cities around the globe.
As a semi-Green, sustainable fisheries is a massive step in the right direction.
Finding solutions to oceanic polution, acdification, and habitat loss could butterfly the worst die-off since the Permian-Triassic boundary @ 252 mya. 95% of oceanic species and 70% of terrestiral species died then.
By some estimates, it took 30 million years for various species to recover b/c the oceanic climate and thermohaline circulation were so jacked up.
For the tl;dr crowd, the earth will be fine, life finds a way, but it doesn't give a fig about you personally.
Clathrate exploitation to me is a rather touchy subject- plenty of energy, but methane's role as a greenhouse gas (60X more powerful than CO2) and how huge the quantitites involved happen to be could really jack the climate up for millennia.
Beyond global disaster to s/t less vexing, like Cuba- hmm...Cuba's not as bloody minded as or delusional as DPRK. Why couldn't it find a migration plan away from socialism a la Yugoslavia or Vietnam or China?
If the gates between Cuba and US were opened in 2005, give folks a decade to process the new info and find ways to exploit the situation with a lot of help from the Cuban-Americans as the Chinese diaspora helped the PRC once it opened up, things could be developing at explosive-levels of growth from 2015 on.
How much the average Cuban benefits from it's another story.
Sure politics are a mess, but I just can't see Cuba imploding that bad.
Cuba petitioning to be a US state?
Really?
NEUMA! Ni en un millon anos! I refuse to say ASB, but no.
The only time I see Cuba becoming a US state is basically butterflying the Platt Amendment and assurances Cubans are American citizens able to vote, regardless of what color they are really early (ca 1905) which would make US Southerners blanch, catch the vapors, whatever.
By the 1930's or 1940's they were used to running themselves and doing pretty well. People talk about how bad Argentina lost ground in the 20th century, but Castroite Cuba barbecued its economy and quality of life to a degree only rivalled by Cambodia when the Khmer Rouge took over.
Puerto Rico's had its massive problems with 1/20th the population that the mainland could comfortably ignore and did.
Cuba OTOH would be a bleeding mess for decades. People in DC and troops on the ground in Cuba in 1900 knew it and wanted no part of it,
It didn't hurt that the Moro insurgency in the Philippines gave the US army and marines a vivid, current example of how ugly that could get.
At any rate, love the TL but find a couple of quibbles.
- Status