We should leave politics out, since half of us want one guy to win and half of us want the other to win.

As far as prices… many times during a recession people are looking for fun things to do close to home - this is a great opportunity for regional attractions such as tourist railroads and hometown rail museums.

I would love to share your optimism but I don't put it past our govt. to do their best to keep that price high. If not from exports to Europe, they will find another way. There are vested interests in perpetuating high fuel prices.

Biodiesel. Ignore the occasional "French fry clogging the line" (the handy Grand Canyon Railway shorthand for not enough BTUs to keep up enough steam and/or a flame blow-out)........

Of course, ignore for the moment the potential additional demand (and price rises) for the biodiesel cost, plus the refining expense which is large even if the feedstock is "free" (which, between additional uses and competition for it and transport costs, it's not).

An interesting aside to all this:

I just last week did some historical research on the fate of a specific Pennsylvania coal mine which fed three power plants in Pennsylvania, and by the closure of the plants was the primary coal source for all three and had been purchased by the utility in question.

According to various filings I found on the mine, its sister mine, and its coal-prep plant, when the utility company bought the first mine, post-WW2, it had about 450 underground miners. By the time it finally closed not long ago, it had fourteen working a strip face and the processing plant. Not only was the seam increasingly "worked out," but the processing plant was reduced to taking truckloads from much smaller mines elsewhere in the area. It's safe to assume both the strip mine and the trucks used a LOT of diesel.

And ironically, the one power plant it fed was ALSO getting truckloads in directly from small "bootleg" mines across the river, and even some of the last "river coal" being dredged from the river. Guess what fuel transported that coal?

Any wonder that the utility that replaced the one plant paid for a 50-mile pipeline to feed it natural gas from fracking operations?

This is not about who anyone wants to win, it is about finding the root causes for the dilemma that we have put ourselves in and what can be done to get out of it. As much as I would love to believe that politics exists in a vacuum separate from and having no impact on our industry, that is naive thinking that has no basis in reality. If there are impacts created by political machinations, then discuss it. Adhering to some arbitrary prohibition will do nobody any service in the quest for enlightenment as to the best way to navigate through these tough times.

I mean the root cause is Russia invading a neighboring country... something that should be EXTREMELY concerning to everyone. Saying the root cause is American politics (basically saying blame Biden without actually typing those words) also is naive thinking and has no basis in reality.

Rick, Dirty motor oil should work just fine in #58, you might be able to fire her for nothing...
Now that I think of it, you could do what some larger RRs do, and engineer a setup that would allow you to easily convert back and forth between coal and oil fuel. This would allow you to take advantage of fluctuations in the relative prices of the different fuels.

And, while I've got the floor, I don't think the little guy can expect to get a break no matter who wins tomorrow. You might as well vote for whomever nauseates you the least.

Doesn’t have to be left dirty. There are spin filters, manual or using a hand drill or other spinny thing, that will catch a lot of the crud, French fry crumbs or other stuff you might not want to send through.

We’re still wasting a lot of perfectly usable propane at oil well heads locally. We need to get a whole lot better at coordinating by-product use. It wouldn’t only be Green, it could save a lot of money.

We CHOSE to give Russia an economic win over us by refusing to buy their oil. That was a political decision that is only hurting us while helping Russia. Russia is still selling all the oil they want, but doing it at the higher price that our actions created while watching our economy implode. Putin played the US like a master chess player, while our leaders are fumbling around trying to figure out how to play checkers.

And separate from that, the continued rhetoric from Biden about shutting down coal plants, stopping drilling and generally killing the energy industry has spurred the decisions to not increase capacity to meet needs and to instead ride out what they are now producing at higher prices, knowing that the end is near.

Our coal needs are miniscule. It is the power plants that buy coal that keeps mines in business. If the major customers stop buying, those mines close and all of our supplies eventually dry up.

You have not been paying attention to what is going on then. The choice is crystal clear. Full steam ahead toward energy starvation or the chance to at least slow it down until a change in administration reverses the johnson bar.

As to the waste oil, yeah I know. Set up an entire apparatus for processing used motor oil to burn, including setting up networks of people to supply it. Yeah, as if my schedule isn't packed as it is. Just add another 10 hours a week tracking down fuel. I much prefer the alternative of not making boneheaded decisions to artificially create energy shortages.

And that used motor oil is going to become scarce as people who cannot afford to heat their homes start doing their own waste oil conversions. Of the two trucking companies near me, both burn waste oil to heat their own shops. That assumes that the high diesel prices doesn't put them out of business.

Without getting into the political end of things, the simple fact is that oil companies are making record profits. I don't care who you're voting for, it won't change these facts:

LONDON, Nov 1 (Reuters) - BP (BP.L) more than doubled its third-quarter profit from a year earlier to $8.15 billion and expanded its share buybacks by $2.5 billion, joining rivals in reporting bumper profits that have sparked renewed calls for energy companies to pay more taxes.

BP made a profit of $3.3 billion a year earlier and achieved a 14-year high of $8.45 billion in the second quarter of 2022.

London-based BP follows the likes of Shell (SHEL.L), Exxon Mobil and TotalEnergies (TTEF.PA), which also reported bumper profits last week, helping the sector to pay out a record $29 billion to shareholders.

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy ... 022-11-01/

That stuff that used to be "waste"? It's now kept behind locked gates at every garage and auto store that collects it here. Ditto the used kitchen grease, if the place has any decent volume (fried chicken/French-fry places). There have already been "pirate" collectors stealing both for several years now. Increase demand (and price) as an alternative, and the problem will worsen.

I'm sure the railroad up north of me that used WVO would love to hear about this "free" stuff you think exists.........

For normal demand (read: not during a pandemic) we're never going to cheap fuel prices again.

It doesn't matter who "wins" tomorrow. Oil companies have said they have no interest in increasing supply because they're making record profits with the high prices. I'm not saying long term politics don't factor in but even with the probable red wave expecting 2020 prices on Jan 1st is foolish.

Also this thread is a thinly veiled post for politics, not really about "preservation". I really wish this kind of content wasn't here.

This thread is about the cost and availability of the fuels that make our operations possible. This is extremely relevant to preservation.

Nobody sane is expecting 2020 prices on January 1. Reversing the policies that has created these artificial energy shortages will take years, even if possible at all. But we must act to protect our interests to the extent possible.

Biden has put the oil companies on death row. It is in their vested interest to milk their infrastructure for everything they can while they can. So the record profits make perfect sense and I do not fault them for that. Now if the oil companies felt confident that they could sell their products for decades into the future then some of those profits would go toward R&D, capital projects and exploration. This really isn't difficult to understand.

This has been for the large part, a discussion devoid of "politics", other than tangential references to policy objectives. You are the one who inserted a "political" comment about the Russia-Ukraine war; and it's a bit more complicated than the "four legs good, two legs bad" binary thinkers would have us believe.

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news ... dly-gamble

What you are complaining about in your explanation "since half of us want one guy to win and half of us want the other to win" is partisanship; which has not been brought up in this thread.

However, it is impossible to discuss energy markets without acknowledging political constraints, effects and influences. The OPEC cartel's pricing power is resurgent, prices are principally due to our Seppuku.

Almost nothing in the economic sphere is free from the iron fist of government. While it is common to complain about "capitalism" (as a synonym for free markets, but the term is a foil, devoid of meaning) the last unregulated transaction I saw was an exchange of baloney for peanut butter, decades ago-and today most kids get school hash served by by the hairnet set, so no trading possible.

What you are alluding to with "many times during a recession people are looking for fun things to do close to home" is the concept of inferior goods, which are things whose consumption rises when incomes fall.

https://corporatefinanceinstitute.com/r ... ior-goods/

A classic example is potatoes; as they are cheap, filling calories. Sometimes the categorization depends on the type; it is widely thought beer is inferior; while high end spirits are not- but sometimes empirical analysis yields surprising, counterintuitive results.

https://www.env-econ.net/2011/01/a-supe ... -good.html

That said, I'm unaware of any papers showing that show entertainment is an inferior good. If there's an extended or deepening recession; and dailyjobcuts.com becomes the first of the "must see" sites again, You might need to drain boilers and crankcases and cap stacks.