The Aberdeen and Snotfish Chailway

Truly it is amazing how much your protocol is affected by your local environment.  When the Aberdeen and Rockfish "shortline" railroad is servicing the DAK Americas plant on Cedar Creek Rd, my productivity becomes limited.  Probably in response to a handful of letters to the editor I have penned to our local Fayetteville Observer, now the A&R is shunting freight cars from Russell Street to Glensford Ave.  Perhaps this is a blessing, because their daily switching of freight in the Norfolk Southern yard is shared with both them and CSX.  As I dully have mentioned previously, three railroads operating in downtown Fayetteville is too much.  Business owners and patrons of businesses would agree.  It is ludicrous really.  Leaving a baseball game and walking back to your car you must stop for a local freight consist.  Again perhaps the A&R assembling trains behind Berean Church and Christian Academy is a blessing.  What!?  That is even more ludicrous.  Ludicrous is a shortline railroad based in Aberdeen, North Carolina, which makes it money from contracts in Fayetteville.  The majority of their earnings occur when their railroad activity is functioning in someone else's city.  That is Donald Trump convenient.  The origins of the A&R are a great success story in the railroad industry.  They laid down tracks in the great pine forests of the sandhills, felled the trees, and provided raw materials to the United States Navy.  Pine sap for turpentine.  When their great pillage was complete, venture capitalists appeared and turned the vast expanses of lowland into the Pinehurst golf resort.  Let's hear it for creative business thinking.  Now that the turpentine industry has subsided, the A&R focus on other contracts which seem to be mostly in Fayetteville.  The story goes they sneaked over to Fayetteville in the middle of the night and build a crossover across the mainline railroad tracks.  Now their access to the downtown yard and potential future businesses was sealed.  A century later still the Aberdeen and Rockfish is making their money by operating largely in Cumberland County.  This activity has escalated during the Trump presidency has all rail activity.  The EPA is a shell agency that was instructed to do nothing.  They did not police the Chemours plant providing tainted drinking water to Wilmington.  They have not monitored the overall health of the Cape Fear River Basin.  They have not kept track of rampant low frequency noise pollution created by the railroads.  If you can't see it, it isn't there.  I know better, and when the A&R is busy making their money, my productivity is limited.  Why?  Who knew they had a small freight yard in close proximity to Cross Creek Mall.  During the Covid 19 crisis they parked hazardous material tank cars next to Montclaire Elementary School.  Even if they were empty, we all know that fumes from chemicals mixed with air are more dangerous and potentially lethal to human beings in case of an incident.  What kind of incident could there be?  A spark of some kind and two apartment complexes, several churches, and a Christian Academy would burn into oblivion.  The EPA did nothing.  Wednesdays and Thursdays are a drag in Fayetteville.  The military machine and the industrial complex tool on, and it is the dominant force.  You cannot ignore it.  I spend my days trying to get around its influence.  Plastic is the one commodity that is ruining our planet.  It is in the oceans.  It is everywhere, and DAK Americas owned by a MEXICAN conglomerate manufactures plastic from polyester resin on Cedar Creek Rd.  Evidently the Aberdeen and Rockfish supply the raw materials and deliver their product.  All three railroads share this responsibility.  CSX has been delivering the goods like they did today.  Four o'clock and those rebuilt GP-38-3 AC locomotives, a newer version of a previously only direct current locomotive, shutter into service.  Our dinner time is destroyed.  Diesel knock for hours.  Who decided this was the appropriate time to switch freight cars to this plant?  Dinnertime?  Why no normal working hours?  Fayetteville is the only city in North Carolina which gets hotter after the sun sets, because this is when the trains begin to run.  It gets hotter after the sun goes down.  Operating under the veil of darkness is a cheap device.  What is even cheaper is suggesting that any diesel electric freight locomotive is green in any way.  They are not.  They are one of the major contributors to global warming.  Watch any Captain Justice train video on Youtube, and you will see the intense vapor streams of pollutants pouring out of a locomotive smoke stacks.  It is surreal.  Heat.  Intense heat.  No one cares, because the big corporate lobby has been at work for decades forging their path.  No regulation for the railroads.  Cha ching.  Paid.  U.S. lawmakers.  A country club membership.  Gifts.  Travel.  So here I sit feeling the effects of a disruptive, polluting, invasive oppresion that is created by a company which resides in Aberdeen and does its dirty work in our town.  Ain't that the shit?