freight rail

A short, sarcastic Half as Interesting video about a tiny freight railway in Canada built to exploit a shipping regulation loophole. It explains how a track just 100 feet long counted as a railway.

John Oliver's Last Week Tonight segment on freight trains and railroads, covering how profit-driven practices undermine safety. It touches on longer trains and shrinking crews.

Footage of a doubleheader of locomotives crawling over badly maintained track on a former Wabash Railroad line, now the ND&W Railway. The uploader explains the track had deferred maintenance for decades.

DHH's opening keynote at Rails World 2024 in Toronto, where Rails 8 beta shipped. It covers built-in authentication, Propshaft, Solid Cache, Solid Queue, Solid Cable, Kamal 2 and Thruster, pitching the One Person Framework that needs no PaaS.

Wendover Productions explains why Amtrak trains run late: most Amtrak routes run on freight-owned track, and the law giving passenger trains priority is rarely enforced. The video covers rail ownership versus control and how freight carriers hold the leverage.

Wendover Productions explains why US passenger rail lags behind other countries. It covers freight companies owning most of the track, geography and population density, and the economics of competing with flying.

A Wendover Productions explainer on how China built the world's largest high-speed rail network so quickly and why its rail strategy differs from America's. It covers politics, social benefits and the economics of unprofitable lines.

Brian Cardarella's RailsConf 2016 talk on why and how teams can move from Rails to Elixir and Phoenix. It covers performance gains without losing productivity and how to introduce Phoenix in an organization.

CityNerd lays out a data-driven method for deciding where high-speed rail should be built in North America and identifies 56 city pairs that justify it, based on population and distance.

Wendover Productions explains how UK rail privatization worked and why it failed. It covers the fragmented operator and infrastructure structure and why market forces apply poorly to rail.

Aaron Patterson's RailsConf 2011 talk on Rails 3.1 performance, showing why deeper Rack middleware stacks slow Rails and how a shallower pipeline helps. It also touches on Rack API design.

Not Just Bikes examines Toronto's GO Transit commuter rail, arguing it is a costly system with park-and-ride stations and rush-hour-only service that subsidizes car-dependent suburbs.

Practical Engineering explains how continuous welded rail copes with thermal expansion by restraining it, using the relationship between temperature, stress and strain. The video is part of a series on railways.

Steve Yegge is interviewed at Google's Kirkland office about the birth, growth and future of his Rhino on Rails project, a Rails clone on the Rhino JavaScript engine, and other web development topics.

A short video of railroad workers in Storfors, Sweden, using thermite to weld rail sections together.

Sam Stephenson's RailsConf 2016 talk on Turbolinks 5, showing how small teams can ship fast Rails apps in the browser and hybrid iOS and Android apps sharing one set of web views.

David Heinemeier Hansson builds a blog engine with Ruby on Rails in 15 minutes, the demo that launched Rails' momentum.

The Monorail song scene from The Simpsons, uploaded with a note comparing it to a local Australian development controversy.

The original trailer for Threads, the 1984 British TV film depicting the aftermath of a nuclear attack on Sheffield. The trailer hints at the film's bleak tone.

David Heinemeier Hansson's opening keynote at RailsConf 2019 argues against the expectation of payment for open source work, drawing on his experience releasing Rails. It also includes lighter asides about the industry.

The official tour video of Miniatur Wunderland in Hamburg, the world's largest model railway. It shows the 1,300 square meter layout with trains, aircraft, cars and ships moving around.

Yehuda Katz's Railsberry 2012 talk on why Rails is hard to learn and use. He explains that the framework's many features reflect real complexity in web applications that newcomers do not yet see.

Matt Wynne's GoRuCo 2012 talk on why Rails apps get hard to change as they grow, and how a ports-and-adapters hexagonal architecture separates application logic from the framework.

A Cincinnati Ruby meetup talk by Jim Weirich on decoupling application logic from Rails. He argues for separating business logic from framework and database models.

Rich Hickey's keynote at RailsConf 2012, a close sibling of his 'Simple Made Easy' talk. He distinguishes simple (not intertwined) from easy (familiar), and argues that software complexity comes from complecting things, with Rails-specific examples including large gem collections.

David Heinemeier Hansson's RailsConf 2014 keynote argues that programming is closer to writing than to science, with clear code produced by iterating through drafts. It prioritizes clarity and craft over technical superiority.

Gary Vaynerchuk's keynote at RailsConf 2010 in Baltimore. The Wine Library TV founder talks about building a business and audience through genuine effort and caring about customers.

Alan Kay demonstrates GRaIL, a graphical input language system from around 1968 in which hand-drawn strokes become boxes, connections and dataflow-style programs.

Trailer for the documentary It's Quieter in the Twilight, shown at the Boston SciFi Film Festival. The film follows the engineers who keep the Voyager spacecraft running.

A Vox explainer on why California's high-speed rail project is years late and far over budget, with only a few concrete structures built by 2022. It covers the political, legal and routing challenges behind the delays.

A side-by-side edit lining up footage of the Wuppertal Schwebebahn suspended monorail filmed in 1902 and in 2015. It lets you compare how the buildings and surroundings changed over 113 years.

A short documentary clip of Japanese railway workers and Toyota staff using pointing-and-calling, a safety practice of physically pointing at and naming things while working. It includes examples from several railway companies.

Arend Schwab demonstrates a research bicycle, the two-mass-skate design, that balances itself without gyroscopic effects or trail. It challenges the common explanations for why a moving bicycle stays upright.

A controlled demonstration by Wabash National of a tank trailer collapsing under vacuum, staged at an industry expo. The tank implodes as air is pulled out.

A one-minute clip of slime mold placed on a map with food at the cities around Tokyo, growing a network that approximates the Tokyo-area railway system.

IGN's 2010 trailer for Infinity Blade, an Unreal Engine fighting game for iPhone, iPad and iPod. It shows off gameplay and the visuals of the mobile game.

Official trailer for Eugene Jarecki's 2012 documentary The House I Live In, an investigative look at America's war on drugs and its effect on the criminal justice system. It won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance.

The official trailer for the documentary General Magic, about the secretive Apple spinoff that tried to build a handheld communicator in 1990 and whose ideas shaped the smartphone era.

A short clip of Richard Feynman explaining how a train stays on its tracks, through the conical shape of wheels and how it handles curves without differentials.

Robert Martin's RailsConf 2009 talk looks at why Smalltalk lost out despite its technical strengths. He draws lessons about language communities and arrogance that he argues could hurt Ruby too.