Hagestad Sandhouse Gang - Northwestern University's Transportation Center

[955 AM Weds. 05 May 2010 - Fixed the formatting - PDN.]

Courtesy of greyhounds about a month ago, several of us were introduced to the ‘on-line’ availability of the above, which describes itself as follows - I’d say it leans more towards the business and economic side than the technical aspects:

The Hagestad Sandhouse Gang is a railroad-oriented discussion group run by the Transportation Center at Northwestern University. The group meets monthly for 90 minutes to two hours with a speaker and then discussion of the presentation. The concept is to link active / semi-active rail practioners with students and academics at Northwestern and other schools. We currently have about 300 members and have been in existence for roughly five years.

See - [link]http://transportation.northwestern.edu/sandhouse/[/link]

We were able to view the PowerPoint slides and listen to most of the remarks and questions. Better yet, there’s an on-line archive of past meetings, most of which can be viewed or listened to, at:

[LINK]http://transportation.northwestern.edu/sandhouse/past.html[/LINK]

Apologies for the format issues - I’ll edit/ fix it tomorrow sometime. But I wanted to get this post up before I forgot about it yet again . . .

  • Paul North.

P.S. - A similar group is The Lexington Group in Transportation History, at -

[LINK]http://www.lexingtongroup.org/[/LINK]

It seems to be less formal, though perhaps more scholarly from what I’ve seen of some presentations. I’ll try to expand this in another post. - PDN.

Doug Hagestad was a freind of mine. (and some other regulars here) He was involved with transportation programs at both Northwestern and the University of Denver. I knew him from the ICG. He died at age 63.

There’s a presentation on High Speed Rail this month. The speaker has a PhD in transportation economics. If you’re a big fan of HSR and think guys like me “just don’t understand”, I don’t think you’ll like what the speaker has to say.

Of course, he hasn’t given the presentation yet. So we’ll have to wait and see for sure.

I have been to two presentations. Both were high quality discussions and presentations. Lately, there hasnt been too much that interests me. Also the start time of 3pm in Evanston is a logistics nightmare for me.

If you are into the economics of the industry, this is a good group.

Ed