I’m Bill Moyer, your host for the Reconnect America podcast.

For the last decade, I’ve been interviewing and learning about rail transportation, electrification and transmission from all sorts of angles and all sorts of folks from across the US and beyond. It has been - and continues to be - a fascinating journey and an honor to learn from these intelligent and generous people.

I came to this subject somewhat by mistake. As an activist, I had a conversation with a railroad worker, Mike Elliott, who was on the other side of a fight to establish a coal export facility in the Puget Sound. Mike challenged me to “green” a 2008 white paper on modernizing the Northern Transcon (the rail corridor from Chicago to Puget Sound). For years, as an activist I had worked to apply the lessons of Col. John R. Boyd’s work on grand strategy, via his protege and my friend and mentor Chuck Spinney. As a person who is interested in how regular people can come together to take on mightier foes, I took Mike’s challenge seriously. I put together a small team and three years later, we published the Solutionary Rail book.

Understanding grand strategy is essential if we are to manifest visions for a better life and a world that reflects our deepest aspirations and values. What’s crystal clear to me is that victories do not come from isolation, but through our connections with others. I hope that someday, people will look back and consider Solutionary Rail to be a case study in grand strategy, an example of a movement that transcended real and perceived differences to overcome the divide and conquer strategies of the rich and powerful. In this way, we can make a material difference in people’s lives by delivering an infrastructure for a more resilient, connected and prosperous society.

Sign up to help out or donate to support this work at SolutionaryRail.org

Artwork for our 2016 book is by J. Craig Thorpe. The color image are was appeared in the book. The drawing below was an earlier rendering. Painting the Possible is a theme Thorpe has explored extensively.