Pika’s recent observations of cheap shit from China being shipped by the trainload to the heartland may or may not be related to something I noticed more than a decade ago along the same rail line.

I was making relatively frequent visits to Clovis, New Mexico. We’d stay in the Holiday Inn, which was right across from the tracks, and we would see train after train loaded with stuff going west. Only west. I figured all the shit would eventually end up out in California, and they’d run out of stuff in the east and have to start shipping it back.

Clearly, given Pika’s observation, the whole thing was more international than I realized. That’s probably why it took so much longer than I expected. I wonder what sort of value has been added. Or did it just sit around in containers on the dock at Tianjin for ten years?