How does a train of 72 oil tank cars and 5 locomotives have a crew of exactly one?

It's called "efficiency," my friend.

And "Fast Eddie" Burkhardt is renowned the world over for the efficiency two-step he brings to the railroads that he and his hedge fund backers have "restructured" over the years.

Step one in a Burkhardt restructuring is to prune back that inevitably "bloated" workforce.

Step two; grind down the wages of those who remain.

After all, every dollar out of a worker's pay packet is another dollar for the dividend pool.

The terrorism of unregulated capitalist enterprise

While we don't want to read too much into the Quebec train explosion at this early hour, there is one thing we know for sure.

Back in the day, a train such as that would never have been left unattended.

There would have been a caboose and that's where the crew would have stayed for a layover.

But that extra crew and that caboose are easy pickings for the efficiency experts who want rail traffic to be lean and mean.

We now have one incident which by far has caused more mayhem than all of the terror attacks in the history of Canadian terror attacks.

If we can spend billions avoiding the latter, why can we not spend some loose change preventing the former?