These color-coded lines of varying thickness are the most important travel corridors in America. They represent how we move cargo around.

The map above is from Peter Zeihan’s book The End of the World is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization, available on his website

There were stories in the news this week about railroad union negotiations and the threat of strikes. Orders were canceled on Monday for sensitive cargo like hazardous materials and perishable food. As of Friday a tentative agreement was reached between railroads and unions to avoid catastrophic shutdowns. The good news for union members is higher wages, better time-off policies, and changes to medical care. The unions were also arguing for increased staffing. The industry has reduced operators and maintenance staff and increased automation efforts in pursuit of profit margins.

It’s easy to forget how critical railroads are to our daily lives. We don’t see them as often as we see semi-trucks on interstate highways. But huge volumes of very important cargo are moved by rail, including food and farm output, chemicals for water treatment, and hydrocarbons for electricity. Looking at the green lines on the map, one can see that there are dependencies on railroads all over the country, especially in the Great Plains.

This map tells a lot of stories. I’m curious what others will get out of it. It made me think about the time before all this infrastructure was built; the native animals and people who were pushed aside to create this; and how much of this network shape could have been predicted in those days by just looking at the geography.

You might see similarities to biological networks like the circulatory system. Geoffrey West wrote about these shared properties that networks have whereby they are self-similar and space-filling at different scales, in his book Scale

Freight shipping represents enormous energy flows, without which everything we depend on would grind to a halt. In that event this map might be a good addition to your weirdo doomsday kit.