93-3-WMR Audio on Demand presents the Preston and Steve show podcast.

And now, Preston and Steve's news update with Kathy Romano.

Today's Thursday at September 15th.

Good morning, Kathy.

Good morning in the news this morning.

Freight rail companies and unions are negotiating contracts as a Friday deadline looms. If no agreement is reached, a worker strike could happen. It comes at a bad time because we're really just starting to crawl out from under all of the supply chain disruptions of the past few years created by the pandemic and the war in Ukraine, said Ted Rosman, a senior industry analyst at bankrate.com. Rossman said this could set back any progress made.

40% of goods that are transported within the United States are on a train at some point, he says.

That includes 75% of cars. Other big ticket items like food and gasoline can be transported by train.

Rossman said that we could see gas prices rise again if this happens. Now, Preston, you and I left to ride the rails with the hobos and do the whole thing. And this could impact us, so I'm keeping an eye on it. Please do. Because, you know, it's dangerous out there. We love our stew. Yep. Hobo stew. It's so good. To be proactive, he suggests getting your holiday shopping done before Halloween and buying big ticket items now.

As a result, on Wednesday, Amtrak announced it will cancel all long-distance trains starting Thursday

since much of the track they use for their trains is owned and operated by the freight companies involved in the negotiations.

The negotiations do not involve Amtrak or the Amtrak workforce.

While this is not going to impact the busy Northeast Corridor, it will impact Amtrak's Silver Star Line

locally in Philadelphia. You talk about this affecting holiday shopping. I'm planning on getting

my wife, Claire, 20 tons of graphite for Christmas.

Amtrak added it closely monitoring the ongoing freight rail, rail labor contract negotiations

and is hopeful that parties will reach a resolution soon.

You know what, speaking of trains real quick, and you mentioned the graph, I did make me think

of that.

You know, when you see the tanker cars, I had heard, you know, and a lot of times they're black, and I don't know why you automatically think of, like, oil. Yeah, yeah, yeah. A lot of times it's corn syrup. Really? That's in those. I didn't know that. And apparently that's, yeah, a lot of the tankers carried that. I had heard that at one point and another. I've forgotten what the source of that was. I didn't even think that they would, in fact, the notion that they would transport it that way at all is pretty mind-boggling. Yep. Philadelphia Brewing Company's Hop Garden is in ruins after the city brought in a team of weed whackers to cut down more than six months of hard work. What? Oh, no.

This is, like, terrible.

I was Ted for them. This is, by the way, the cakes or cats event on Sunday. This is them. It's a wonderful brewery, and they're very proud of this. They cut it down, they were weeds. Wow. The gardens aren't cheap either. No, the garden is fenced in right next to the Kensington Brewery and has a sign that clearly explains how they're growing hops

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