Amtrak ends charter rides. Did you know that you can hitch your own train cars to an Amtrak train? Granted, not many among us have privately-owned rail cars, a novelty for the richest among us, but some do. Anyways, this practice, the Wall Street Journal reports, is going bye-bye:

Amtrak is ending the charter services and special trains it operates on its routes—bad news for some train buffs who offer speciality and custom rail trips. For now, however, Amtrak will allow owners of private railcars to hitch them to Amtrak trains on regular routes.

The announcement came Wednesday in a policy advisory memo to employees. “These operations caused significant operational distraction, failed to capture fully allocated profitable margins and sometimes delayed our paying customers on our scheduled trains,” the memo stated.

This reminds me of one of the more prolific and well known Amtrak charter users, Ty Robbins. His car is known as Navy 118. I only know of this story through a family friend, who worked one summer on his car as a chef. When he was stationed at the Pentagon in the late 1970s, he lived in his train car on the edge of the Pentagon's expansive parking lot. Here's how the Washington Post covered it:

The 27,000 people who work in the Pentagon, including jut-jawed generals and assorted personages of power, must all commute twice a day - all, that is, except for one man.

That man, with the unassuming title of Navy journalist second class, simply walks across some grass and climbs abroad his own private railroad car.

The car, tastefully decorated with pre-revolutionary Russian etchings and red velvet curtains, rolled up to within a quarter-mile of the free world's defense headquarters when Tyler Robbins, 30, decided to take some temporary employment with the Navy.

Pretty neat, huh? Here's how the Associated Press covered it, as depicted in the Detroit Free Press in 1978:

Well, Mr. Robbins's charter days are over, but at least he can hitch on regular routes. And it's not like Amtrak doesn't run any unprofitable or nonsensical routes.

Will lawsuits kill conspiratorial fake news? That's what Oliver Darcy wonders in a worthwhile item at CNN. Meanwhile, at the Daily Beast, Betsy Woodruff reports that Alex Jones is getting sued:

Marcel Fontaine, who was falsely declared a suspect in the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting by conspiracy-theorist website InfoWars, is now suing Alex Jones for more than a million dollars.

Fontaine, a young man from Massachusetts, filed suit in the district court of Travis County, Texas on Monday against InfoWars head Alex Jones; InfoWars reporter Kit Daniels; InfoWars LLC; and Free Speech Systems, LLC, InfoWars’ parent company. The suit charges that InfoWars “irreparably tainted” his reputation in a report that falsely claimed he was suspected as the Stoneman Douglas shooter.

Good for Fontaine.

A remote landing. For the first time, the U.S. Navy remotely landed an F/A-18 on an aircraft carrier. Next stop, robot planes. Skynet continues apace.

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