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“WHAT a way to run a railroad” — making a mad mess of what should by nature be an orderly system has been a metaphor for screwing stuff up since at least the 1930s.
The phrase probably began with an advertisement for Admiral Cigarettes, which used the slogan while showing a signalman in his cabin so contented with his smoking that he ignored two trains running towards each other on a single track below.
But what we are doing with the railways now isn’t a metaphor for idiot contentment. It is idiocy. Let’s start with some symptoms.
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