Trent Telenko Profile picture
Aug 5, 2024 14 tweets 5 min read Read on X
It looks like the Russian railway's western cassette roller bearing wear out & capability collapse I've said was coming for a couple of years...

...is now arriving.

Assuming this report is true⬇️

1/
In simple terms, we are in August 2024 after this bearing wear out prediction for February 2024.⬇️

This is something I've been expecting to see since September 2022.⬇️

The life of installed 5 million km Western roller bearings are ending for more and more Russian locomotives and rolling stock.

The Russian pattern of the most neglected...

2/
...track meeting the most neglected engines & rolling stock will cause more & more derailments starting in the arctic, then the Far East.

Then derailments in the Caucuses, moving towards Moscow/St Petersburg.

Finally, we would see derailments of the repair trains.

3/ Image
In Oct 2022 Russia had 10,000 freight cars out of service, with 200,000 more railway freight cars at risk of bearing wear out after a few of years of Western sanctions

4/
Every January the Russian government owned railway monopoly cycles a large fraction of the engines offline for periodic maintenance and it takes 2-to-3 months to recover full capacity.

Look what happened for the 2024 bottom red trend line.⬇️ (H/T @Prune602)

5/ Image
The count down to Russian railway collapse from a lack of replacement Western railway cassette bearings in railway car trucks was straight forward math, unless you believe in "Russia Strong ™️" or "Escalation Management™️" ideological delusions.🙄

6/ Image
If you believe in either delusion, then no amount of empirical evidence has any meaning.

The rejection of the empirical is the antecedent condition for either delusion.

If you accept empirical evidence, you cannot become invested in either

7/
..."Russia Strong™️" or "Escalation Management™️".

The empirical view is rooted in ground truths, like sun rotted tires, & the delusional is rooted in wishful thinking.

And these twin delusions mean the West is failing to plan for a Russian railway collapse.


8/Image
Western governments failing to plan for Russian transportation collapse & defeat, so as to manage the transition to a stable post-war world, will put post-Putin Russia on the slippery slope to the hell

9/
...of becoming a continent spanning Lebanese Civil War with loose bugs, loose nukes & novachuk gas equipped sprayer drones.

It may not be possible to avoid this Russian meltdown collapse, but failing to plan for the possibility, is planning to fail when it arrives.

10/
The economic repercussions of Russian energy & food suddenly just falling out the world economy from this pending "railway transportation collapse apocalypse" beggars the imagination.

Even @PeterZeihan pales at the thought.

11/
Western national security and economic policy makers ought to be putting together crisis teams to evaluate the implications for both the world economy and for obtaining an armistice.

Using access to railway cassette bearings as a leaver...

12/
...to obtain the two most important concessions -- Pre-2014 Ukrainian borders & getting back Ukraine's kidnapped populations -- that will make a lasting cessation of hostilities possible.

But they won't.

They believe in "Russia Strong™️" or "Escalation Management™️".

13/13 End

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh
 

Keep Current with Trent Telenko

Trent Telenko Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

PDF

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video
  1. Follow @ThreadReaderApp to mention us!

  2. From a Twitter thread mention us with a keyword "unroll"
@threadreaderapp unroll

Practice here first or read more on our help page!

More from @TrentTelenko

Dec 21
The following is evaluation is based on a number of professional discussions:

This CRPA found in a shot down jet Shaheed is reported to be Russian built. This is highly doubtful as the design and construction style looks far too professional for Russian industry.

1/
Bluntly - Russians tend towards cheapskate up-front capital manufacturing solutions.

The upshot is injection molded and die cast components are not a common feature in Russian designs as tooling for manufacturing designs is expensive up front,

2/
...even if the mass production unit costs are lower.

In addition, Western style SMA RF connectors are not a feature of the Soviet technology base.

Nor is the RF coax with a transparent jacket.

3/
Read 5 tweets
Dec 19
Let us be clear what has happened here.

Ukraine has a drone armed merchant raider lose in the Mediterranean hunting Russian shadow tankers.

Upshot: There will be more elsewhere on the world's oceans in the near future effecting maritime trade.

2025 Merchant Armed Raider 🧵
1/
@grok answered the following questions for me:

" Please summarize the pre-World War 1 to 1942 career of merchant armed raiders and compare that data to Ukraine's recent drone attack in the Mediterranean with a drone armed commercial vessel."

2/ Image
Image
Image
This is @grok's final summary:

"In essence, Ukraine's approach modernizes the raider concept—swapping guns for drones and merchant disguises for stealthy launches— but lacks the historical volume due to the conflict's constraints.

3/
Read 11 tweets
Dec 11
US Ground force flag ranks deny this 2025 reality 🤡⬇️

"The Ukraine war has exposed a large and increasing gap between Western reconnaissance doctrine and modern conventional battlefield reality.
1/3
In Donetsk, reconnaissance operators face constant drone surveillance, electromagnetic degradation, and hyper-local combat conditions that invalidate long-held assumptions about stealth and standoff intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR).

2/3
This article contends that NATO must, with urgency, reform its reconnaissance doctrine, training, and force structure to survive and efficiently operate in a drone-saturated battlefield."

Upton Sinclair reports:
3/3 Image
Read 4 tweets
Dec 9
I said this about the US Navy in 2023 (⬇️)

....and the institutional failures on display in the USS Truman CVBG Red Sea deployment proved me correct in 2025.

1/2
Every competent USN surface officer knows in their gut an anti-aircraft cruiser should not be operating with downed identification friend or foe (IFF) and Link-16 data link with no E-2 Hawkeye AEW support.

2/
news.usni.org/2025/12/04/inv…
Those officers know in their guts that radar skin paints alone from their ship's SPY-1 will be borderline for high tempo engagements...

...but this is not the first time this kind of problem occurred:

3/
twz.com/air/how-uss-ge…
Read 6 tweets
Nov 16
Just...listen...to this video clip with your eyes closed.

The predominant sound isn't artillery.
It isn't assault rifles.

It is the scream of drone rotors coming close, punctuated with the explosion of the drone upon impact.

1/3
That sound drama isn't World War One or any "medium intensity" conflict since 1918.

It is the sound of how 21st century Peer-to-Peer conflict is fought.

A conflict Western ground militaries are obsolescent in equipment to face.

2/3
That Russo-Ukraine War video is a soundscape US Army National Training Centers are too obsolete/incapable of replicating, because US Army flag ranks are allergic to training with high densities of small/cheap/many FPV drones.

3/3 Image
Read 4 tweets
Nov 10
WW2 is calling again with Ukraine developing Drone version of SHORAN.

_SH_ort
_RA_nge
_N_avigation

1/
SHORAN was a WW2 blind bombing system using two radio stations and an electromechanical computer.

In 1938 an RCA engineer named Stuart William Seeley, while attempting to remove "ghost" signals from an experimental television system, discovered he could measure distances
2/ Image
...by time differences in radio reception.

Instead of building a radar unit with this discovery, he proposed using this technique for precision ground-based radio beacon navigation bombing aid.

3/ Image
Read 12 tweets

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!


This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Don't want to be a Premium member but still want to support us?

Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal

Or Donate anonymously using crypto!

Ethereum

0xfe58350B80634f60Fa6Dc149a72b4DFbc17D341E copy

Bitcoin

3ATGMxNzCUFzxpMCHL5sWSt4DVtS8UqXpi copy

Thank you for your support!

Follow Us!

:(