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Realtalk, people with autism love trains, so I wouldn't think it's unreasonable to assume that a foamer is autistic. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/14/nyregion/children-with-autism-connecting-via-bus-and-train.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
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Sep 3, 2013 18:19
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My wife was a bit grumpy the first morning on our Minneapolis to Portland trip on the Empire builder, but some lunch and a wine tasting cheered her up. We also got a Bedroom, which is nice because the bottom bunk can actually sleep 2 if you don't mind being close 
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Sep 12, 2013 05:26
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The Milwaukee Road electrified a bunch of their Pacific Extension, I think because of a combo of tunnels and steam not being powerful enough to handle the mountains. I believe it's all been torn out now though.
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Oct 8, 2013 16:18
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So somehow I stumbled across something called Project 130, and it sounds pretty awesome. A group is researching steam using biofuel for future high speed locomotives. That that end, they've acquired a 1937 steam engine, an ATSF 3460, that they're going to convert to renewable biofuel and try and break the current steam speed record, with a goal of 130 mph (hence project 130). Best part (for me) is that they're local, so maybe I'll get to see such a thing in operation. Anyway, here's their website: http://www.csrail.org/ I guess right now they're working on how to get the locomotive from Kansas to somewhere in Minnesota.
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Oct 10, 2013 18:36
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Brother Jonathan posted:I sometimes wonder how well the Japanese safety method of making drivers physically point at the schedules and signals works. I'm confused, why is he pointing? Nobody can see him point but him.
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Oct 12, 2013 20:35
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Ryand-Smith posted:Yep, thats point read operate method of operations, which forces one to see, acknowledge, and understand. So it's more for the operator than anyone else? If he points one way and the train goes another he knows bad things could happen and stops the train etc etc?
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Oct 12, 2013 23:35
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I follow @MarketUrbanism on Twitter who is part of a cabal of (pro) railroad rabble rousers bitching about FRA regs, and now he's a writer at nextcity.org. Anyway, he wrote a piece about PTC on the line, and apparently Metro North is bitching that PTC is delaying capacity upgrades and doesn't make anybody safer: http://nextcity.org/theworks/entry/signaling-upgrades-might-have-prevented-sundays-metro-north-deaths A lot of his rabble rousing is about costs, particularly in construction and operation of rail lines, so he's always been pretty peeved about all the conductors on these trains, so the article is how Metro North could have saved money and still instituted PTC by switching to Proof of Payment. On the face it makes sense to me. I've taken exactly two commuter railroad trips in my life, a there and back trip on the Metra in Chicago, and the conductor never stamped my ticket on the way back, so proof of payment seems like it would make a lot more sense. So hopefully PTC chat happens, but as I read somewhere, modern railroading safety is about preventing accidents from happening, not mitigating effects of accidents that do happen, so maybe it can lead to a broader discussion about over staffing (but it won't).
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Dec 3, 2013 18:55
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I think freight in the US is a much different beast than passenger anywhere, or even freight in Europe. Bottom line, we haul a ton of freight by rail in the US, and it's a profitable venture. Passenger rail isn't profitable in the US or UK and governments focused on not subsiding things are loath to put more money into a service that doesn't generate balance sheet return. I think other European countries have a more liberal view and thus are investing more in their passenger infrastructure in ways we aren't willing to do here in America.
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Dec 3, 2013 21:06
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Yeah, I'm the guy that took a first class sleeper Minneapolis to Portland for my honeymoon, I think it's an experience that everybody should have, but the train was a part of the trip rather than just a way to get where I was going. On the other hand, if you overlay France's TGV network centered on Paris on top of a map of the US centered on Chicago and compare city sizes, the populations and distances match up pretty well. Rail can be really competitive with air travel on short distances.
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Dec 3, 2013 21:26
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Is scheduling so sporadic because nobody knows when a train is leaving more than 10 minutes in advance or something? I think the FEC runs everything they do on an advanced schedule, which I've read is part of the reason they're doing their own passenger service, because as far as their operations are concerned it's just another regularly scheduled train.
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Dec 5, 2013 18:24
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I'm not sure how I feel about this existing.
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Jan 28, 2014 06:14
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For what it's worth, from watching the overhead shots in Great British Railway Journeys, on double track sections, the train tends to drive on the left.
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Feb 1, 2014 07:49
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Pigsfeet on Rye posted:I might have missed it, but Amtrak is apparently getting some new locomotives for the Northeast Corridor runs. I'm glad we got all these locomotives just a few years before the FRA totally changes their crash safety guidelines to be more in line with the rest of the world. These are going to be obsolete before we even know what hit us.
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Feb 8, 2014 21:58
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SybilVimes posted:I dunno, one of the key features of the ACS-64 over the ES-64 appears to be that it has better safety features (crumple zones and rollbar cages). If the ES-64 is good enough for most of the EU, then I can't see how the US stepping into line will result in the ACS-64 not being safe enough. The problem is that our trains are too safe. No trains in the world are built as heavily as our trains our, and by 2017 the FRA is going to change rules to be more in line with the rest of the world. This will result in trains that are much ligher, making them cheaper to buy and cheaper to run. We can't buy trains off the shelf because nobody builds trains for our market, they have to be custom engineered. This means every time we buy a trainset, there are only a handful of bidders. We lose out on economies of scale. American trains are built with the assumption that they will crash head on into freight trains, which isn't a very common occurrence. Besides, we don't mandate that cars survive impacts with solid objects or planes remain intact when they crash into the ground. Once we can run more standard rail vehicles, these sprinters will quickly be seen as expensive, overweight, and uneconomical to run.
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Feb 8, 2014 23:22
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That's basically correct, European trains safety comes from avoiding collisions, American train safety comes from surviving collisions. For example, the ACS-64 is 97 tons and the 86-87 tons. Most of that is probably structural, to give the locomotive more buff strength. Basically they want the locotomotive to just bounce off of whatever it hits (the presumed alternative being the entire trainset gets flattened like a pop can). I believe rail cars are also heavier for this same reason. Here's an interesting article, even though it's from 2007 I think it gives a pretty good picture: https://www.ebbc.org/rail/fra.html And here's an article about the FRA changing the rules: http://nextcity.org/theworks/entry/modern-european-train-designs-american-tracks-2015-fra I guess it's 2015 the regs change, which makes the ACS even sillier (though, probably nobody knew that the changes would happen when the ACS was ordered).
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Feb 9, 2014 08:07
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They're not mandating they be lighter, they're just no longer mandating that passenger trains be able to withstand impact of 1 million pounds of force. Freight trains will continue to be freight trains, and passenger trains will become lighter and faster (because they were at this magical tipping point where the locomotives just kept getting heavier and heavier just to haul themselves). There's also the possibility of Multiple Units, which means you can run a rail line without needing an entire separate locomotive.
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Feb 9, 2014 23:47
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I don't know if it's because of the way the Houston METRO interacts with the road or the way Houston drivers are, but drat... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CV2rdGX4JYc
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Apr 2, 2014 23:30
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Disgruntled Bovine posted:Figured I'd share this video of mine since we're posting trains making good noises and blowing lots of smoke. This train was either underpowered or had a dead engine (not sure which) because when they stopped it on the grade outside the yard it couldn't get itself moving again and they had to bring out the yard goats (two GP9s) to help it. Judging by the smoke show they put on it was probably the first time they'd been worked that hard in a long time. I love how Guilford bought the Pan Am name so they could rename their dinky Class II North Eastern railway after a former world wide airline that got its start serving South America.
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Apr 4, 2014 06:42
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ChickenOfTomorrow posted:Speaking of micro-lines, how about the London Necropolis Railway? I'm pretty sure I saw a bit about that on Great British Railway Journeys. E: Yeah, Series (season) 2, episode 2. Axeman Jim posted:Next, Part 2: The brief period when things actually worked until Hitler hosed it up. Thanks, Hitler. loving Hitler.
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Apr 8, 2014 23:03
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I don't even know how you could say that, when the A4 class exists.
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Apr 9, 2014 18:20
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Boomer The Cannon posted:N: I got to tour the Age of Steam roundhouse site in Ohio today; if you ever get the opportunity to check it out, by all means go. I just looked at the website for this, it all seems rather... hostile. And why would they make you sign an NDA?
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Apr 13, 2014 03:22
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I remember posting about it here months ago, but freight railroads report their miles per gallon per ton, but the trucking industry doesn't report such statistics. Also does anyone haul something like coal in trucks?
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Apr 15, 2014 06:12
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drunkill posted:
I had no idea what was going on here until they started digging down for the train tracks. Isn't it usually easier to change the elevation of the road than the train, since cars can handle higher gradients than trains can. Though maybe passenger trains can handle higher gradients than freight trains. When I took a train out west (USA) I saw plenty of nothing towns where the roadway was buried under the train tracks.
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Apr 17, 2014 17:35
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drunkill posted:Road over rail is often seen as ugly and very unfriendly at street level, of course this happens for freeways and further out of the city but in the suburbs they are trying to remove road bridges over rail in a few areas to help activate the street. That line in particular may carry a lot more freight then it currently does if the current port is shifted west of the city, that line will be duplicated to have four tracks too in a decade or so. It looked like there was quite a bit of ROW along there, do you know if it extends the whole corridor? You could just bury the whole drat thing and be done with it.
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Apr 17, 2014 19:12
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PYF Railroad yards? Ok good Local yards, they just go north for miiiles. http://goo.gl/maps/bsPlG
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Apr 21, 2014 04:40
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Milwaukee Road actually electrified their transcontinental route in the Rocky's around the turn of the century, but the wire was all torn out in the 70's. It'd be funny if it wasn't so sad. Traffic on their line to Seattle was booming, but they finished electification right as the boom in Seattle ended, and also only a few years before the Panama canal opened, so they could barely fill one train a day in each direction on the line. Then in the 72 they de-energized half their electric line and in 74 the other half (they had two sections, one from Tacoma & Seattle to Othello, Washington, and another from Harlowton, Montana to Avery, Idaho). Right as the oil crisis hit. So basically A+ Milwaukee Road at having the worst possible timing. Though they should have predicted the Panama Canal would have a major impact on shipping.
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Apr 24, 2014 17:09
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MassivelyBuckNegro posted:https://www.google.com/maps/@35.0269921,-89.8984434,1588m/data=!3m1!1e3 Reminds me of this video, which is pretty cool: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHmyYqfNYnc The railroads know what it takes to make money, and it sounds like they understand that they're in a capital intensive business with only long term payoffs. I'm also reaaaaly glad that Warren Buffet owns BNSF, because he absolutely gets that a rail company is not something you can wring short term profits out of, that it's a long term investment, and one that has to keep investing in itself to keep growing.
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Apr 25, 2014 17:45
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Wikipedia says that: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penn_Central_Transportation_Company#Bankruptcy But it sounds like it's been dwarfed now by all the financial bankruptcies, and also possibly inflation, because the Wikipedia article of largest corporate bankruptices and a CNN article I found don't mention anything about inflation adjusted numbers.
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Apr 25, 2014 18:24
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Is PTI this PTI? Is it a company whose job is just to move crewmembers around?
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Apr 28, 2014 05:08
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Let's be honest, are these people going to breed anyway?
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May 19, 2014 17:43
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That's a pretty nice road they're running on, too.
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Jul 15, 2014 04:12
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OK, is it just me or is there no audio on the right channel on that video?
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Aug 28, 2014 01:13
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Wally Joyner posted:That is awesome! There is a similar car in the Duluth rail museum, but unfortunately I don't have the pics handy. I was just gonna say, they've got one too. Also they've got a 2-8-8-4 Yellowstone which is just ENORMOUS.
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Dec 9, 2014 05:46
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Did they just throw whatever crap cars they had sitting around the yard between those bottle tank cars, to keep them separated from each other?
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Dec 22, 2014 05:50
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I took the Empire Builder from Minneapolis to Portland with a private bedroom for my honeymoon. I think a long distance train journey should be on everyone's bucket list, but it was definitly way slower than flying (we took the train west and flew back). We also took the Cascades between Portland and Seattle and Vancouver, and that's very nice, they just need to fix the bottlenecks and generally up the speed from 79 to 110 mph. Train travel can be good, we just have to want it.
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Dec 24, 2014 17:10
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I'm mostly talking out of my rear end here, but the land is flat and the distances long. Milwaukee Road did electrify parts of their line going through the Rockies, and it meant they could have 1 electric locomotive pull trains through there rather than 2 or 3 steam locomotives. They saved tons of money, but did it right before a market crash so it ended up not working out for them.
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Mar 26, 2015 05:25
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In the red and blue lines, the tunnel under the loop is basically one continuous station, with walls to separate it into the 4 or 5 actual stations.
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Jul 18, 2015 16:21
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You might like Harriman vs. Hill: Wall Street’s Great Railroad War. I haven't finished it yet because I haven't unpacked it from my move a year ago, but it's a really close in look of a few days on Wall Street trying to buy out the Northern Pacific. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0816683646/ A lot more about financial maneuvering than actual railroad building, but it's railroad financial maneuvering.
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Jan 2, 2016 21:34
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I believe this is the training video on how to fire a steam locomotive: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHo860Q66Gw Didn't most of the giant American coal powered steam locomotives end up with autofeeders or something so you didn't need a fireman shoveling coal every 2 minutes?
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Jan 19, 2016 18:26
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I thought the HST did that as well.
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Dec 29, 2016 23:46
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