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I had no idea this thread existed. Please accept this picture:  I miss that apartment a bit. Don't miss that water tower though.
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Aug 23, 2013 04:13
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Disgruntled Bovine posted:The idea that passenger rail is a way to make money is a very American point of view. The concept is ridiculous. Airports and airlines are heavily subsidized, roads are paid for with tax dollars, why would passenger rail be any different? The rest of the world realizes this, it's only the US that has this delusion that trains are the only kind of transportation that should support itself. Amtrak had profitability written into the very legislation that created it in order to be the way to kill it. The whole thing was designed to fail on purpose, because it had already failed in the first place. Also, I wouldn't call the ATC system a subsidy. The airlines pay directly into a fund to pay for that and that money can't be touched by anyone other than the FAA. The funding model is completely unique. It is more like the airlines being forced to pool money for a collective system.
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Jan 7, 2019 18:11
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Powershift posted:Not only that, anybody who's even semi-interested in trains knows this stuff happens all the time. It just finally happened in a populated area with a dangerous cargo. So FEMA does this thing called a National Level Event exercise every couple years. A few years ago, 2016 I think, one component of the disaster was a freight train derailing at CP Virginia in downtown Washington, DC and tank cars of phenol rupturing. I was killed 
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Feb 18, 2023 22:12
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If you let your eye follow the line of the hood tops, it becomes apparent that the trailing end of the second car and leading end of the third car are lower. I'd wager slack run in. There's a lot of guessing here, but I think those coil cars are empties. Lot of inertia behind them in a train that long.
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Mar 7, 2023 15:46
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MikeCrotch posted:Personally I would make the train wheels tighter. Maybe that's just me though Hey now, WMATA is in the middle of a decade long process of pretending that no one can really know how to tell if wheels are in gauge, believing that ignoring them is a solution, and that it will takes year and years to figure out how to measure anything let alone fix it.
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Mar 13, 2023 03:04
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I got curious about it and the lowest fare I could find is $5 to get from WAS to New Carrollton, MD at 4:30 in the morning.
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Mar 23, 2023 01:45
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Amtrak does still have flag stops, but doesn't list them on the schedule as such. Part of the shift was around the general move away from being able to buy tickets onboard. This pretty much eliminated flag stops for boarding, although the crew knows to keep an eye out just in case someone happens to be hanging around on the platform at the stations they know they can pass because there's no one on the manifest for getting on or off. The only three I know of off hand are Thurmond (WV), Essex (MT), and L'Enfant (DC), although L'Enfant is in a different category because it doesn't even show up as a possible station.
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Mar 28, 2023 03:11
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Peanut President posted:i don't think amtrak lists flag stops as such but i know the Cardinal has one at Crawfordsville, IN and another one in WV (other than Thurmond). You go back ten years or more and there was a little flag icon that would appear on the timetable. I went back to 2004 to get the times for the one time I'd used a flag stop. Back in 2004, I decided to take a fall weekend trip on Amtrak because I'd never done that before. Drove down to Altoona from State College. Waited on the platform for my train, which arrived four minutes late. Not too bad. Off to Pittsburgh I go! Except it turns out that I'd actually boarded a 37 minute late Three Rivers and was bound for New York. I immediately informed the conduct that I'd boarded the wrong train and was willing to buy a ticket through to the next station. I figured I could get someone that owed me a favor to drive to Huntingdon to collect me. Conductor tells me to sit tight. A few minutes later, he comes back and says "come with me." I follow him back to the vestibule, where another crewmember is waiting. They've got the door open as we're flying down the tracks. He tells me that they'd managed to get word to the westbound Pennsylvanian that they had one of their passengers before they'd passed Tyrone. There's only 16 minutes between Altoona and Tyrone, so these pieces had moved pretty quick. Tyrone was a flag stop for the Pennsylvanian, so they'd instructed the Pennsylvanian to hold there while the Three Rivers approached. I thanked them profusely and made the comment that I didn't know that the Three Rivers stopped at Tyrone. It does not. Dropped the trap door before we even stopped moving and down onto the tracks I went. Didn't even use the platform. They didn't even try to line us up because I got to walk two car lengths between trains. Oddly, I don't remember them lifting my ticket when I got on the Pennsylvanian. So my first Amtrak trip involved riding an train that no longer exists, using a flag stop, getting an unscheduled stop, and probably affecting multiple freight trains.
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Mar 28, 2023 23:51
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There's a way that they can do a blanket lift, but that definitely did not exist in 2004. I actually got my paper ticket in the mail! They're not really supposed to do it that way. When they don't scan the individual tickets, the system can list the unscanned ticket as a no show and inadvertently cancel the reservation on a connecting trip. At a minimum, that person doesn't get their AGR points, if they're in the system. It also opens a door for free riders because the conductor never interacts with people to determine who isn't supposed to be there. I'm a pass rider now and I make sure they lift my ticket instead of just looking at my badge. They shouldn't be assuming that I don't have a connection or, when I'm on the Acela, that I'm not stealing someone's seat.
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Mar 29, 2023 01:31
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Long distance trains have Discharge or Receive flags to prevent seats from being used by commuters or short hauls. For instance, once the northbound Silver Star or Silver Meteor reaches Fredericksburg, VA, it becomes discharge only all the way to New York. The Silver Meteor arrives in DC at 7 am, making it attractive for Baltimore or Philly traffic. But they'd rather have those seats available for people in GA, SC, and NC to book. So the SM only lets people off in DC and anyone going north has to get a different train.
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Mar 29, 2023 21:21
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Noosphere posted:What if someone wants to go from DC to NY ? There's other options. The Silver Meteor departs DC at 7:07. There's a 7:00 Acela and a 7:10 NER.
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Mar 30, 2023 16:49
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The Silver Star and Silver Meteor (and Palmetto, which used to be called the Silver Palm) are intended for Tampa/Miami to New York long distance service, so they want to shield long distance customers from getting seats bought out by people using it as commuter service on the NEC instead of using MARC, SEPTA, or NJT. The discharge flags are fit into the rush hours. The Silver Meteor runs north during morning rush hour and the Silver Star during the evening rush hour. But, they only have them for the northbound runs. Going south, anyone that's using them for commuting doesn't have the potential to eat up seats that you need for people boarding south of the NEC. You also see it at the south end where they run during rush hour, overlapping with Brightline. The Palmetto doesn't get those flags. It doesn't get to DC until closer to 8PM and the only discharge only stops are in northern New Jersey late at night, which implies to me that they're more there for schedule purposes.
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Mar 31, 2023 18:13
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I've spent just over two years refinishing my basement to build my layout. It is a pretty slow go when you're one person working almost entirely alone and also working on a Masters at the same time. I hope to finally be done by the end of the month and can start working on the layout. HO scale, contemporary, Pittsburgh area. The thing is being built around three things: a large river crossing, a rolling mill because I have an endless hunger for coil cars, and handling a full-up Superliner Capitol Limited (the pre-pandemic version when it still ran two P42s, baggage, three sleepers, diner, lounge, three coaches) plus enough cushion for a private car on the end. If I had the pockets for it, I'd probably have gone all in on a NEC layout, but that much passenger equipment is expensive. From 2008 to 2014, I had a small switching layout that I dismantled when it wouldn't fit into the apartment I had to move to. The one I'd been living it got demolished, which was an interesting experience. Since 2016, I've been running with a modular club and have a couple modules. On one hand, I can run whatever I want, which is great and gave me an excuse to run steam and lots of long gone road names. On the other hand, I can run whatever I want, which enables me to have an excuse to buy whatever I want. It also does not help that my wife frequently encourages things like "hey look, this one says FAMOUS BACON on it, so you should get it" and I'm there holding a pre-war reefer for some packing house thinking "hrm." I'm surprised to find that I have virtually no pictures that I've taken. They're all in storage right now, or I'd set them up to take some pictures. Not a very good angle of my little village. The unballasted track is one of the module joints. There's six houses, all depicting actual houses in Pittsburgh.  The module to the left, where the grade crossing is, has this house on it. A stock Walthers farmhouse kit, but my wife wanted a house with a wraparound porch, porch swing, and metal roof. The porch swing is on chains, so it swings freely.  My third module is a river crossing, but I don't seem to have any pictures of it. I'm still learning to weather equipment. This is my favorite one though. 
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Apr 15, 2023 00:04
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Allow me to go deep into the gently caress off area with something that personally delighted me. My two G&W locomotives are Buffalo & Pittsburgh, one of which is #458. I grew up in Butler, PA, where the B&P's shops are. My wife is from Vidalia, GA, where the G&W operates the Georgia Central. A couple of years ago, we were down there visiting her family and what should be sitting in the little yard in downtown Vidalia?  (You can't really take very good pictures when you're sitting at a red light and leaning over another person) They loaned some B&P power to the GC that summer. BPRR 458 is my only non-Amtrak model locomotive I've ever actually seen. I managed to find another couple pictures:  The UP passenger train belongs to another guy in the club. Full length California Zephyr. Takes forever to go by.  The houses before I installed them on the module. The red houses were inspired by these three houses: https://goo.gl/maps/VGKRrDCURk9fom719 The other three were inspired by these three houses: https://goo.gl/maps/Lt8LxYe88R3eLxXm7 There's a little church around the corner from those last three, which is why I included a church. A few little touches I included are things like a Pittsburgh Steelers flag on one of the houses, a realtor sign from a Western Pennsylvania realtor, and the church is named for the patron saint of coal miners.
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Apr 15, 2023 03:58
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"All of the name options were dumb so we picked the worst," said some CPKC exec, probably. I wonder if they'll ever have a unified paint scheme or if they'll be like BNSF that had cascade green power stenciled BNSF for a longer time than there was a Burlington Northern in the first place.
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Apr 15, 2023 22:24
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Railbox was developed to sidestep per diem, not to profit from it. In the 1970s, there was a huge wave of boxcar retirements and to encourage the purchasing of new ones, the regulators tweaked the rules surrounding how per diem rates worked. It was a cash cow for a lot of short lines who pretty much just had to lease out their reporting marks to the actual boxcar owners. They were a rather motley collection of roads and paint jobs. They were quite popular with photographers and modelers. There's also plenty of them still out there on their fourth or fifth owner. It actually didn't work out. The railroads had a better idea of the situation at the time (this was pre deregulation) and weren't too worried about the looming "shortage." Railroads knew that a lot of boxcar traffic was already lost to trucks, but they were also surging buying of new types of railcars. Remember, grain was still moving in boxcars into the early 70s. They knew that they wouldn't need that much longer as more covered hoppers were delivered. They were also counting on deregulation to open up intermodal. Their plan was to direct money to their existing pool company: Trailer Train. TT formed a subsidiary in 1974, in parallel to the regulators work. That became Railbox. Because they were in pool service to the pool members, they were functionally home road cars and immune to the per diem rates. Within seven years, between Staggers, the early 80s recession, and the railroads having been correct about their fleet make up, the per diem exploit collapsed. There was suddenly a huge glut in the boxcar fleet and those boxcars were returned to their home rails at short lines who couldn't even store them all. They were sold off en masse and I believe a good number of them even because Railbox property.
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May 15, 2023 19:32
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Jonny Nox posted:TT is now TTX and owns a poo poo-ton of the actual cars the now carry freight, especially intermodal wells? Yes, Trailer Train became TTX in the early 90s. Part of the rebrand was that they'd expanded into boxcar and gondola ownership (Railgon). The original plan for Trailer Train was to start to settle the standardization issue that was emerging in the 1950s for handling trailers. The Pennsylvania was the biggest driver behind it, supplanting their own Truc Train service. They were not creative about the names. The bulk of the fleet is their intermodal, which is why you see so few railroad intermodal. The only ones I know of off the top of my head are BNSF, FEC, and CP wells I've seen. FEC isn't a shareholder of TTX either. Aside from specialized lumber and steel flats, they've effectively taken over flat cars from the railroads. There's also the autoracks, which fall into a weird place. Maintenance is a complicated matter because railroads do a lot of repair work on each other's property out of practicality. I know that TTX has their own shops, just like the railroads, so they're likely sending equipment to those for serious work. I'd wager they do treat them like foreign road equipment, in that they'll do the bare minimum to keep it in service or at least enough to drag it back to a TTX shop. Which brings me back to the autoracks. The actual flat under there is owned by TTX and is, in theory, just an 89 foot flat like any old flat car handling pipe. The rack is owned by the railroad, which is why autoracks have a TTX reporting mark, are yellow, and have a TTX logo on them below the deck. The rack with UP on it is UP's. How they handle that for maintenance purposes is unclear to me.
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May 15, 2023 22:00
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:TTX is a weird federally permitted monopoly for railcar pooling that's owned directly by the railroads. I got thinking about this and I figure that it might have ended up that way even if the STB hadn't allowed the pooling agreement. I could see a scenario where specialized intermodal cars were largely owned by one or two major fleets like tank cars are. I wouldn't be surprised if GATX and UTLX control 70 or 80 percent of the tank cars. The only other players are Procor, which just Canada UTLX, and Trinity's leasing fleet. After that, you're either Exxon or Shell.
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May 16, 2023 00:09
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Railroad owned ones are like any other interchange car, although plenty never really leave the property. They'll just move between the origin and destination on the same railroad. Leased equipment, like TILX, fits into two categories. Some leased equipment is filling in gaps in a certain route. I recall in my hometown, the CN filled in leased hoppers while they were retiring B&LE hoppers and awaiting the delivery of new equipment. Or either the shipper or receiver leased them to have a more reliable car supply or to use them as rolling storage without having to pay as much as if they were holding railroad owned cars. There's also a decent fleet of privately owned cars. I see a train of SCWX cars come through DC often. They're originating in Shire Oaks, about an hour south of Pittsburgh, and end up somewhere in South Carolina. They're owned by Santee-Cooper. My understanding is that the rates are lower for private cars, as the burden of maintenance is on someone else. They're fully captive and you won't see them anywhere else. Unless Santee-Cooper leases them out, which they're fully capable of doing.
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May 16, 2023 03:09
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Tex Avery posted:As is usually the answer for such simple questions, the answer is money. Developing and adopting a standardized, fully automatic coupler that can withstand the forces put upon couplers, especially on American trains, and then retrofitting hundreds of thousands of cars and thousands of locomotives, would cost way more money than anytime is willing to spend. I worked the numbers on this for a paper in grad school and it was an astoundingly high number. Like "you're better off just paying the labor costs indefinitely" high.
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May 16, 2023 21:16
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ChickenOfTomorrow posted:i see a lot of Procor tank cars coming through PDX, do they not obey geographic borders? They do not. Back in the old days, UTLX was Union Tank Car and was the main builder of tank cars in the US. Products Tank Line was the Canadian subsidiary of Union. Pre NAFTA, there were more controls on cross border railcar traffic for a huge variety of reasons, including protecting the Canadian fleet from becoming captive in the US. There were cars specifically marked for cross border service. I believe that's the origin of Canadian National using the CNA reporting mark alongside CN. When the trade laws changed, the line became less important. Especially because the railroads weren't as restricted to their own countries any more anyhow. UTLX and Procor are both part of Berkshire Hathaway now too. They're simply the US and Canadian sides of the same company. UTLX has always been mixed up with super huge businesses and deep pockets. Union was one of the companies that fell out of Standard Oil back in the day and the Union in the credit report business TransUnion is directly tied to UTLX.
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May 22, 2023 16:23
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I'm going to Switzerland later this summer for 10 days (flying into Geneva, then staying in Lausanne, Zermatt, Zurich, and Murren before flying back out of Geneva). We do have a healthy number of trains on the itinerary, in part because the trip is to celebrate getting my MA in Transportation Policy, like the Glacier Express and the Jungfrau Railway. On a previous trip, we did the Bernina Express and didn't feel the need to retread that. Given that I've already seen the Landwasser Viaduct and Brusio spiral viaduct, what else should I be on the look out for as I go back and forth across the country? I'm also planning on keeping an eye out for SBB Cargo, as I didn't have much of an opportunity to do so on the previous trip. My impression is that the system is mainly in the northern part of the country. Is that correct? The only other time I was in Switzerland, we didn't get into Geneva until twilight and it was dark by the time we got into Zurich. The next morning was a very early train to St. Moritz. Barely even remember seeing anything freight.
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Jun 17, 2023 19:09
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Noosphere posted:The Montreux - Oberland Bernois between Montreux and Interlaken. I'm reasonably sure this is the only item you suggested that actually made it into the list. Had to keep the wife happy too. We're a bit over halfway through the trip. Right now, I'm sitting on our balcony in Mürren. Close enough to the station that I just heard the BLM pull in. We flew into Geneva and immediately departed for Lausanne. We went on short trips to Montreux and Gruyeres. For reasons I don't exactly recall, we ended up in Fribourg too. I did catch multi freight trains while we were in Montreux. After that, we left for Zermatt. Our hotel required a trip up the Gornergrat cog railway. I was surprised to see that it had a freight component and I was able to watch them doing some shunting at the Zermatt station. Our hotel even had a tram of its own. The big leg was the Glacier Express from Zermatt to St Moritz, then a train from St Moritz to Landquart, and capped with Landquart to Zurich. We had no clue that Züri Fäscht was happening and our hotel was right in the middle of the tram closures. We did have dinner at a restaurant that overlooked Zurich HB. I noticed both on trains and watching the station that it seems a proceed signal doesn't turn to the danger signal when the front of the train passes. Is that correct? In North America, a green drops to red almost as soon as the locomotive passes the signal. In the station it didn't seem like they changed at all. I assume there's some fundamental rules that I don't understand. It almost seems like the default aspect is "proceed" rather than "stop." Between Zurich and Bern on the way to Mürren, I saw a lot more freight. I find the covered goods wagons interesting, because they're completely unknown in North America. We flirted with them in the 1960s and 70s for lumber traffic and they were sort of a disaster. I also noticed containers that looked slightly larger than the 20 foot ISO container that appeared to be in domestic service (companies like Coop). Is there some kind of European container that doesn't travel overseas? It also jumped out how there's very few wagons that aren't owned by the railroad, with the exception of VTG and GATX tank cars. I really like the Stadler bilevels that seem to be everywhere. California bought some, but I don't see how they're doing that. I was taken aback by how poor the Swiss trains are from an accessibility standpoint in ways we could never get away with in the US. Like how you have carriages with level boarding into the second class seating, but stairs into the first class area. Also completely shocked at the honor system that is in play for tickets outside of the IC or scenic trains. There's some pretty huge differences in society here. The little children's area on some trains was neat. We're heading back to Geneva in a few days before flying back to NYC and taking Amtrak home. The trains here aren't much faster than the NEC, but their time keeping is beyond our abilities.
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Jul 9, 2023 18:21
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Chenghiz posted:They're actually already in testing: I saw in the comments that they have upper and lower level doors to accommodate the ADA requirements. That's got to look weird.
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Jul 10, 2023 07:00
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Yeah that's the First Street Tunnel.
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Jul 12, 2023 21:06
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During the stay in Mürren, I had more time to study what I came to realize was the most fascinating and entirely Swiss freight movements I've ever seen. To get to Mürren, we transferred from the SBB to the Berner Oberland-Bahn at Interlaken Ost (by the way, if any of you ever find yourself there, there's a spot on the Aare just west of the station where there's a railway bridge that might be one of the finest trainwatching spots anywhere) and that takes you to Lauterbrunnen. At Lauterbrunnen, one crosses the street to take the cableway to ascend to Grütschalp. When it is busy, which it was when we were inbound on the first day, they take your luggage and you get it back at either Winteregg or Mürren, which are the only two stops on the Bergbahn Lauterbrunnen–Mürren atop the 800 meter cliff you just went up. It is almost difficult to articulate the topography in the Jungfrau-Aletsch. When I say it is on top of a cliff, I mean it is on top of a cliff. In Mürren, you get your luggage from a little wagon towed by the single carriage train that took you the rest of the way. My hotel was across the street from the station, so I actively watched everything from luggage to cases of wine to construction materials being brought up by the little wagon. What I hadn't pieced together was how they were doing this from the cableway. Down at Lauterbrunnen, they loaded a cargo module onto the bottom of the cablecar. That one used a regular old forklift. Up at the top at Grütschalp, they had this contraption that I couldn't photograph at all, due to the positioning and objects in the way, but you could clearly see it in motion. It was a funicular forklift, entirely inside the station. When the cablecar stopped, the forklift slid forward and lifted the cargo module out of the bracket that carried it under the cable car. Then, the funicular carried the forklift up to the level where the train was. There, it rotated 90 degrees and deposited the cargo module onto the single wagon that the train would tow. On one hand, I wouldn't be surprised to find out it was the only such device in the world, but also not at all surprised to find out they were everywhere in Switzerland. Either is entirely plausible. The final major leg was the BOB's Golden Pass via Gstaad, which I had sprung for Prestige Class for. That turned out to be a fantastic decision, because the bulkhead behind the operator's cabin was clear glass. You basically got a cab ride. When I'm less jetlagged, I'll pull some pictures off my phone. I've spelled about half of these words wrong on the first try because my fingers just won't listen. That's an interesting size that Coop selected for their containers, yet is pretty close to the size Matson Navigation arrived at when the early battle to determine the base container unit dimension was raging. They'd selected 24 feet, which is 7.32 meters. Those covered goods wagons do seem to function like our failed all-door boxcars. The North American ones were designed to handle lumber and each side had four sliding doors. A lot of lumber moved in boxcars back then and loading through one door was kind of a hassle. They got the idea to take a bulkhead flatcar and put a roof on it and the sides be all doors. On paper, it was a good idea, but the doors often took too much of a beating and wouldn't work properly. Ultimately, they figured it was easier to just wrap lumber in plastic. I'll study those signal rules. The other signal rules that I noticed were that there was a light visible to the driver at level crossings to indicate that the protection was activated and that there was an in-cab orange/amber light that came on with an audible sound when approaching a crossing or signal. Thought that was interesting. And that the Swiss crossing projection activated way earlier than North American ones do. To their credit, I did notice numerous construction projects where the platforms were being raised for level boarding. It was a great trip overall. The last leg, though, was Amtrak down the NEC and it might have been the single roughest train ride I've ever had at any level or country. One of the trucks on our coach was severely hunting and the vibration was extreme. It was enough that my wife told me that she kept looking at me thinking "if he's not reacting, then we're not in danger, but I sure feel scared." The vibration lessened at speeds under about 100 mph and in curves it stopped completely.
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Jul 15, 2023 18:27
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I'm a poor photographer on a phone and an even worse videographer. Especially inside a moving object where the camera is endlessly trying to focus on reflections on the windows. I culled out some of the better or more interesting pictures I took. Turns out that I didn't really take that many. Without getting into the whole thing of it, I've been trying to actually look at my vacations rather than look at everything I've ever seen through a videoscreen or viewfinder.Noosphere posted:The Mürren cargo module is really cool. Since the village has no road connection to the outside world (except for a forest track appropriate only for off-road vehicles), all freight for the village has to use the gondola and the train. I've not heard of other such exact load handling devices, but all passenger gondolas can and do carry freight for the destinations they serve. I don't know why I haven't just looked at Wikipedia when I've been describing it. They have a picture of it. I can't find anything describing another such machine anywhere. They were doing quite a bit of work along the Gornergrat cog railway, including rebuilding one of the stops that appeared to be a ski season one.  This one was coming off the mountain and heading to the transfer platforms in Zermatt. It was still there the next morning.  The Riffelalp station had a small freight house/goods shed. All of those pallets were beer and wine for our hotel.  I'm not one to brag or show off by nature, but we'd saved for years and have stockpiled credit card miles so that we could totally go nuts on hotels. This was the view from our room above Zermatt. While I'm talking about the Gornergrat:  If one was to build a model of this place, you will save on trees. Not much growing when you're 3000 meters up.  And this is a level picture! quote:Your timing for the Prestige Class was good. These trainsets were taken out of service shortly after their introduction because the wheel geometry was damaging track points. As the necessary tweaks to the bogies are being made, they are being phased back into service. We did have an issue with the trainset substitutions. At Interlaken, I did see an inbound Goldenpass the day before at the fantastic trainwatching spot along the river.  The next day when it was our turn for the Goldenpass, BLS subbed in a brand new FLIRT. It was nice and shiny and perfectly clean inside. It wasn't just "they've taken care of this." It was like getting into a new car at the dealer. I mean, no one wants to have equipment subbed on a nominally luxury service, but it could have been worse. At the change of gauge in Zweisimmen, we did get the fancy equipment. Literally the only time it rained on us the entire trip was when we were changing trains there. We had the second/third row behind the bulkhead. Being overly polite, I didn't get right up to the bulkhead and get in the way of the people who had the first row.   I did take a short video of semi-random territory. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHvIra6jlPo On the matter of signals, the only time I actually took a picture of one was this very basic one in Gruyeres.  quote:The federal Disability Discrimination Act gives public transport authorities until the end of this year to make their services accessible. So the SBB is working as hard as possible to get everything done by the deadline. The only station I saw them actually working on was what I think was Wilderswil on the Berner Oberland-Bahn.  They'll probably get this done in the time it'll take us to build like a single ramp at a station somewhere in the US. Random other pictures: Glacier Express   Landwasser Viaduct   It sneaks up on you and is a little tricky to take pictures of from the train. I did take a video of a trip over it, which is a combination of "I'm going to hold my phone up" and "I'm going to look a different direction." I just noticed that one of the people that is in my video happened to be on four of the five trains we were on that day. On train #4, she actually said something to us like "so we've been on the same trains all day and now it just feels weird to not say hello." She was a Dutch woman on a solo Switzerland train tour. We talked about Amtrak for a while and she admired our freight trains quite a bit. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSjfLnvGfq8 Jungfraubahn A little tourist-y, which says something compared to the Glacier Express and the Bernina Express.   Still, an underground train station at 3000+ meters is something.  Frecciarossa in Montreux  I really wanted to get a picture of one of the BLS Re 475s. Of course, the only time I actually had a chance, there was a dang catenary mast in the way. I like them because they're the cousins to our ACS-64s. In a parallel universe where Conrail electrified west of Harrisburg in the 1970s, they'd probably be what NS is running to Pittsburgh.  I was a little surprised to see that the only thing marking the end of a train are those little red and white chevrons?  Dinner in Zurich had a heck of a view.  This was the power on the train that got us to Zurich.  Not a train, but I just can't help showing people this rear end in a top hat.  This was in Lauterbrunnen. I'd have loved to be able to get inside that building and take some better pictures. Lastly, one of Lausanne's metro lines is built is a rubber tired metro built on an old funicular track. It looks like an optical illusion. 
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Jul 23, 2023 05:34
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If the failure dynamics are anything like fan disk failures in aircraft engines, there's probably not much you can do trackside. The cracks are microscopic and/or internal, so you're stuck having to examine them directly removed from the wheelset and truck.
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Sep 5, 2023 01:21
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Mexico is even more fossil fuel dependent than the US for power generation, so they're burning dinosaurs either way.
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Sep 9, 2023 01:03
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PATH being a railroad because of conditions that haven't existed for like 60 years is just as hilarious as saying was "brought down" to being a subway. That happened like 115 years ago.
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Sep 12, 2023 23:07
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Work sent me on a field trip to the maintenance facility at Ivy City (DC). My main takeaways are: The Acelas are absolutely beat to hell. Its one thing to see them when you're boarding one, but another when you actually have time to look at them. They look like the train equivalent of a 25 year old that looks 50 because meth is a hell of a drug. If you go out to Dulles to the big Air and Space Museum and see the Space Shuttle, they didn't restore it or clean it. They wanted it to be beat up as a demonstration of their service life. The Acelas are in worse shape than that battlescarred and scorched spacecraft. The cabs are incredibly tiny. You can't really fit three people into them. Visibility is horrible. It felt like you were looking down a cardboard tube with one eye. I liked the cab signal unit that they have that just says what the aspect is instead of replicating the lineside signal aspect. Back in the coaches, I was reminded that the funny empty cubby that looks like a luggage storage area was, in fact, a phone booth 25 years ago. That sounds hilarious now. The ACS-64 we went in was so, so clean. It was randomly selected, so it isn't like it was staged. The interior was squeaky clean, even back in the accessway between the two cabs. The cabs are also enormous. We had six people in one. The desktop controls are showing a lot of premature wear, which seems to be a poor design choice. They have a layer of clear plastic laminated over it and that layer is blistering badly. Excellent visibility. It felt rather comfortable, as a workspace. We weren't able to go inside one of the ALC-42s. There was only one spotted anywhere we could easily get to, but someone was doing minor work in the cab. I would have liked to, because I'm curious what the cabs are like. The specific unit was so new that there's no picture of it on Railpictures yet. Likewise, despite there being a number of P42s sitting around, we didn't visit them. There were a number of Amfleets in various stages of work. Despite their age, they're still plenty serviceable after their interior refresh. Are they in as good shape as some of the equipment in Europe? No, but I've also seen equipment in Europe in worse shape (Italy). They're B-52s. They're not perfect, but they're getting the job done despite (or in spite of) their age.
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Sep 23, 2023 02:56
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It also depends on time of the year. Like on the Cap, if you're going westbound out of DC in the colder months, it is practically dark before you get to Gaithersburg let alone anywhere nice to look at. In the summer though, it'll be daylight until you're well past Cumberland. But the best scenery is after Cumberland anyhow.
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Nov 18, 2023 15:29
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I'm partial to the Capitol Limited in general as a Pittsburgher that lives in DC and have ridden it many, many times. I have never taken the Cardinal before. Looking at the timetables and knowing when the sun rises and sets in the region, I'd take the Capitol Limited eastbound and the Cardinal westbound. You'll get to the Allegheny Mountains around sunrise and cross the Eastern Continental Divide and descend the Potomac River in daylight. For the Cardinal, you'll be in the Shenandoahs by late afternoon and crossing West Virginia before sunset.
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Nov 19, 2023 06:32
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I get that excited about things, but keep it on the inside where no one can make videos of me to post online/my wife realized what she married and runs away. Just kidding about the second one. She knows and will have to bear that cross for the rest of her days. I once ran clear out of a restaurant to go watch a train.
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Dec 4, 2023 05:02
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I was having lunch with my wife, mother-in-law, sister-in-law and her husband, my then one year old nephew, and some of their family friends. The meal was more or less over and the women were women talking and such about things that aren't sports or whatever. Immediately across the street, there's a small two track interchange between the Georgia Central and the Heart of Georgia. As soon as I saw the grade crossing flashers start, I told my wife "I'll be right back" and off I went. I watched them work the interchange. Lots of boxcars, but also a few loads of telephone poles.
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Dec 4, 2023 18:53
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The joke's on them. It is my wife's favorite restaurant in her home town!
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Dec 4, 2023 20:28
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In all seriousness, she is a good sport about it. For our fourth anniversary, she tracked down an antique lantern from a railroad that ran through my hometown (Bessemer & Lake Erie) on the logic that a lantern is a lamp and a lamp is an appliance and four years is appliances. She likes hunting for antiques and I kinda started collecting railroad stuff when I started going out on trips with her.
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Dec 5, 2023 17:28
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Frankly, I think that guy displayed a remarkable amount of restraint in his profanity and screaming.
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Dec 6, 2023 01:59
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I'm not sure if that's worse or better than the lady that's in love with the Eiffel Tower, but I can't decide.
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Dec 7, 2023 01:47
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I'm sad because my wife saw the CSX Veterans unit and I was in the car, but too busy paying attention to the road while driving like a moron. I've never seen any of the CSX special paint schemes and only got a bad view of the NS Erie heritage unit once. Seen basically all of the Amtrak ones though.
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Dec 15, 2023 03:41
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