Throw Edgar from the train!


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @boomzilla said:

    We're saying no one would fucking use them, because they're not better than other things we already have.

    That, of course, is another issue. If you take the train from city A to city B, you're also almost certainly going to have to rent a car to get around. In Europe, do the HSR stations have rental offices and parking lots? If not, is there space to build them? If not, how much money would it cost to buy up the land?

    Sure, there's situations where this isn't an issue, but the US also generally doesn't have the local mass transit network that would obviate the necessity for rental car infrastructure.

    In the US, mass transit, from figures I've seen, never manages to live up to usage estimates. How long do you think a cross-country train would run with, say, 25% or 10% occupancy? Bear in mind the regular long-distance train system in the US (Amtrak) is a massive money pit (I think it loses about $100M a year, but the exact amount isn't important. What is important is that HSR would probably be even more adversely affected, because the trains probably cost more.)


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @boomzilla said:

    tl;dr DC/NY and NY/Boston makes enough to cover operating expenses, but not capital expenses.

    Bear in mind that Acela isn't even what you would call high-speed, in the sense it's normally used. If you wanted to convert it to true high-speed, you'd have to re-lay a lot of track, and for that, see my previous post.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @EvanED said:

    don't have to deal with TSA searches

    Yet. If they have their way, that could change. They've already experimented with "helping" supply security at train and bus stations in a few instances.

    @EvanED said:

    I think there's a very nice sweet spot for trains for trips longer than a couple hours and less than... maybe 16?

    I'd actually like to use trains, but it's pretty pricey. A few years ago I looked at Amtrak's autotrain line in Florida when I had to drive more or less the entire eastern US coast. But my ticket, plus the car's ticket, would have cost more than $400 one-way, only gotten me less than half of the distance I wanted to go, and would have only saved me a couple of hours versus driving (admittedly, I wouldn't be driving, as you mention.) On balance it didn't seem to make sense, especially since I was making a round trip.

    @boomzilla said:

    Get rid of public subsidies and all that crap goes away (so do most of the trains, for that matter).

    Remember, Amtrak's losing--crap, it's far worse than I thought--$600M a year. (cite: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/03/01/amtrak-loses-a-ton-of-money-each-year-it-doesnt-have-to/)


  • FoxDev

    @FrostCat said:

    Acela

    ..... i need help or something.

    the first thing that went through my head here is "that's not how you spell my name"


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @dkf said:

    If you go 1000 miles north of DC, you're deep in backwoods Quebec. You won't find anyone speaking anything very much there except the odd weirdo speaking French. (They're weird for being quite that far out in the boonies.) You'd get more conversation if you could talk in beaver or moose.

    A thousand miles due south is in the Bahamas. I think that's nicer than northern Quebec!

    The point I'm making is that the US is not quite as big as you make it out to be. It's still big (once you go west of the Mississippi, the distances become really quite substantial, especially east/west), but not quite as vast as you think. Similarly, Europe isn't exactly tiny either. Belgium isn't big, but neither is New Jersey. France is a similar scale to Texas. (Russia is huge, nearly twice the area of the USA. Just the European part of Russia is nearly half the area of the US, and the total land area of the European continent — a small continent as these things go — is rather more than that of the USA.)

    The point of all this is that saying that you can't run high speed trains because some parts of the USA are large is just making up excuses. Chicago to DC is just under <abbr title="around 600 miles">1000km</abbr>, to NYC just a bit over. That's very similar to the distance from Madrid to Paris, which is practical for real HSR (where sustaining speeds on the order of <abbr title="around 185 mph">300km/h</abbr> is possible).

    If you're going from NYC to California, fly if you're not a dumbass. But that's not a majority of inter-city travel in the US, even discounting longer commutes. 😄


    ­



  • @dkf said:

    The point I'm making is that the US is not quite as big as you make it out to be. It's still big (once you go west of the Mississippi, the distances become really quite substantial, especially east/west), but not quite as vast as you think. Similarly, Europe isn't exactly tiny either. ■■■■■■■ isn't big, but neither is New Jersey. France is a similar scale to Texas.
    Europe as a whole, minus Russia, is of a similar size as the continental US, but it's significantly more dense: about twice the US's population.

    @FrostCat said:

    I'd actually like to use trains, but it's pretty pricey. A few years ago I looked at Amtrak's autotrain line in Florida when I had to drive more or less the entire eastern US coast. But my ticket, plus the car's ticket...
    To be fair, that's a fairly special case. Most people wouldn't take their cars. For a single person's ticket, going from Chicago to near my parent's house by train is less half the price of flying and probably about the same as the trip's worth of gas, and it's a long enough drive that I sometimes stay in a hotel on the way. The reason I don't take it more is a time thing; if I lived in Chicago, it would be pretty reasonable (around that 16 hour limit of the sweet spot I mentioned) and I'd probably usually go that way. Heck, they could double the price and I'd still probably usually go that way. But the problem is that, as it is, I'd have to bus to Chicago, and then there's I think about a 3 hr wait in the station, so all told that'd be another 8 hours or something -- so around or above 24 hours door-to-door.

    @da_Doctah said:

    And (3) the fact that "two hours late" is considered on time, and "five hours late" is not considered remarkable
    That's true too, though I lump that in with the length of the journey.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @EvanED said:

    To be fair, that's a fairly special case. Most people wouldn't take their cars.

    Oh, absolutely, but I didn't want to have to rent a car while I was home. FWIW the price without the car was only about $150, but that left me 600 miles from home, which wouldn't be very useful. :)

    I just looked, and the full Amtrak trip would be $160 or $340, depending on whether I choose "value" or "flexible". I'm not going to look up what those are, but I did notice that the trip requires me to get from one station in Boston to a different one, and Amtrak doesn't provide transportation betwen the two, so add the time and cost for a bus or taxi. Oh, plus, you need to transfer in DC, and the entire trip--ignoring the fact that I'd need to get a ride to the start station and picked up at teh destination, as well as whatever time the "you're on your own" Boston transfer takes--is 34 hours. You can beat that driving even if you stop to get a ful night's sleep--if you're feeling tough, you can drive in ~24 hours.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    I was curious: NYC->Dallas is ~54 hours via Amtrak, including a transfer delay, which is a WTF of it's own: You take a 28-hour train from NYC to Chicago via DC and Kentucky, wait 4 hours, and then it's 21 more hours to Dallas. (It turns out there's an alternate route that's about $5 more, which involves 18 hours from NYC to Chicago, plus a 4 hour layover, and then the same 21 hours to Dallas, after a 5 hour layover.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @da_Doctah said:

    And (3) the fact that "two hours late" is considered on time, and "five hours late" is not considered remarkable.

    Well that's just crappy. Round here, the boundary for when a long distance train is considered late is 10 minutes. (Local rail uses 5 minutes for their metrics.)

    @FrostCat said:

    Yeah, and much of it is more or less empty.

    Much of the west of the US is pretty empty too. What's the point you're making here?

    @FrostCat said:

    How expensive, do you think, would it be, to add portion of a new high-speed line that went through, say, downtown Berlin? Anywhere east of the Mississippi the land is probably already in use.

    Welcome to our world. This is normal for Europe. We cope. (And the immediate answer to that question is “tunnels”. That's exactly how HSR is pushed into cities when there isn't a convenient existing permanent way.)

    @FrostCat said:

    In Europe, do the HSR stations have rental offices and parking lots?

    I've no idea about rental offices (there's probably something there, but why would it be the responsibility of the railway to provide it? The free market sorts it out.) but there's usually not a convenient car rental nearby for a downtown station. There are exceptions, but they're that. The HSR might (selected trains only) make additional stops at a more out-of-town location which would be suitable for having a car-hire nearby, but that's not universal.

    What there usually is is other forms of local transport. Local rail. Metro. Tram. Bus. Taxi. (Taxis in the US tend to be pretty miserable affairs.) Even cycle hire if you want. 😃 Moreover, the places where the majority of rail users want to go are more concentrated near the rail hubs (which encourage an increase in land values, encouraging people to invest in building more things near the rail hubs, …)

    @FrostCat said:

    How long do you think a cross-country train would run with, say, 25% or 10% occupancy?

    Coast-to-coast? I'd fly that sort of distance. But with real HSR you often find that it is faster to take the train than fly (with all the “bonus” annoyances of an airport) for distances in the 300–1000 miles range. I don't think the Acela counts as HSR, or if it does, we've had widespread HSR in the UK for many decades. ;) [spoiler]That was a joke.[/spoiler]

    @FrostCat said:

    If you wanted to convert it to true high-speed, you'd have to re-lay a lot of track, and for that, see my previous post.

    I think I read somewhere that one of the biggest bottlenecks is somewhere like Philly or Baltimore, where the alignment is just abysmal through some relatively-short tunnel/cutting section.

    But apart from dealing with that sort of thing, key parts are stuff like keeping freight and passenger services at least partially segregated. You can run them right next to each other, but you don't want to have to stop either for the other. Yes, some lines would need to be re-laid, but you can't go infinitely long without doing that anyway: making it part of the rolling maintenance programme would be a way to keep the level of disruption down.

    Some real construction would probably be needed; that's the only sane way of dealing with some kinds of bottleneck.

    @FrostCat said:

    Remember, Amtrak's losing--crap, it's far worse than I thought--$600M a year. (cite: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/03/01/amtrak-loses-a-ton-of-money-each-year-it-doesnt-have-to/)

    What are they spending blowing that on?



  • @FrostCat said:

    as well as whatever time the "you're on your own" Boston transfer takes--is 34 hours. You can beat that driving even if you stop to get a ful night's sleep--if you're feeling tough, you can drive in ~24 hours.
    Yeah. Like, I really wish that trains worked better in the US. For the reasons stated above, I think a better trains system would be the ideal way to travel for a lot of trips; there's much more room for increasing comfort than there is on a plane. But the cost to get there would be huge, and even I'm not sure it's worth it except in limited areas like Acela.

    I think some trip in an Amtrak sleeper car through the rockies or something would make a very nice, relaxing vacation -- but that relies on considering the time spent looking at the scenery as part of the trip instead of just transportation to your destination.

    @dkf said:

    Well that's just crappy. Round here, the boundary for when a long distance train is considered late is 10 minutes. (Local rail uses 5 minutes for their metrics.)
    The main problem here is that Amtrak doesn't own its rail, it leases from freight rail companies. (Most of the Acela line is an exception.) The freight companies give Amtrak windows that they can use, but if they miss a window they have to wait potentially a significant amount of time for the rail to clear.

    One of the trips I took turned into a big boondoggle. There was a freight train that derailed east of Chicago, blocking the track and disrupting tons of Amtrak traffic around Chicago. So Amtrak had to bus us around that diversion for 4 hours or something to Toledo, OH, where we boarded the train. But then we hit Cleveland, and sat unmoving for maybe 2 hours. (I'm not sure exactly; that was like 4am so I was asleep most of the time.)



  • I tried Amtrak last year, and the sheer level of incompetence shocked me. They are slow because they are dangerous, and lose money because they're badly managed.

    The train set off on time.

    A few hours later it stopped dead for 3-4 hours overnight because they forgot it existed and parked a goods train blocking the track - with no crew aboard.

    That presumably messed up the rest of the routing as it was about 5 or 6 hours late by the end of the scheduled 15 hour trip.

    I felt really sorry for the train crew. Fuck all they could do, and they didn't even have the supplies to give everyone a bottle of water.

    So much for catching a show on arrival.

    Then there are the huge numbers of unguarded, even unsignalled level crossings.
    I'd be interested to see the stats on collisions per crossing-train. It's got to be high.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @dkf said:

    What's the point you're making here?

    Uh..."nobody would build trains there", I guess, because nobody would go there? Either that or I was comparing it to the Eastern US, where you are going to have a tough time getting the land necessary.

    @dkf said:

    And the immediate answer to that question is “tunnels”.

    *cough* Tampa. 😄

    @dkf said:

    I've no idea about rental offices (there's probably something there, but why would it be the responsibility of the railway to provide it? The free market sorts it out.) but there's usually not a convenient car rental nearby for a downtown station.

    It wouldn't necessarily be the railway's responsibility, but if they don't, say, put in offices and parking for the cars, it's probably going to be harder to get them there, because they're not necessarily going to be right there, so now maybe you need shuttles as well. There's a reason airports have them. 😄

    I would suspect that the majority of (say) business travel in the US isn't going to want to take a bus. And telling people to use bikes means either you need bike rentals or people need to bring them with them. Then you're (for example) cutting into the space in your hotel room if you're staying overnight, which might not be a big deal.

    None of these are insurmountable, but all of them will wind up raising the cost, and of course, in urban areas, the land's going to be hideously expensive. (That applies, jsut in a different way, when you're building tunnels--and those may have their own problems. San Francisco (I think) is building a subway tunnel, or maybe it's an aqueduct, and it's been stalled for a year or two becaue the TBM ran into problems with the ground makeup.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @dkf said:

    I don't think the Acela counts as HSR

    Acela technically is HSR, because part of the time, it exceeds the generally-considered mininums to be considered such. Like I said, they found it cost-prohibitive to obtain enough land to lay the track out so it could actually go really fast.

    @dkf said:

    Coast-to-coast? I'd fly that sort of distance.

    Not necessarily, even. See my florida-to-maine example above, where I crunched numbers a little bit.

    @dkf said:

    What are they blowing that on?

    My understanding is that not enough people use the train to cover costs, coupled with a healthy dose of the usual waste/corruption. I was reading about this a little bit a year ago, and IIRC one tiny example of the problem is Amtrack sells a decent $6 cheeseburger...for $15. And they manage to lose money on the deal!


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @EvanED said:

    But the cost to get there would be huge, and even I'm not sure it's worth it except in limited areas like Acela.

    The analysis seems to be--someone linked above--that teh coastal lines cover, more or less, their operating expenses, but none of the other ones even come close.

    Remember above where I show the Amtrak times for NYC-Dallas? I just looked up the road trip time. It's 22 hours by car, says Bing. That means, if I pop some No-DoZ, and don't drink so I don't have to stop to pee, I can get to Dallas before the first leg of the train arrives in Chicago, if we leave at the same time.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @EvanED said:

    I think some trip in an Amtrak sleeper car through the rockies or something would make a very nice, relaxing vacation -- but that relies on considering the time spent looking at the scenery as part of the trip instead of just transportation to your destination.

    I agree, when you factor in the whole sentence. :) Or if you're going on a longer vacation and want to unwind a bit before you get there.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @dkf said:

    Welcome to our world. This is normal for Europe. We cope.

    We know. We just choose a different way. We already have an awesome train network that does great stuff for us. We don't need to fuck it up by transforming it into something a tiny fraction of people want.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @FrostCat said:

    The analysis seems to be--someone linked above--that teh coastal lines cover, more or less, their operating expenses, but none of the other ones even come close.

    And that's just barely cover operating costs. And not capital costs. But why would a rail industry have significant capital costs?


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @lightsoff said:

    I'd be interested to see the stats on collisions per crossing-train. It's got to be high.

    A quick Bing takes me to an accident lawyer's site1 that there's a collision with a vehicle or person approximately every two hours.

    Here's another page that says roughly 2-3000 accidents a year with roughly 250 fatalities and 4x the number of injuries. A quick eyeball suggests the numbers have gone down over the last 20 years; what I just mentioned was an estimate from just the last few years.

    1 so apply as big a grain of salt as you feel necessary


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @PJH said:

    Train ticketing in the UK as well.

    http://www.moneysavingexpert.com/travel/cheap-train-tickets#singles

    You want to go from A to B. An A->B single and a B-> A single can be cheaper than an A->B return.


    From down South to Glasgow.
    Two singles half the price (ish) of return.
    A single that takes an hour longer and gets in 13 minutes sooner for nearly 4 times the price of the cheapest.
    A 12 hour journey because it goes in the wrong direction to change lines, but does so when the trains back out aren't fucking running so you get to sit in London Euston from midnight to 5:30am. :wtf:

    How do they come up with this?!


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @boomzilla said:

    But why would a rail industry have significant capital costs?

    Do "new cars" count as capital costs, as opposed to operating costs? I don't know which track leases would come under, but I'd guess "operating", but I could be wrong.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @FrostCat said:

    Do "new cars" count as capital costs, as opposed to operating costs? I don't know which track leases would come under, but I'd guess "operating", but I could be wrong.

    I'd assume that new cars are capital costs. That shit's expensive. Honestly, I didn't dig into the stuff. Because Fuck Amtrak.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @boomzilla said:

    I'd assume that new cars are capital costs. That shit's expensive. Honestly, I didn't dig into the stuff. Because Fuck Amtrak.

    Although then you have to ask--or you would if you cared--how often they replace the cars. With regular subway cars, they have a long life, long enough that people have websites devoted to keeping track of how often cars are bought, how many there are, and the serial numbers, for trains like the Boston T. (I don't remember how I ran across that, but you figure there's gotta be someone who cares about that kind of crap, for any given thing.)

    I actually like the ideas of trains, but I don't have the starry-eyed romanticism about them that leads to people wanting them even when they're not cost-effective. "I vote for every civic improvement that comes down the pike, but I just can't afford my taxes!" is not a smart way to go through life.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    http://www.amtrak.com/ccurl/976/814/Amtrak-Five-Year-Financial-Plan-FY2013-2017,0.pdf

    Chart on page 10. The plan is to spend over $10B over 5 years (2013-2017).

    5 year total plan in $millions:

    Track and Other Infrastructure $5,830
    Rolling Stock Acquistions 1,981
    Rolling Stock Overhauls and Engineering 1,463
    Technology Programs 415
    Customer Experience Programs140
    Security Programs 60
    Environmental Remediation 58
    Other 76
    Total Capital Plan $10,024



  • @lightsoff said:

    I tried Amtrak last year, and the sheer level of incompetence shocked me. They are slow because they are dangerous, and lose money because they're badly managed. ... A few hours later it stopped dead for 3-4 hours overnight because they forgot it existed and parked a goods train blocking the track - with no crew aboard.
    This may come as a surprise, but that wasn't Amtrak's fault. Neither are the grade crossings, which aren't owned or managed by Amtrak except for parts of the Acela line and near stations.

    My very-limited experience is that Amtrak itself is actually pretty well run from a passenger point of view, but that they are limited by their arrangements with the freight companies.





  • @lightsoff said:

    A few hours later it stopped dead for 3-4 hours overnight because they forgot it existed and parked a goods train blocking the track - with no crew aboard.

    Whose track was that on? That sounds like a major B*****ming by the train dispatcher...who, by the way, works for the freight railroad, not Amtrak. (Amtrak has their own train crews, but outside the NEC, all other functions are handled by the freight railroad.)

    @lightsoff said:

    Then there are the huge numbers of unguarded, even unsignalled level crossings.I'd be interested to see the stats on collisions per crossing-train. It's got to be high.

    Most passive level crossings see very, very little road traffic.

    @FrostCat said:

    (That applies, jsut in a different way, when you're building tunnels--and those may have their own problems. San Francisco (I think) is building a subway tunnel, or maybe it's an aqueduct, and it's been stalled for a year or two becaue the TBM ran into problems with the ground makeup.

    Yeah, tunneling under most US urban areas is a pain in the rump.

    @FrostCat said:

    Although then you have to ask--or you would if you cared--how often they replace the cars.

    Superliner hardware is definitely vintage gear -- easily a few decades old.

    @boomzilla said:

    Chart on page 10. The plan is to spend over $10B over 5 years (2013-2017).

    It sounds like the NEC is seeing some major capital -- otherwise, that budget looks not too far out of line with a Class I...(the Class Is go through several billion in capital a piece yearly).

    @EvanED said:

    This may come as a surprise, but that wasn't Amtrak's fault. Neither are the grade crossings, which aren't owned or managed by Amtrak except for parts of the Acela line and near stations.

    My very-limited experience is that Amtrak itself is actually pretty well run from a passenger point of view, but that they are limited by their arrangements with the freight companies.


    As I stated above. I agree they're pretty solid as far as customer service goes, but their timeliness is limited by having to work with the current state of the US rail network. There are effectively 100+mile two-lane streets with no passing zones the whole way out there, and those are among some of the more efficient parts of the US railroad network...



  • @tarunik said:

    >A few hours later it stopped dead for 3-4 hours overnight because they forgot it existed and parked a goods train blocking the track - with no crew aboard.

    Whose track was that on? That sounds like a major B*****ming by the train dispatcher.

    It sounds like maybe the crew reached the limit of hours they were allowed to work. (For safety reasons, train crews are only allowed to work a certain number of hours per day.) Sometimes, because of some problem the train is delayed, and the limit is reached before the train gets to its destination. When that happens, the train stops wherever it happens to be until a relief crew can arrive; if the train is in the middle of nowhere, that can take a while.


  • Garbage Person

    @boomzilla said:

    I'd assume that new cars are capital costs. That shit's expensive. Honestly, I didn't dig into the stuff. Because Fuck Amtrak.

    Railcars are basically forever. Change the carpet and seats every decade or so. They do not build very many.

    Locomotives are actually the shorter lived component, and will do 30 years without major rework.

    They are then often rebuilt and resold into other duties (or foreign service). In particular much of Amtraks fleet is bought with an eye towards being modified freight locomotives (there is a slight difference in equipment - passenger service needs such niceties as electricity and air conditioning that aren't always dealt with by the Railcars themselves, and the trains weigh less so there's less cooling capacity for the engine) to make that process easier.

    Occasionally it goes the other way. I'm right next to an electrified Amtrak line at work, and when the electrics are down due to storms, they use some real beat assed piles of freight industry castoff to keep things moving.



  • @HardwareGeek said:

    Sometimes, because of some problem the train is delayed, and the limit is reached before the train gets to its destination. When that happens, the train stops wherever it happens to be until a relief crew can arrive; if the train is in the middle of nowhere, that can take a while.

    It's still a major B******ming, because normally a train dispatcher will have a foggy clue that one of the trains on his territory is going to die on the law -- and that crew van ought to be on its way when the crew's time expires, not four hours later!



  • @tarunik said:

    It's still a major B******ming

    I didn't say it wasn't.

    @tarunik said:

    normally a train dispatcher will have a foggy clue
    I suspect it's like many other endeavors: some people have a clue; others need a cluebat.

    @tarunik said:

    die on the law
    That's the term I trying but failing to remember.

    @tarunik said:

    that crew van ought to be on its way when the crew's time expires, not four hours later!
    Agreed. Ideally, of course, the dispatcher would have a reasonable estimate of where the train is going to be when the crew's time expires and have the relief crew there ready to board. One can't expect perfection, especially if the dispatcher is preoccupied with whatever caused the delay in the first place, but blocking the main for four hours seems like the sort of thing that might lead to a change in employment.


  • kills Dumbledore

    @EvanED said:

    Comfortable seats

    @EvanED said:

    don't have to feel like you're being nickel-and-dimed for everything

    Obviously never been on a First train in the UK


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @Weng said:

    Railcars are basically forever. Change the carpet and seats every decade or so. They do not build very many.

    Locomotives are actually the shorter lived component, and will do 30 years without major rework.

    Whatever the lifespans, they are planning to spend hundreds of millions of dollars per year on acquisition and overhaul / maintenance of rolling stock per year. When you can barely pay to keep the lights on, that's not chump change.

    BTW, right below that chart they talk about the source of that $10B. There's a line item for "Internal Amtrak funds." They have $62M penciled in for FY2013 and $1M for FY2014. And that's it. Remember, this is for a 5 year $10B+ capital spending plan.

    This is the summary text that appears on the page above those charts:

    Amtrak’s five-year capital program proposals total $10.024 billion as summarized in Table 2. The majority of this program is dedicated to infrastructure improvements, the acquisition of rolling stock including exercising buyout options on leased equipment, overhauling existing rolling stock, and technology investments. The capital plan is for 79% of available funding to come from Federal appropriations, with the balance being funded by a variety of special Federal grants, financing under the Railroad Rehabilitation and Improvement Financing (RRIF) program, and from state and local entities. The capital program is presented in the following sections based on the strategic business activity that each program supports



  • While Acela is forced to cope with some bad infrastructure (the B&P tunnel south of Baltimore's Penn Station dates to 1835 if I recall, yes 18) the train was designed with this in mind - it's got suspension systems that help it lean through some of the tight curves.

    The TRWTF is this - they ended up building the thing a smidgen too wide... which would have been okay, except for the leaning-suspension deal which lets the train take the turns at high-speed.
    Two trains can't pass on two parallel tracks on the existing curves at top speed - so they have to keep to a lower speed limit.

    And so the whole danged thing is $$ down the rathole - I suppose it supplements the "Metroliner" capacity - but it's barely faster overall. As far as I know, nobody has any plan to deal with the deficiency - it looks like Amtrak is just whistling in the wind, hoping nobody notices they totally hosed their flagship program.



  • @HardwareGeek said:

    It sounds like maybe the crew reached the limit of hours they were allowed to work. (For safety reasons, train crews are only allowed to work a certain number of hours per day.) Sometimes, because of some problem the train is delayed, and the limit is reached before the train gets to its destination. When that happens, the train stops wherever it happens to be until a relief crew can arrive; if the train is in the middle of nowhere, that can take a while.

    You know airlines seem to handle that identical problem in a much more reasonable way.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @ijij said:

    the B&P tunnel south of Baltimore's Penn Station dates to 1835 if I recall, yes 18

    That was the one I was trying to remember!


  • kills Dumbledore

    There are certain complications involved in leaving an aeroplane in the middle of nowhere when you've passed your allotted hours.

    Maybe that's what the AirAsia flight did?


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @blakeyrat said:

    You know airlines seem to handle that identical problem in a much more reasonable way.

    Ensuring that there are sufficient crew for keeping the plane going the whole of the flight? Yes. They do that. Mostly because just stopping the plane in mid-air is a little awkward. Railway companies are a bit cheap by comparison.

    Though someone should've been fined/fired for blocking the live line. That's the only way to make people prioritise sometimes…



  • @dkf said:

    Ensuring that there are sufficient crew for keeping the plane going the whole of the flight? Yes. They do that. Mostly because just stopping the plane in mid-air is a little awkward. Railway companies are a bit cheap by comparison.

    The Australian railroads actually do this, with one crew operating the train and the other resting in a crew-bunk car located right behind the locomotives -- this is needed because of just how barren the Australian Outback is. You might be able to get it to work in the US, but it'd take a massive amount of renegotiating with the unions to do so. There's also the issue of needing pilot crews to get on in case of a detour...



  • @boomzilla said:

    The capital plan is for 79% of available funding to come from Federal appropriations, with the balance being funded by a variety of special Federal grants, financing under the [Federal] Railroad Rehabilitation and Improvement Financing (RRIF) program, and from state and local entities.

    Conspicuously missing is anything resembling "reinvestment of profits" (because, of course, there aren't any).


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @HardwareGeek said:

    Conspicuously missing is anything resembling "reinvestment of profits" (because, of course, there aren't any).

    There are in the chart, but they're basically a rounding error ($63M in the first two years).


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @HardwareGeek said:

    Conspicuously missing is anything resembling "reinvestment of profits" (because, of course, there aren't any).

    You don't want to make profits. They'll encourage the politicians to reduce the level of funding you get.



  • @dkf said:

    You don't want to make profits. They'll encourage the politicians to reduce the level of funding you get.

    Disproportionately so AFAICT, which is a nasty trap for public transit systems as well -- subsidies get cut faster than farebox revenue rises, which leaves the system unable to grow because it gets less money overall if it attracts passengers. :wtf:



  • @tarunik said:

    needing pilot crews to get on in case of a detour...

    ....pilot [train] crews.... whowouldda thunk?



  • @ijij said:

    pilot [train] crews.... whowouldda thunk?

    Short answer: think of them as guides to get the regular crew over an unfamiliar stretch of railroad.

    Long answer: train crews qualify on specific territory, as they need to know how the trains they typically run handle over that territory, what grades and curves are present, where signals are and when to start looking for them, and various other things. When a train must be detoured over territory the regular crew isn't qualified on themselves, a qualified crewmember boards the train and gives them directions as to how this particular stretch of track is supposed to be handled.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @tarunik said:

    As I stated above. I agree they're pretty solid as far as customer service goes, but their timeliness is limited by having to work with the current state of the US rail network. There are effectively 100+mile two-lane streets with no passing zones the whole way out there, and those are among some of the more efficient parts of the US railroad network...

    Sounds like someone needs to sit the track layout people down with a copy of Railroad Tycoon! 😄


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @HardwareGeek said:

    Sometimes, because of some problem the train is delayed, and the limit is reached before the train gets to its destination. When that happens, the train stops wherever it happens to be until a relief crew can arrive; if the train is in the middle of nowhere, that can take a while.

    This, of course, is a WTF of its own.

    It would be interesting to see how often this happens. I wonder if it's tracked as such: you might be able to predict it and put a second crew on a train in danger of having the crew run out of hours.



  • @tarunik said:

    (Long answer will come after TheDailyMeetings™ finish.)

    I await the long answer!

    I think I get it, but you're the expert, so I'd like to hear.
    (railroading has changed a bunch, hasn't it?)


  • I survived the hour long Uno hand

    If I want to go visit NYC from Cleveland, Amtrak can't get me there any faster than 12 hours. Google says it takes 7 hours to drive. It takes an hour and a half to fly.

    That 12-hour ticket costs $160, while the plane ride costs $266. My car gets about 32mi/gallon on highway, so even when gas was $4 per gallon, it costs only $116 in gas to drive.

    A quick and dirty graph of my options (axes are arranged so higher is better):

    Trains are clearly not keeping up.



  • I believe this graph illustrates why trains are still a reasonable option if your end points are serviced and it's a mid-range trip like the one you propose: ;-)

    I considered making the plane comfort rating -.5 or something, but that made the graph aesthetically far worse and I didn't feel like messing with it.

    (As an aside... God I hate OpenOffice. Anyone who says it matches MS Office obviously either hasn't used OpenOffice or hasn't used MSO.)



  • @FrostCat said:

    Sounds like someone needs to sit the track layout people down with a copy of Railroad Tycoon!

    The track segments in question are quite old, and were rather state of the art the last time they were touched, and still work -- its just that the dispatcher can't sort trains on that part of the territory.


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