Throw Edgar from the train!


  • Grade A Premium Asshole

    @another_sam said:

    Didn't we already have the 18-wheelers don't have 18 wheels discussion somewhere nearby?

    WTF are you getting on about? The majority of tractor trailers in the USA have 18 wheels.


  • Grade A Premium Asshole

    @HardwareGeek said:

    Also, I think they are often paid by the load rather than by the hour

    The contracting company negotiates a price for the load, the truck driver then gets a set price per mile, which really works out to per load. They typically get fuck-all when dead-heading.

    Also, truckers are only considered to be using up their allotted hours when behind the wheel, so they can sleep in the bunk, or do whatever (murder prostitutes, etc) and it be considered rest time and off the clock. By team driving, the truck need really only stop for fuel.



  • @HardwareGeek said:

    Wikipedia lists 15 railroad horseshoe curves in the US. Three of these are abandoned or out of service, and six others are on old Denver and Rio Grande Western narrow-gauge lines, leaving six in active, standard-gauge service.

    By far the most famous is the one near Altoona, PA; I'm guessing that if you were referring to that one, you wouldn't have even bothered to mention any other one. The others are in WA, between Skykomish and the Cascade tunnel; central CA, between San Luis Obispo and Cuesta Pass (near Cal Poly, so that's a likely candidate for being on your way to college); northern CA, the Cantara Loops between Dunsmuir and Mount Shasta; OR, east of Oakridge; and PA, between Meyersdale and Hyndman.

    In that case, I've been lied to by Marketing.

    @HardwareGeek said:

    between San Luis Obispo and Cuesta Pass (near Cal Poly, so that's a likely candidate for being on your way to college);

    This is the one I go by, yeah.



  • @riking said:

    This is the one I go by, yeah.

    I've had a picture of a train heading up the grade, not taken at the curve itself, but just north of it, set as the wallpaper on this decrepit old desktop for something like 6 or 7 years.



  • Finally created an account to reply to this.

    So true. Hell, it's not just Europeans who don't get how big this place is. Make a few drives.

    Dallas to L.A. Or San Francisco
    Dallas to Minneapolis
    Dallas to Manhattan
    Texarkana to El Paso

    Yes, I'm from Texas. No I'm not being a dick about it.
    The fact is, this country is huge. You don't really get a sense of it until you've made the drive. Side note: you really get an appreciation for air travel this way.

    I drove a car to a friend in L.A. once. Flew back home. Days of driving through the desert south with no A/C. Sort of miserable. But the right friends along for the ride can make that okay. I didn't have the right friends along for that ride. But theoretically, it could be okay.

    Just a couple of painless drunken hours to get back home.

    Still on my bucket list: drive from NYC to San Francisco in a bespoke artisanal PBR speed racer fixie. Take a hipster from the east coast with me and beat up a west coast hipster with the east coast one.


  • FoxDev

    @glathull said:

    Finally created an account to reply to this.

    welcome!

    we don't bite, well most of us don't bite!


  • Grade A Premium Asshole

    @accalia said:

    we don't bite, well most of us don't bite!

    You just nibble, unless it is a rabbit?


  • Notification Spam Recipient

    It's mostly the rats that bite


  • Grade A Premium Asshole

    @Vault_Dweller said:

    It's mostly the rats that bite

    I see what you did there...


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @glathull said:

    Make a few drives.

    Dallas to L.A. Or San Francisco

    TIL the entire population of Dallas does nothing but drive back and forth between there and California.

    Or, more seriously, why is it the response of so many Americans to proposals to build HSR (on limited potentially-high-traffic routes) that it won't help with particular routes that are at best very low priorities because they're long-distance and low-traffic? It seems to be some sort of systematic stupidity.

    And HSR will work quite well when connecting larger cities in Texas. The longer distances by comparison with EU inter-city spacings will work in its favour, as the train will be able to spend a larger proportion of the journey time at full speed…


  • Grade A Premium Asshole

    @dkf said:

    TIL the entire population of Dallas does nothing but drive back and forth between there and California.

    You didn't know that? Silly Europeans.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Polygeekery said:

    You didn't know that?

    It would explain a lot, I suppose.


  • Grade A Premium Asshole

    @dkf said:

    It would explain a lot, I suppose.

    If you ever spent any time in Dallas, you would gladly drive to California, just to have some fun.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @dkf said:

    TIL the entire population of Dallas does nothing but drive back and forth between there and California.

    I haven't done that yet. Although I've driven to Tampa from here and back twice, as well as making other equally-long trips I've described.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @dkf said:

    Or, more seriously, why is it the response of so many Americans to proposals to build HSR [...] that it won't help with particular routes that are at best very low priorities because they're long-distance and low-traffic?

    Because that's most of them? And for the remainder, the answer, instead, is generally "it's probably far too expensive to be worth it"?


  • BINNED

    It's not as bad as all that. Part of the problem is that people move here but get a place in the suburbs because it's cheaper. Then they complain about there being nothing around but strip malls and chain restaurants. Of course there's nothing around but strip malls and chain restaurants, you're in the Belgiuming suburbs! All the cool stuff is in Dallas proper (or Addison).


  • Grade A Premium Asshole

    @antiquarian said:

    It's not as bad as all that.

    I know, not altogether a bad place. The airport sucks, and I have flown through DFW enough that it has made me bitter.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Polygeekery said:

    I have flown through DFW enough that it has made me bitter.

    I've never flown through there. I always end up routed via DTW or MSP (both of which are miserable in the winter, MSP especially so).


  • Grade A Premium Asshole

    @dkf said:

    I always end up routed via DTW or MSP (both of which are miserable in the winter, MSP especially so).

    Yeah, the hell with both of those places also. Or DEN, where you taxi for so long that you begin to think they are going to drive the plane to your final destination at SFO or LAX. DTW is the king of, "My gate numbers are not too far apart, should be an easy plane to catch...holy fuck my next gate is a 1/2 mile away and I have 7 minutes to make it, in dress shoes, dragging a carry-on."



  • Sorry, I wasn't clear. My point was not that a lot of people here drive to California. It's just a thing one can do to get a sense of scale. Normal speed rail transit takes forever. It's faster and generally cheaper to drive.

    I would love a high-speed rail in Texas. Don't know if it will ever happen. I would love it even mor if we would spend that money getting actual usable public transit in the DFW area. But that will never happen.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @glathull said:

    Normal speed rail transit takes forever.

    In part that's because your normal speed rail transit is miserably slow. 😛 One of the commuter trains I take when going to/from work has a substantial section where it's doing 85mph. Our HSR systems go a lot faster than that.


  • Grade A Premium Asshole

    I think part of the reason that HSR has never taken off in the USA is because of how spread out our concentrations of commerce really are. The only place that has several of them together is the Northeast Corridor, where they have Acela. We have NYC, Boston, DC (and others on the east coast), Chicago, Denver, Atlanta, LA, San Francisco, Seattle, etc. The majority of them are pretty far from their nearest counterpart. It will always be too far to travel by train. The rest of the routes are just too low-traffic to justify it.

    I prefer to travel by plane if it is very far, so much faster and you can just get the travel over with and then either get down to business or enjoy your leisure time. I would be highly unlikely to ever take a train if I am given a choice and I feel like most of our population feels the same way.



  • @dkf said:

    In part that's because your normal speed rail transit is miserably slow. One of the commuter trains I take when going to/from work has a substantial section where it's doing 85mph. Our HSR systems go a lot faster than that.

    Most of that is because of the debacle that the ICC (one of the finest examples of mis-regulating an industry into the ground I have ever read about) caused in the 50's with their rather half-baked automatic train protection (automatic stop or cab signaling) mandate -- you can't go faster than 79mph on rails in the US without some sort of train protection system fit, and very few passenger lines in the US (outside of the NEC, which uses the ACSES system to provide a PTC-like level of functionality) were fit with train protection, either. Furthermore, there were multiple train protection systems fit at that time, all mutually incompatible -- nowadays, equipment is made that supports multiple systems out of necessity due to railroad mergers, but it proved to be a major barrier to more widespread adoption of train protection at the time due to the interchange hassles it caused.

    Fortunately, the current work on PTC fulfills the train protection mandate, which means that that piece of the puzzle promises to no longer be a hangup...we'll see if we can get it right this time, though.

    @Polygeekery said:

    I think part of the reason that HSR has never taken off in the USA is because of how spread out our concentrations of commerce really are. The only place that has several of them together is the Northeast Corridor, where they have Acela. We have NYC, Boston, DC (and others on the east coast), Chicago, Denver, Atlanta, LA, San Francisco, Seattle, etc. The majority of them are pretty far from their nearest counterpart. It will always be too far to travel by train. The rest of the routes are just too low-traffic to justify it.

    For truly long-haul trips, certainly -- while taking the train is fun and scenic, it just takes too long for the pace of business today.

    SF-LA is a small stretch for true HSR, but the Texas Triangle and parts of Florida would lend themselves well to it, I feel...

    There's also quite a bit of opportunity for incremental speed improvements on existing routes -- getting to 110 or even 90 mph can be done with the combination of PTC, grade crossing improvements, and a bit of geometric help, without needing dedicated HSR rolling stock or right-of-ways, and it will provide a surprising amount of travel time improvement for "intermediate haul" routes that may not be busy enough to justify something as big as Acela and the NEC are.

    @Polygeekery said:

    you can just get the travel over with and then either get down to business or enjoy your leisure time.

    The nice thing about rail travel is the trip itself is an adventure of sorts, much better for leisure than having to deal with all the things flying entails.


  • Grade A Premium Asshole

    @tarunik said:

    The nice thing about rail travel is the trip itself is an adventure of sorts, much better for leisure than having to deal with all the things flying entails.

    A means to an end as far as flying is concerned. I would much rather be there quickly. If it is going to take several hours longer before I am sitting at my vacation spot with a stiff drink in my hand, it will be a tough sell for me. But, I may not be the primary market for such a thing. I am one of those reasonable people that does not think my preferences should be the only ones under consideration.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Polygeekery said:

    If it is going to take several hours longer before I am sitting at my vacation spot with a stiff drink in my hand

    As has been noted before, you can have a beer on the train. (I prefer to stay sober when travelling, but that's totally my call, not anyone else's.)


  • Grade A Premium Asshole

    @dkf said:

    As has been noted before, you can have a beer on the train.

    Trains are not the same as beaches. If they were, many more of us would be amicable to the idea. ;-)

    I can and do have drinks on planes also, and that is also not the same as a beach, but the plane does get me to the beach a hell of a lot quicker.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Polygeekery said:

    Trains are not the same as beaches. If they were, many more of us would be amicable to the idea. ;-)

    I can and do have drinks on planes also, and that is also not the same as a beach, but the plane does get me to the beach a hell of a lot quicker.

    I'm not a big fan of being on a beach. Not unless I've got an army surplus entrenching tool with which to raise mighty earth-sand-works. (Lesser spades break in my hands, for some reason… ;-))


  • Grade A Premium Asshole

    @dkf said:

    I'm not a big fan of being on a beach.

    Me either. Simply using it as an example. I want to get to my destination. I am not one of those, "The journey is part of the experience" type folks. I want to get where I am going.



  • @Polygeekery said:

    I am not one of those, "The journey is part of the experience" type folks. I want to get where I am going.

    For me, it really depends on, among other things, the type of transportation.

    Plane: Means to an end; just get me there.
    Ship: Part of the experience, at least; a cruise may be the destination.
    Train: Part of the experience; may be the experience.
    Driving: It depends. If I'm not in a hurry and can sight-see and maybe take side trips along the way, part of the experience. If I am in a hurry, then merely a necessary evil, and only if no other form of transportation is practical under the circumstances.


  • Grade A Premium Asshole

    @HardwareGeek said:

    Plane: Means to an end; just get me there.

    Agreed. But, it can be part of the experience. That is rare, and expensive.

    @HardwareGeek said:

    Ship: Part of the experience, at least; a cruise may be the destination.

    I have absolutely no desire to go on a cruise. I have even less after all the cruise ship disasters. To each their own though.

    @HardwareGeek said:

    Train: Part of the experience; may be the experience.

    No desire, just get me there.

    @HardwareGeek said:

    Driving: It depends. If I'm not in a hurry and can sight-see and maybe take side trips along the way, part of the experience. If I am in a hurry, then merely a necessary evil, and only if no other form of transportation is practical under the circumstances.

    Agreed. I have done road trips, and it can be fun. Most often I just want to get there though.



  • @Polygeekery said:

    I have absolutely no desire to go on a cruise. I have even less after all the cruise ship disasters.

    I have little desire to, either. I've only been on one; it was pleasant enough, but it was definitely not the destination. There isn't really any other affordable option, AFAIK, to get from one Greek island to another.

    @Polygeekery said:

    >Train: Part of the experience; may be the experience.

    No desire, just get me there.

    I'm a train aficionado, so we'll agree to disagree on that one. For me, the train trip itself, especially in certain scenic areas that you simply can't see any other way, would be a nice vacation.

    @Polygeekery said:

    I have done road trips, and it can be fun. Most often I just want to get there though.
    Yes, I'm usually just trying to get to a destination, too, and since I'm generally doing most or all of the driving myself, the travel consists primarily of boredom and fatigue.


  • Grade A Premium Asshole

    @HardwareGeek said:

    Yes, I'm usually just trying to get to a destination, too, and since I'm generally doing most or all of the driving myself, the travel consists primarily of boredom and fatigue.

    As I have a toddler, and another due in August, sadly road trips are going to be most of my vacations. Having kids, you might as well buy a cargo trailer to bring all the shit along with you on vacation, and flying with all that crap just won't happen.

    @HardwareGeek said:

    I'm a train aficionado, so we'll agree to disagree on that one. For me, the train trip itself, especially in certain scenic areas that you simply can't see any other way, would be a nice vacation.

    I dig trains. I think they are really interesting. I just don't think a train trip would be for me. Of course, to each their own.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @FrostCat said:

    trains in the ass

    This was all I saw at first when I read your post. Make of that what you will.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @dkf said:

    It seems to be some sort of systematic stupidity.

    AKA, the Democratic Party (Republicans don't propose HSR, they have different stupid proposals).

    @dkf said:

    And HSR will work quite well when connecting larger cities in Texas.

    A well engineered train line would. It would not be profitable, however.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @antiquarian said:

    Then they complain about there being nothing around but strip malls and chain restaurants.

    You get a lot of interesting restaurants in strip malls. What's all the "interesting stuff" that fancy city folks do in the cities that I can't do in a strip mall? Is it something I'd want to do?

    I can drive in for the occasional concert or museum or whatever and it's no big deal. Meanwhile, when I go to the store, the roads are wide and well maintained and there's a place to park my car when I get there.



  • @Polygeekery said:

    Having kids, you might as well buy a cargo trailer to bring all the shit along with you on vacation

    +¶, QFT, etc., etc.

    @Polygeekery said:

    flying with all that crap just won't happen.

    It can be done. We did it a couple of times, sort of. We went to Hawaii when my daughter was just starting to try to learn to walk (and left her favorite stuffed animal on the plane, but the airline found it and reunited them). We also flew from the Bay Area to San Diego once, but the kids were a bit older — 4 and 6, I think, ± 1 year — so not really toddlers any more.

    @Polygeekery said:

    I just don't think a train trip would be for me.
    TBH, I haven't been on a long-distance train since I was a kid. The few times as an adult that I've seriously considered using a train for transportation, they turned out to be too expensive and/or too inconvenient. (Case in point: A long-weekend ski trip from the Bay Area to Lake Tahoe, from which I had to return early (probably because I had to work Monday), so I couldn't carpool with friends. IIRC, there was only one westbound train per day, which arrived in SJ in the afternoon, so to get back by Monday morning, I would have had to leave Tahoe (very early) Sunday morning, which would have rendered the whole trip pretty much pointless.)


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @boomzilla said:

    A well engineered train line would. It would not be profitable, however.

    I would take an HSR from Dallas to Houston or San Antonia or Austin....maybe. It depends on what's available near the terminus as opposed to "you need to rent a car to do anything."


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @Polygeekery said:

    .holy fuck my next gate is a 1/2 mile away and I have 7 minutes to make it, in dress shoes, dragging a carry-on."

    My worst DFW experience was 2010, the week before the Super Bowl. I'd gone to CA for my grandmother's 85th birthday party, taking my (then) 4yo son. I came down with what we thought was the flu (woke up at 3am with 104° fever) that Monday morning, the day of my flight home. "Fortunately," there were massive weather problems, so my flight got cancelled, giving me some time to recuperate. I'd been given tamiflu, so I should have started getting better by then (or at least no worse).

    Eventually got on a flight on Wednesday. By the time we got to Dallas, all the trains were closed. It was after 9pm, and my son was tired and couldn't move very quickly. I ended up carrying him on my back, plus our luggage, going God knows how far.

    Made it to our plane. That ride was pure misery. Couldn't get comfortable. I felt like I'd strained a muscle in my back. That got worse over the next day (including horrible sweating fevers followed by terrible chills). Went to the doctor on Friday, because my back hurt so much I could barely breathe. Of course, it was actually pneumonia. The doctor was very close to admitting me to the hospital.

    Took several weeks to get over that and a few more to get back to 100%. I can totally see why people died of pneumonia. That shit is serious. I used to be pretty impervious to cold. I could just ignore it. Ever since, I wear sweaters all the time because I can't stand getting a chill.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @boomzilla said:

    What's all the "interesting stuff" that fancy city folks do in the cities that I can't do in a strip mall? Is it something I'd want to do?

    When I was a teen and in my early 20s, living first on the South Shore and then on the North Shore of Boston, I liked to take the train into town to walk around, window-shop, and actually shop. Boston, like NYC (but obviously to a lesser extent) has a large, vibrant commercial downtown with a ton of shops, including weird shit like the Revolutionary Bookstore (which was always in--surprise--Cambridge), video arcades, book stores, record stores, blah-di-blah, and so on. The places I've lived since--Tampa, South Carolina, Dallas--have a lot less of that.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @Polygeekery said:

    Having kids, you might as well buy a cargo trailer to bring all the shit along with you on vacation, and flying with all that crap just won't happen.

    Full sized passenger van.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @FrostCat said:

    ...walk around, window-shop...

    This sounds like the sort of thing my wife would use to torture me.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @boomzilla said:

    This sounds like the sort of thing my wife would use to torture me.

    Well, bear in mind I was looking for stuff I was interested in. Egghead, bookstores, arcades.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @FrostCat said:

    Well, bear in mind I was looking for stuff I was interested in.

    True. How often did you do this sort of thing?

    I suspect most people who talk about stuff in the city are talking about a particular set of bars and or clubs. Which doesn't interest me at all. Actually, there are several "colorful" local bars withing walking distance (~1mi) of my house.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @boomzilla said:

    True. How often did you do this sort of thing?

    Hm. Variable but up to once or twice a month--that tempo was rare, though.

    But I don't mind walking for several miles at a time, either, although I like interesting stuff to walk through. Downtown Tampa (the CBD) is pretty damned boring compared to Boston or, of course, NYC.

    @boomzilla said:

    I suspect most people who talk about stuff in the city are talking about a particular set of bars and or clubs.

    That's probably true. I would go to a bar with friends, but not for picking up girls, of course. (When I was working in Tampa, we were next to a mall, as in, it was on the other side of the parking lot, so once a week after work we'd go to a bar at the mall that had dollar hamburgers for supper. A couple of burgers, a couple of beers, hang out for an hour or two with 2-6 friends, then go home, makes for a nice evening.)


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @boomzilla said:

    What's all the "interesting stuff" that fancy city folks do in the cities that I can't do in a strip mall?

    Museums and galleries and stuff like that. You get some of those out in the 'burbs too, but that's less common.

    @boomzilla said:

    Is it something I'd want to do?

    Don't know, but I really like going to a modern art gallery. Or a good museum of technology. There's not much that's greater than going round a museum of military flight with someone who keeps saying “Oh, I remember those. Used to fly in one.” before giving some anecdotes that have never hit the history books. :)


  • Grade A Premium Asshole

    @another_sam said:

    Didn't we already have the 18-wheelers don't have 18 wheels discussion somewhere nearby?

    You never did answer me about WTF you were getting on about?




  • ♿ (Parody)

    @dkf said:

    There's not much that's greater than going round a museum of military flight with someone who keeps saying “Oh, I remember those. Used to fly in one.” before giving some anecdotes that have never hit the history books.

    I actually live down the street from an incredible Air and Space museum. We take the kids there several times per year. Always something new to see. And the docents have lots of amazing stories to tell.


  • Grade A Premium Asshole

    @another_sam said:

    Is this how I link to a post in another topic?

    Yeah, but still, in the USA 18-wheelers are the predominant OTR carrier. In some cases, and it is expanding all the time, carriers are switching to "Super-single" wheel and tires, therefore reducing the wheel count. But, most carriers are staying with double wheel setups for redundancy.

    Apparently where you are, and in many other places, that is changing more rapidly.



  • @Polygeekery said:

    in the USA 18-wheelers are the predominant OTR carrier.

    Some states (OR is the only one I know of, but there may be others) allow triple-trailer configurations. I don't know what the restrictions are, other than all the ones I saw last time I drove through there had signs on the back warning that they were longer than standard.


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