Intercity Passenger Rail

[Anti Federalist]

I'll scan it when I get a chance, my daughter gave a me a railroad book from 1975 on the Mountain Division line here in NH.

They had a bunch of schedules printed in the book, and in 1944 you could take the Boston and Maine RR's "Mountaineer", a Budd built streamliner originally called the "Flying Yankee" from Boston to Conway NH in about 30 minutes less than what it takes to drive today.

[Anti Federalist]

[acptulsa]

Biden's massive new boondoggle plan for Amtrak will mean a huge change in the very mature of the beast. It will enter an arena it was never in before--intrastate service.

It shows an array of potential new service lines: new rail connecting all of Texas' biggest cities and new connections across the Midwest, including between Cincinnati, Columbus, Ohio, and Cleveland.

"Prospects for a passenger rail line connecting Baton Rouge and New Orleans got a boost this week," wrote the New Orleans Advocate, noting that the last passenger train to serve Baton Rouge, La., ended service in 1969.

If that isn't enough of a wealth transfer from poor states to rich states to suit you, you'll love this tidbit:

Biden's $2 trillion infrastructure package has two provisions involving passenger rail: $85 billion to modernize public transit (commuter rail, buses, stations, etc.)

https://www.npr.org/2021/04/06/98446...people-talking

Taking money from South Dakota to subsidize bus service in the wealthiest cities in the nation. Tenth Amendment, anyone?

I haven't seen any word on whether they'll officially rewrite Amtrak's charter, or just ignore it.

[Anti Federalist]

D.C. Transit Authority ‘Actively Looking into’ Mask-Only Cars

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2...ask-only-cars/

HANNAH BLEAU 13 May 2022

The Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) is reportedly considering implementing mask-only cars, pending concerns over the possible ramifications of mask enforcement.

In April, Metrorail, Metrobus and MetroAccess made masks optional due to the ruling from a Trump-appointed federal judge in Florida, who deemed the Biden administration’s federal mask rule illegal. As a result, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) suspended enforcement.

“Our mask mandate has been based on federal guidance,” General Manager and Chief Executive Officer Paul J. Wiedefeld said at the time.

“We will continue to monitor this situation as it unfolds, but masks will be optional on Metro property until further notice,” he said.

But during a board meeting Thursday, Chief Safety Officer Theresa Impastato confirmed WMATA is looking into the possibility of a mask-only car.

When asked if such was being considered, Impastato said, “That is something that we’re actively looking into.”

“We’ve benchmarked and talked to New Jersey transit who are also looking into a mask only,” she said, explaining that they have some concerns over mask enforcement.

“We do have some concerns that have been identified around enforcement of the mask-only car and how that could potentially create conflict amongst our customers,” she said. “The quiet car [on Amtrak] has a pretty storied history of having some conflict there.”

According to DCist, safety concerns remain the primary issue as officials struggle with the fear that such enforcement would cause a rise in violence or assault:

WMATA is having to balance other several health and safety concerns. The injury rate for Metrorail employees is 3.7 per 100 people, and 13 per 100 people for Metrobus employees, as of the current fiscal year to date. Assaults and threats are the most common injury, accounting for one-third. Impastato said injuries among Metrorail employees were particularly high in the winter months, during a time when many were out sick with COVID-19 and those working reported more overtime.

“We believe it had a lot to do with mental health issues, where at one point customers were not getting their medicine, not getting their treatment they needed, and coming on board and that led to altercations not only with our bus operators but our customers,” Chief Operating Officer Joseph Leader said of the rise of assaults.

While no statewide mask mandates remain in place and travelers are no longer under the Biden administration’s federal mask mandate, mask rules have not been completely eradicated. Some school districts and cities have demonstrated that they are more than willing to put rules back in place over fears of a rise of the virus.

[Anti Federalist]

Hard to blame Anthrax for this one I suppose.

Sounds like the dump track may have dodged the gates or ignored the signals.


3 Killed, Dozens Injured in Amtrak Train-Truck Crash in Missouri

https://www.breitbart.com/news/3-kil...s-in-missouri/

AP 27 Jun 2022

MENDON, Mo. (AP) — A passenger train traveling from Los Angeles to Chicago struck a dump truck and derailed Monday in a remote, rural area of Missouri, killing three people and injuring dozens more, officials said.

Two of the people who died were on the Amtrak train and one was in the truck, Missouri State Highway Patrol spokesman Cpl. Justin Dunn said. It was not immediately clear exactly how many people were hurt, the patrol said, but hospitals reported receiving more than 40 patients from the crash and were expecting more.

Amtrak’s Southwest Chief was carrying about 243 passengers and 12 crew members when the collision happened near Mendon at a rural intersection on a gravel road with no lights or electronic controls, officials said. Seven cars derailed, the Highway Patrol said.

It’s too early to speculate on why the truck was on the tracks, said National Transportation Safety Board Chairwoman Jennifer Homendy. A team of NTSB investigators will arrive Tuesday, she said. Trains won’t run be able to run on the track for “a matter of days” while they gather evidence, she added.

At one point, helicopter video of the site from KMBC-TV in Kansas City showed rail cars on their side as emergency responders used ladders to climb into one of them. Six medical helicopters parked nearby were waiting to transport patients.

Close to 20 local and state law enforcement agencies, ambulance services, fire department and medical helicopter services responded, Dunn said. The first emergency responders arrived within 20 minutes of receiving a 911 call, he said.

Passenger Robert Nightingale, owner of an art gallery in Taos, New Mexico, said he was dozing off in his sleeper room when the crash happened.

“Everything started to go in slow motion,” he told CNN, describing how the train rocked before tumbling onto its side.

Nightingale was able to climb out of the side of the rail car.

“We all just sat there shocked,” he said.

Other passengers on the train included 16 youths and eight adults from two Boy Scout troops who were traveling home to Appleton, Wisconsin, after a backcountry excursion at the Philmont Scout Ranch in New Mexico. No one in the group was seriously injured, said Scott Armstrong, director of national media relations for the Boy Scouts of America. The Scouts administered first aid to several injured passengers, including the driver of the dump truck, Armstrong said.

High school students from Pleasant Ridge High School in Easton, Kansas, who were headed to a Future Business Leaders of America conference in Chicago, were also aboard, Superintendent Tim Beying told The Star.

It was the second Amtrak collision in as many days. Three people were killed Sunday afternoon when an Amtrak commuter train smashed into a car ín Northern California, authorities said.

The Southwest Chief takes about two days to travel from Los Angeles to Chicago, picking up passengers at stops in between. Mendon, with a population of about 160, is about 84 miles (135 kilometers) northeast of Kansas City.

[acptulsa]

No gates, no signals, no action by the government.

https://www.kansascity.com/news/stat...262969938.html

In March 2021, a small group of men met at a rural railroad crossing in northern Missouri that locals had long been complaining about because of its steep grade and lack of visibility. A farmer leading the effort to improve the crossing was among those who gathered at the Porche Prairie Avenue Crossing southwest of Mendon. All three Chariton County commissioners were there, along with a safety official with the Missouri Department of Transportation and a representative from a local engineering firm. In the wake of Monday’s deadly Amtrak derailment that killed four people and injured 150, last year’s meeting at the crossing has taken on new meaning and importance. Not only for the desperate call to fix and improve the crossing but also for the fact that no one did. “We had high hopes that something was going to get done there,” said Paul Speichinger, a Chariton County farmer, who wasn’t at the meeting but has complained about the crossing over the years. “We really hoped and anticipated that we’d have something done last fall, and the commissioners have been on the officials to get something done. “But it fell on deaf ears.” In fact, their efforts ran into a wall of state bureaucracy, The Star has found. That meeting at the crossing last year did possibly prompt the state, in July 2021, to place the crossing high on its priority list to make it safer. But that didn’t mean the fix would come anytime soon. Unbeknownst to the community, because of budget constraints and the slow pace of government projects, any safety improvements would still have been years away. Although residents complained about the crossing for years, BNSF Railway, the railroad that owns the track, told The Star that the Missouri Department of Transportation had not — even up to the day of the crash — contacted them to conduct an official review of the site that is required before any repairs are initiated. “I can tell you that we have not been contacted over this crossing to work on a diagnostic review,” said BNSF spokeswoman Lena Kent. “That is a critical step of this process to move forward. “You can’t just, you know, have somebody out there say, ‘Hey, I think we need gates,’ and the next day we show up with some gates. That’s not how that works. You have to go through that process.” The Missouri Department of Transportation has authority over public railroad crossings and runs the state’s railroad safety program. A MoDOT spokeswoman confirmed that although MoDOT alerted BNSF earlier this year that the crossing has been put near the top of its priority list to be fixed, the agency had not yet contacted the railroad to conduct a review of the site. “It was approved last July (as a priority) and our staff reached out,” MoDOT spokeswoman Linda Wilson Horn said Tuesday of BNSF. “The diagnostic review has not been scheduled yet.”

But without government, who will forbid us to fix the roads?

[acptulsa]

[acptulsa]

Ever wonder why some coal hopper cars have a colored stripe painted up one end?

[acptulsa]

DP

[Anti Federalist]

Ever wonder why some coal hopper cars have a colored stripe painted up one end?

Coal...

It really is the perfect fuel when you think about how many ways it can be moved and dumped and transported and stored with a minimum of fuss and a maximum of efficiency, considering it's energy density.

[Anti Federalist]

That's adorable...

[Anti Federalist]

Finally scratched a trip to Cass Mountain Scenic RR in WV off my bucket list.

Went with my daughter last Friday as a side trip on the way home from a week camping at DollyWood.

Weather was perfect, crowds were thin...a perfect day.

Railfans and steam enthusiasts...this is a "must do" trip. Seriously, there is no place in the world you will see vertical engine shaft locomotives working hard, pushing up mountain grades, as they were intended to, except for here.

Five Stars.

[Anti Federalist]

[acptulsa]

[Anti Federalist]

SLOW MINDS RUN OVER AT HIGH SPEED

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archiv...high-speed.php

9 Oct 2022

Well, well, look at what we have here: the New York Times has finally caught up with what every sensible person knew at least ten years ago—California’s high-speed rail project is a joke. “America’s first experiment with high-speed rail has become a multi-billion-dollar nightmare,” the Times says in a long feature today. Fun bits:

The dogleg [route] through the desert was only one of several times over the years when the project fell victim to political forces that have added billions of dollars in costs and called into question whether the project can ever be finished.

Actually there really isn’t much question: it isn’t going to be finished. And in any case, since Californians will all be driving electric cars in little more than a decade (heh), why bother finishing it, since it will not do anything to save the climate.

The tortured effort to build the country’s first high-speed rail system is a case study in how ambitious public works projects can become perilously encumbered by political compromise, unrealistic cost estimates, flawed engineering and a determination to persist on projects that have become, like the crippled financial institutions of 2008, too big to fail. . . [A]ccording to projections widely used by engineers and project managers, the train could not be completed in this century.

But this passage is the best part of the whole story:

The state was warned repeatedly that its plans were too complex. SNCF, the French national railroad, was among bullet train operators from Europe and Japan that came to California in the early 2000s with hopes of getting a contract to help develop the system.

The company’s recommendations for a direct route out of Los Angeles and a focus on moving people between Los Angeles and San Francisco were cast aside, said Dan McNamara, a career project manager for SNCF.*

The company* *pulled out in 2011. “There were so many things that went wrong,” Mr. McNamara said. “SNCF was very angry. They told the state they were leaving for North Africa, which was less politically dysfunctional. They went to Morocco and helped them build a rail system.”

Morocco’s bullet train started service in 2018.

There you have it. As far as good governance is concerned, California now ranks below North Africa.

[Anti Federalist]

Things were better.

This train could take you from Boston to NYC in 4 hours.

It cost less, was much more luxurious and was consistently on time.



The best government run rail can do, is supposedly the premier high speed train in the US.

It costs more, the accommodations are downright Spartan compared to the Clipper, and it is consistently late.

And at it's best can only beat the Clipper of 1945 by 30 minutes.

[acptulsa]

The Southwest Chief is scheduled to run an hour and a quarter longer than the Santa Fe Super Chief did from 1935-1971.

Running time was a bit slower in the twenties, when the California Limited often ran seven sections per departure.



When people talked about "The" California Limited, they were talking about as many as 45 trainsets.

[Anti Federalist]

The Southwest Chief is scheduled to run an hour and a quarter longer than the Santa Fe Super Chief did from 1935-1971.

Running time was a bit slower in the twenties, when the California Limited often ran seven sections per departure.



When people talked about "The" California Limited, they were talking about as many as 45 trainsets.

All managed by wind up wristwatches, pencil and paper and telegraph.

[acptulsa]

All managed by wind up wristwatches, pencil and paper and telegraph.

And cloth flags. If you're the engineer of a freight train waiting until the California Limited passes before the single track is yours to use, look for green flags on the locomotive of the express. If they're flying, there's another section of the same train behind it.

And they were more often 21 jewel pocket watches, in those days--proudly crafted in the U.S.

They're trying to eliminate conductors. Trains won't even have a person to cycle the system while the other walks the mile long train checking the brakes. We all know the Democrats are trying to trash the economy. Railroads, led by the BNSF, have already met with Congress. They are slamming train crews with impossible scheduling requirements which don't even allow trainmen to see a doctor. This has been going on for over a year, and even in the face of a nationwide strike that will shut down all four of the major systems, they aren't backing down. After the midterms, in mid-November, count on the government "responding" to the "emergency" the strike is causing by granting that one-man crew wish.

[pcosmar]

Coal...

It really is the perfect fuel when you think about how many ways it can be moved and dumped and transported and stored with a minimum of fuss and a maximum of efficiency, considering it's energy density.

Sold Offshore.. No one uses it here.(can't get it here) . and a lot of trains head to ports.

[Anti Federalist]

And they were more often 21 jewel pocket watches, in those days--proudly crafted in the U.S.

Of course, that's what I meant to write.

They're trying to eliminate conductors. Trains won't even have a person to cycle the system while the other walks the mile long train checking the brakes. We all know the Democrats are trying to trash the economy. Railroads, led by the BNSF, have already met with Congress. They are slamming train crews with impossible scheduling requirements which don't even allow trainmen to see a doctor. This has been going on for over a year, and even in the face of a nationwide strike that will shut down all four of the major systems, they aren't backing down. After the midterms, in mid-October, count on the government "responding" to the "emergency" the strike is causing by granting that one-man crew wish.

I can only figure that the Class I's are using this issue as leverage to ultimately automate all long distance trains and remove men completely from the trainsets.

[Anti Federalist]

Sold Offshore.. No one uses it here.(can't get it here) . and a lot of trains head to ports.

Is that coal coming from way back east, like Wyoming or Montana, or are you still producing in the Coos bay coal basin?

If you need some for heating with a proper coal stove, Tractor Supply all across the country carries bagged anthracite coal in nut size.

Finding bituminous forge coal, for either metal working in a forge or as supplement to wood in a wood stove, I do both, that seems harder to find.

[Anti Federalist]

What that would look like today...

(And yes I know the Clipper used an I-5 Hudson and 611 is a Northern. But close enough for this discussion)

[pcosmar]

Is that coal coming from way back east, like Wyoming or Montana, or are you still producing in the Coos bay coal basin?

If you need some for heating with a proper coal stove, Tractor Supply all across the country carries bagged anthracite coal in nut size.

Finding bituminous forge coal, for either metal working in a forge or as supplement to wood in a wood stove, I do both, that seems harder to find.

Grew up wearing Coal dust and Soot.
Our last house was on the tracks,, a lot of Coal that no one here is using,, going to Ports.

[pcosmar]

Thought of this thread.

[Anti Federalist]

Thought of this thread.

Arlo lives not too far away from me.

Gotta see him some time before he passes away.

[Anti Federalist]

[Anti Federalist]

D'Oh!

[Anti Federalist]

[Anti Federalist]

Who says I don't like EVs?

I wasn't positive but now this film confirms it, I rode behind some of them while still in service on NJ Transit.