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--- transportation:train [2024/10/14 22:29] – [Articles] timb
+++ transportation:train [2026/01/11 20:37] (current) – [Caltrain] timb
@@ Line 118: / Line 118: @@
 https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/11/style/europe-railroad-dining-cars-wagons-lits/index.html
+== Crossing the USA by train ==
+-08-19 - blinry
+Today, I get to start a train trip I’ve always wanted to do: Going from New York to San Francisco!!
+This map shows that first section of the trip. I’m taking the “Lake Shore Limited”, an overnight train. Will arrive in Chicago in around 20 hours, and amazingly, that’s the only time I’ll have to change trains!
+We’re first going north, following the Hudson river.
+The seats are big and comfy! But the train seems to be booked out.
+A train attendant asked everyone where they’d get off, and put little notes over our seats – probably to wake up people who have to get off in thr middle of the night.
+https://blinry.org/coast-to-coast/
+== The Secret Formula for Faster Trains ==
+A new report shows how Amtrak and commuter railroads can reduce “dead time” and increase speeds for less than it would cost to build new high-speed rail lines.
+Benjamin Schneider - April 10, 2025 at 5:01 AM PDT
+High-speed trains, zooming across the landscape at over 200 miles per hour, have long been a Holy Grail for US transportation advocates. Though projects are advancing in California, Nevada and Texas, progress has been arduous. Even in sparsely populated corners of the American West, from-scratch high-speed rail development is expensive, complex and politically fraught.
+But brand-new bullet trains are not the only way to deliver faster passenger rail service. In regions with lots of older rail infrastructure, like the Northeast and Midwest, the existing tracks are full of untapped potential.
+That’s the main finding of a new report by the NYU Marron Institute’s Transit Costs Project, authored by Marron Institute research fellow Nolan Hicks. The strategies outlined in the report, Hicks says, “can deliver a whole lot of what high-speed rail promises using the infrastructure we already have, and at costs that are reasonable for the value delivered in return.”
+https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-04-10/how-to-speed-up-us-passenger-rail-without-bullet-trains
+== A short post on short trains ==
+The lesser urbanism hack
+Shaked Koplewitz - Jul 28, 2025
+Small Train is Good Train
+A while ago, I wrote about how elevated trains are the greatest urbanism cheat code, increasing the amount of track miles you can build per dollar (or per year) by a factor of 2-4. And while I don’t have anything else on that order of magnitude, I do have one more easy 20-50% gain1: Run shorter trains.
+The basic idea is simple: The single biggest cost of any metro system is the stations, whose cost scales with size. Therefore, if we run a system for smaller trains, we can build smaller stations for these trains, saving a huge amount on station costs. This costs us in reduced total capacity, but this can easily be made up for by increasing train frequency.
+https://shakeddown.substack.com/p/a-short-post-on-short-trains
@@ Line 148: / Line 194: @@
 https://trains.fyi/
+===== Model =====
+== 'I was shocked': Melbourne man's 'unbelievable' find after buying house ==
+Daniel Xu has loved trains since he was a child. In a surprising twist of fate, he now lives above an extensive hobby train network set.
+Aleisha Orr, Asha Abdi - 29 June 2025 1:28pm / Updated 30 June 2025 1:59pm
+As any new homeowner will know, there are always unknown things to be found in a new place.
+From a kitchen cupboard that never seems to close properly, a curiously painted over area or the real performance of an air-conditioning unit, discoveries abound.
+But after Daniel Xu and his wife finalised the purchase of their house in Melbourne's northern suburbs, he found what can only be described as a train enthusiast's dream beneath their feet.
+https://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/i-was-shocked-melbourne-mans-unbelievable-find-after-buying-house/m4sksfer8
@@ Line 162: / Line 225: @@
 https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2022/09/28/keeping-trains-apart-is-crucial-to-safety
+== When a Deadly Winter Storm Trapped a Luxury Passenger Train Near the Donner Pass for Three Days ==
+Snowdrifts stranded the vehicle in the Sierra Nevada in January 1952, imprisoning 226 people traveling from Chicago to California
+Robert Klara, History Correspondent - January 9, 2025
+High inside locomotive 6019, engineer Tom Sapunor notched the throttle forward and squinted at the track ahead—not that he could see much of it. The blizzard that had barreled into the Sierra Nevada mountain range three days earlier had blanketed most everything, its 90-mile-per-hour gusts sweeping the snow into 25-foot drifts.
+On a normal run, the Southern Pacific Railroad’s City of San Francisco train could whisk passengers from Chicago to San Francisco in 40 hours and 15 minutes. But this wasn’t a normal run, even by the standards of “the Hill,” the perilous trackage between Sparks, Nevada, and Roseville, California, whose high point stood 6,880 feet above sea level. The company’s advertising boasted that there was “no tougher stretch of railroad in the country”—a hard truth that the City’s 226 occupants were about to learn firsthand.
+Near Yuba Pass in California, a snowdrift broadsided the train. As the City’s three locomotives struggled to burrow though, a second mass of snow—this one around 12 feet tall—struck the train and literally stopped it in its tracks. The diesel engines pulling the 15-car City cranked out a combined 6,750 horsepower. Sapunor tried to push ahead. Then he tried backing out. The diesels growled and smoked, but it was no use.
+https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/when-a-deadly-winter-storm-trapped-a-luxury-passenger-train-near-the-donner-pass-for-three-days-180985782/
@@ Line 359: / Line 439: @@
 https://amtrakexplorer.com/
+==  Amtrak's New 160mph Acela Trains Take Just As Long As the Old Ones ==
+Posted by BeauHD on Thursday August 28, 2025 07:02PM
+Amtrak's new 160 mph tilting Acela trains have debuted on the Northeast Corridor, offering smoother rides, upgraded interiors, faster Wi-Fi, and 27% more seating capacity. However, "they don't complete the journey any faster than the old trains," reports The Independent. From the report:
+<blockquote>
+Acela runs from Washington, DC's Union Station to Boston via Philadelphia, New York Penn Station, New Haven, and Providence. It's a total distance of 457 miles, with the fastest next-gen Acela journey being six hours and 43 minutes, five minutes slower than the quickest end-to-end time offered by the old Acela trains, introduced in 2000. However, this may be because, as is common practice with new trains the world over, Amtrak is scheduling longer dwell times at stations so staff and passengers can adjust to them. The next-gen sets have a top service speed that's 10mph faster -- though this can only be achieved on certain sections of the mostly 110mph route -- and an enhanced "anticipative" tilting system that allows for higher speeds through curves.
+</blockquote>
+https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/08/28/2128257/amtraks-new-160mph-acela-trains-take-just-as-long-as-the-old-ones
@@ Line 394: / Line 485: @@
 https://sf.streetsblog.org/2017/12/14/barts-excursion-fare-how-the-agency-earns-millions-from-passengers-not-riding-trains/
+== San Francisco’s BART Grinds to a Halt Due to ‘Computer Networking Problem’ ==
+Service was limited for much of the morning.
+AJ Dellinger - May 9, 2025
+San Francisco’s widely relied upon public transportation system, Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART), went down early Friday morning due to a “computer networking problem,” according to city officials. The outage brought the entire system to a halt at around 5:00 am local time, forcing commuters to quickly find an alternative travel plan. BART officials announced that service had been restored across the entire system around 9:30 am local time, though a spokesperson for the agency told The San Francisco Standard, “Riders should expect residual major delays as we ramp back up.”
+The system’s shutdown, while temporary, caused a considerable number of logistical issues for riders. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, the transit system averaged about 175,000 riders on weekdays during the month of March. With BART out of order, riders were forced to shift their commute to buses, ride shares, and other alternatives. Some of those options are cost-prohibitive—San Francisco ranked in the top 10 for most expensive cities for ride sharing. The Chronicle spoke to one person who opted to wait for the trains to start running again rather than take a Lyft that would have cost $70 to get to his destination.
+To accommodate the travelers stranded by BART, the San Francisco Municipal Railway offered additional buses and extra trains on some lines. The San Francisco Bay Ferry also used larger boats to make room for more riders, per the Chronicle.
+https://gizmodo.com/san-franciscos-bart-grinds-to-a-halt-due-to-computer-networking-problem-2000600231
+== Massive BART Outage Not Related to Old Train Control System, Agency Says ==
+Transit advocates hold signs calling for more public transit funding at the Fremont Street off-ramp for westbound I-80 in San Francisco on May 9, 2025. Tens of thousands of Bay Area transit riders woke up Friday to find no BART service at all.  (Beth LaBerge/KQED)
+Jared Servantez & Katie DeBenedetti - May 9, 2025 / Updated 2:05 p.m. May 9, 2025
+An hourslong outage of the entire BART system on Friday morning, which forced tens of thousands of riders to find other ways to get around the Bay Area, was not a result of aging equipment, the agency said.
+Trains on the Bay Area’s largest transit system did not start running early Friday, suspended until about 9:30 a.m. because of what the agency called a computer networking problem. In an email midday, BART spokesperson Alicia Trost said the issue was caused by network devices not having proper connectivity.
+“We now know the root cause was not related to the train control system needing to be upgraded. It also didn’t have to do with aged equipment,” she wrote.
+It was the largest systemwide BART outage since 2019, when a weekend service meltdown highlighted the need to replace the agency’s decades-old central train control system.
+That shutdown, caused by a networking switch failure that made it impossible for BART to dispatch any trains, came as the agency was in the initial stages of a 10-year train control system replacement supported by funds from a 2016 bond measure.
+The project, contracted to railway company Hitachi, is ongoing, and implementation is underway, according to Trost. Still, she said the train control system was not a factor in Friday’s outage.
+https://www.kqed.org/news/12039472/bart-shuts-down-entire-train-service-due-to-computer-networking-problem
+== Realtime BART Arrival Display ==
+Nov 9, 2025 - Filip Grace
+I have a love-hate relationship with BART. I’m grateful for it, but let’s just say it’s not always the most reliable so it’s nice to see before hand when the train you need is due to arrive. There are plenty of projects out there that show real-time BART arrival information. This one does that too, it’s nothing groundbreaking, but I wanted to build my own version that captures the vintage BART platform sign vibe I associate with commuting between the East Bay and my job in the city.
+https://filbot.com/real-time-bart-display/
+===== Caltrain =====
+== Caltrain's electrification project is paying off big-time ==
+Olivia Harden, Travel Reporter - Nov 14, 2024
+Caltrain officials say the recently launched electrification project is paying off, after seeing a significant ridership increase since making the switch. The new trains officially took off from most Caltrain stations Sept. 21.
+This October, Caltrain saw more than 753,000 passengers take to its railways, a 54% increase from October 2023, according to a news release Thursday. Comparing August 2024’s “primarily diesel service” to October 2024’s all-electric service, the trains saw an overall 17% increase in ridership. Rather than its typical post-August decline in monthly ridership, the service has seen more than 100,000 additional riders.
+“When we broke ground on the Electrification Project back in 2017, we set out to deliver a state-of-the-art modern rail system for the people we serve,” Caltrain Executive Director Michelle Bouchard said in the news release. “It is immensely gratifying to see our riders embrace our new service on this scale. If you haven’t experienced the future of transportation for yourself yet, find out what everyone has been talking about.”
+https://www.sfgate.com/travel/article/caltrain-electrification-project-paying-off-19917422.php
+== California’s High-Speed Rail Fiasco Keeps Getting Worse ==
+California's dream of building a high-speed rail system linking San Francisco and LA is a cautionary tale of ambition outpacing funding, planning, and federal support.
+Benton Graham, Grist - September 10, 2025
+Seventeen years ago, Californians bet on a grand vision of the future. They narrowly approved a $10 billion bond issue to build a high-speed rail line that would zip between San Francisco and Los Angeles in under three hours. This technological marvel would slash emissions, revitalize the state’s Central Valley, and, with some financial help from the feds and private sector, provide the fast, efficient, and convenient travel Asia and Europe have long enjoyed.
+State officials promised to deliver this transit utopia by 2020. Instead, costs have more than doubled, little track has been laid, and service isn’t expected to begin before 2030—and only between Bakersfield and Merced, two cities far from the line’s ultimate destinations.
+It’s little wonder the project finds itself in a precarious financial position, fighting political headwinds, and deemed a boondoggle by everyone from federal Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy to Abundance authors Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. “In the time California has spent failing to complete its 500-mile high-speed rail system,” they wrote, “China has built more than 23,000 miles of high speed rail.”
+The reasons for this vary with who’s being asked, but people with expertise often cite three fundamental missteps: creating a new agency to lead the effort, failing to secure adequate funding from the start, and choosing a route through California’s agricultural heartland. The state’s strict environmental review process hasn’t helped, either.
+https://gizmodo.com/californias-high-speed-rail-fiasco-keeps-getting-worse-2000656798
+== Caltrain Shows Why Every Region Should Be Moving Toward Regional Rail ==
+January 09, 2026
+Caltrain recently replaced diesel trains with electric, cutting 25 minutes from the trip time.
+Faster speed, increased frequency, and more reliable service are causing ridership growth on Caltrain, the San Francisco Bay Area’s passenger railway. The ridership increase and service upgrades are a direct result of the electrification of Caltrain’s entire fleet of rolling stock in September 2024. “For the first time in the railroad’s 160-year history, diesel service was replaced with electric service along the 50-mile main line between San Francisco and San Jose,” Caltrain reported.
+Caltrain’s total ridership in Fiscal Year 2025 (ending June 30, 2025) increased 47% over the previous fiscal year, from 6.2 million to 9.1 million passengers. In June 2025, Caltrain recorded more than 1 million monthly passengers for the first time since the pandemic. It passed the 1 million-passenger mark in July and August as well, which was roughly a 60% increase over ridership totals for those months in 2024, just before the fleet’s electrification.
+The results are a powerful argument for electrification and the adoption of a regional rail model of service by every commuter railway in North America — i.e., offering fast, frequent service throughout the day, including weekends, instead of catering to antiquated commuting patterns and weekday rush hours.
+https://www.hsrail.org/blog/caltrain-shows-why-every-region-should-be-moving-toward-regional-rail/
+===== Tram Train =====
+== Tram trains ==
+How to build cheap transit in smaller towns
+Benedict Springbett - Jul 23, 2025
+Many cities face the following problem. They have railway lines that go where people live. But these railway lines end at the edge of the city center, and don’t go out the other side.
+For cities with this problem, the solution is through running (https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-magic-of-through-running/). Terminating a train and turning it around takes a lot of space, space that is usually unavailable in a city center. This means running a railway line through the city often doubles or triples the number of trains it can handle. As a bonus, passengers who are going from one side of the city to the other can do that much more quickly, with no change.
+Many cities, such as London, Paris, Munich and Milan, have used through running to turn some of their existing Victorian railway lines into metro-style services, by building tunnels under the city center. A few other cities, like Berlin, built viaducts (bridges that carry roads and railways over obstacles), while others, such as Cologne, have simply added platforms at their main stations to enable suburban trains to run through. But all of these are big cities, with over a million people, where the property value uplift or extra revenues from fares can cover the enormous costs (https://worksinprogress.co/issue/why-we-stopped-building-cut-and-cover/) of tunneling. But there is another option, affordable for smaller cities or large towns: the tram-train (https://pedestrianobservations.com/2020/11/03/tram-trains/).
+https://www.worksinprogress.news/p/tram-trains
@@ Line 631: / Line 828: @@
 https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a33372664/japan-new-bullet-train-shinkansen-earthquakes/
+===== Tunnel =====
+== The World's Largest Underwater Tunnel Is Barely Being Used Today ==
+Rebecca Crowe - 25 December 2024
+Yoshioka-Kaitei Station platform in the Seikan Tunnel
+Around the world, there are some truly iconic tunnels. From the engineering marvel of the popular Channel Tunnel linking the UK and France to the world's longest and deepest tunnel, the Gotthard Tunnel in Switzerland, we love traveling through subterranean worlds!
+However, some of the world's biggest tunnels are less popular than others despite the hefty investment that goes into these feats of engineering. The longest underwater tunnel in the world is now barely used.
+So, while conversing about a transatlantic underwater tunnel linking the US and the UK, let's look at the world's biggest - and most underutilized - case study! While it might seem easy to beat traffic and hide unsightly roads away from public view, is it worth the billions of dollars spent?
+https://www.thetravel.com/largest-underwater-tunnel-in-the-world-unused/
 ====== United States ======
@@ Line 677: / Line 891: @@
 https://www.fastcompany.com/91174458/californias-new-electric-train-makes-for-a-shockingly-better-trip-we-tried-it
+===== South Carolina Rail Line =====
+== 'Ghost' That Haunts South Carolina Rail Line May Be Caused By Tiny Earthquakes ==
+Posted by BeauHD on Tuesday January 28, 2025 05:30PM
+sciencehabit shares a report from Science:
+<blockquote>
+Legend has it that if you walk along Old Light Road in Summerville, South Carolina, you might see an eerie glow hovering over an abandoned rail line in the nearby woods. Old-timers will tell you it's a spectral lantern held by the apparition of a woman searching for her decapitated husband's head. Susan Hough has proposed a scientific explanation that is far more plausible, however. A seismologist with the U.S. Geological Survey, she believes the so-called Summerville Light could represent a rare natural phenomenon: earthquake lights.
+Sparks from steel rail tracks could ignite radon or other gases released from the ground by seismic shaking, Hough explains in an interview with Science. In Summerville, I think it's the railroad tracks that matter. I've crawled around tracks during my fieldwork in South Carolina. Historically, when [rail companies] replaced tracks, they didn't always haul the old track away. So, you've got heaps of steel out there. Sparks might be part of the story. And maybe the railroads are important for another reason. They may naturally follow fault lines that have carved corridors through the landscape.
+</blockquote>
+The findings have been published in the journal Seismological Research Letters. Hough also cites a paper published by Japanese scientist Yuji Enomoto that connects earthquake lights to the release of gases like radon or methane.
+https://science.slashdot.org/story/25/01/28/2352213/ghost-that-haunts-south-carolina-rail-line-may-be-caused-by-tiny-earthquakes
+===== Subway =====
+== The New York City Subway Is Using Google Pixels To Listen for Track Defects ==
+Posted by msmash on Thursday February 27, 2025 09:21AM
+New York City's Metropolitan Transportation Authority and Google have successfully tested technology that uses smartphone sensors to detect subway track defects, the MTA said Thursday. The four-month experiment, dubbed TrackInspect, mounted six Google Pixel phones on four A train subway cars traversing Manhattan and Queens. The phones' accelerometers, magnetometers, gyroscopes and external microphones collected 335 million sensor readings and 1,200 hours of audio data, which were processed through 200 prediction models.
+The system identified 92% of defects later confirmed by human inspectors, including broken rails and loose bolts. "The goal with this [project] is to find issues before they become a major issue in terms of service," said Demetrius Crichlow, the agency's president. Following the successful trial, the MTA plans to expand to a full pilot where Google will build a production version for track inspectors.
+https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/02/27/1043221/the-new-york-city-subway-is-using-google-pixels-to-listen-for-track-defects
+== A Look at the NYC Subway's Archaic Signal System ==
+Posted by msmash on Monday May 05, 2025 08:21AM
+New York City's subway system continues to operate largely on analog signal technology installed nearly a century ago, with 85% of the network still relying on mechanical equipment that requires constant human intervention. The outdated system causes approximately 4,000 train delays monthly and represents a technological time capsule in America's largest mass transit system.
+Deep inside Brooklyn's Hoyt-Schermerhorn station, transit worker Dyanesha Pryor operates a hulking machine the size of a grand piano by manipulating 24 metal levers that control nearby trains. Each command requires a precise sequence of movements, punctuated by metallic clanking as levers slam into place. When Pryor needs to step away, even for a bathroom break, express service must be rerouted until she returns, forcing all trains onto local tracks.
+The antiquated "fixed block" signaling divides tracks into approximately 1,000-foot sections. When a train occupies a block, it cuts off electrical current, providing only a general position rather than precise location data. This imprecision requires maintaining buffer zones between trains, significantly limiting capacity as ridership has grown. Maintenance challenges are also piling up, writes the New York Times. Hundreds of cloth-wrapped wires -- rather than modern rubber insulation -- fill back rooms and are prone to failure. When equipment breaks, replacements often must be custom-made in MTA workshops, as many components have been discontinued for decades.
+https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/05/05/0712248/a-look-at-the-nyc-subways-archaic-signal-system
@@ Line 743: / Line 1006: @@
 https://tech.slashdot.org/story/24/04/24/0238217/us-breaks-ground-on-its-first-ever-high-speed-rail
+== Ticket prices leaked for high-speed rail between California, Vegas ==
+Olivia Harden, Travel Reporter - Jan 28, 2025
+High-speed rail proponents who look forward to the bullet train connecting Southern California to Las Vegas may get sticker shock from the initial ticket prices.
+In recent filings that seek to raise $2.5 billion in a bond offering, Brightline West revealed that ticket prices for the trip would range from about $119 to $133 one way. In comparison, Brightline’s prices for its original line from Miami to Orlando start as low as $29 for a ticket, though that can increase depending on the time, date and class of the ticket.
+Brightline West may sway travelers with certain perks to take rail instead of driving to Las Vegas. Notably, riders from Los Angeles skip the interstate congestion that’s typical for the 270-mile trip on Interstate 15, which can take four to five hours with no traffic but often stretches well past six hours during busy days.
+In comparison, Brightline West is projected to travel up to 200 mph. The train is expected to reach Las Vegas in just over two hours, even with multiple stops. Travelers from LA will still have to make their way to the Rancho Cucamonga station, which costs $8 and takes an hour and 20 minutes from Union Station on the Metrolink train. A source close to the company said ticket prices reflect the speed at which the train travels. The peak speed of the train in Florida is 130 mph, according to the Brightline website.
+https://www.sfgate.com/travel/article/ticket-prices-leaked-high-speed-rail-california-20059294.php