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--- transportation:train [2025/01/30 06:22] – [Las Vegas to Los Angeles] timb
+++ transportation:train [2026/01/11 20:37] (current) – [Caltrain] timb
@@ Line 134: / Line 134: @@
 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 162: / 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 390: / 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 425: / 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/
@@ Line 444: / Line 544: @@
 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 763: / Line 912: @@
 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