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All aboard the GDST [Trains]
Heffling
No PicEverRegistered User regular
No PicEverRegistered User regular
Trains. They move stuff. Sometimes they move stuff to fantastical new unintended destinations, like the Ohio River Valley. Sometimes they belabor a point in the wrong thread.
Labor works on trains, which are owned by not labor. Also know as Capital. Like Washington.
Washington, DC is the hub of at least three major rail lines, and numerous smaller spurs.
Spurs, like the ones worn by the rail workers as they laid rail to connect the East and West coasts.
Coasting is what shareholders and executives do!
Labor works on trains, which are owned by not labor. Also know as Capital. Like Washington.
Washington, DC is the hub of at least three major rail lines, and numerous smaller spurs.
Spurs, like the ones worn by the rail workers as they laid rail to connect the East and West coasts.
Coasting is what shareholders and executives do!
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The cars on a train are the manifest, the load is the weight, and how long it is since it's on rails is mostly irrelevant. It's also non-trivial to measure the length of a train, you can do a roller measure parked, but once it is dynamic the couplers are stretching and rotating and you are talking some amount of variation.
Plus dropping or picking up cars, at least in spherical cow territory knowing the number of cars and their load makes length some pointless arbitrary measure that can vary anyway. I get that not even being a concern or something worth collecting once you have the other data points.
If the number of cars is the length then this is a recorded statistic. Almost certainly for accidents in which it may be important. Definitely for the accidents propublica is saying they had data for and care about with regards to public exposure to train incidents.
Lemme tell you, it was an amazing way to travel. We had a sleeper car and it was worth every penny. It was essentially first class, we got priority seating in the dining car, the food was excellent. and taking a shower on the train was a *very* cool experience.
A++ would do it again in a heart beat and we should spend more money on the choochoos
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'Murrica isn't the only ones suffering
I've heard the Cardinal is lovely, but the Capitol Limited takes you more along the lakefront and some of the old 20th Century Limited trackage, before shifting South to DC instead of New York.
Not quite Cat III HSR, but pretty close to it and the sort of thing that can be continuously improved over time. Probably won't ever get true dedicated 300kmh service, but 250kmh and hourly service seems eminently doable given how flat everything is here. Just need more grade separations and to finish up CREATE projects to untangle Chicago.
It went choo.
And then later it went choo a second time.
Taking the train between the two (DC and NYC) beats all hell out of flying, at usually a cheaper per-person price and an equivalent amount of time (once you include the necessary "show up 2 hours early for your security theater" buffer for air travel), while also allowing you to get up and stretch and walk and have a comfortable seat.
A++, would recommend trains all up and down the Eastern seaboard.
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Wilds of Aladrion: [https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/comment/43159014/#Comment_43159014]Ellandryn[/url]
So still slower than drivers on I55.
Trains are just in a weird spot in the US, because once you have made the buy in to being a car owner, which is for a lot of people not really negotiable due to the US's lack of urban planning and shit public transport, the economics of riding one don't seem that great even if your destination supports it.
Like Chi to STL is roughly 600 miles round trip. That is what $80 worth of gas? Which is roughly what a single round trip ticket costs. And I can probably beat the train there driving, especially if you count the time it takes to get to and from the stations. Once you add a second person in the car its not really close.
The optimum travel decision matrix is like 3 concentric circles with fly on the outside, "just drive" as the inner most, and "train" is just like this tiny sliver of a ring between the two.
did it chugga-chugga first?
Enquiring minds want to know!
Ticket pricing is $40-$80 depending on time of day, and the trains for next Monday are currently 60-90% full (again, depending on departure time) so, some folks clearly think it's worthwhile.
Given traffic on the Stevenson I'm pretty skeptical about you getting to the loop first if it's anywhere close to rush hour. Especially since the current timetable still doesn't reflect the higher speed yet. It can take me ~two hours to get to my folks' place, and they're just on the edge of the exurbs. If you're not going to the Loop, then sure it might not be worthwhile. But a literal majority of jobs within city limits are located there/ River North/ West Loop and over 10% for the whole metro area.
After the first chugga there was like a 30 minute delay before the next chugga.
Unrelated: I took the train in Spain during my vacation last year and it turns out that if it's excessively late they are legally required to refund your ticket, which is nice!
I'll be fine, just give me a minute, a man's got a limit, I can't get a life if my heart's not in it.
$80 worth of gas plus 10 hours of driving when you could be playing switch, reading a book, or whatever.
Airlines also generally dislike people trying to put a car in the overhead bin.
Don't tell anyone but...I just download a car when I get to my destination.
But then someone decided it was a good time to break out their bottles of SoCo and Wild Turkey, so most of the car got a little hammered, and we made it to our destination about 4 hours late at 1:30am instead of 9:30.
More seriously, tinwhiskers was comparing trains to cars in North America, so that's what I was comparing too.
I'll be fine, just give me a minute, a man's got a limit, I can't get a life if my heart's not in it.
That's why you just stash a stagecoach.
... that's why it's called "coach", right?
I hear an air marshal will tackle you if you try to use coach as your stage.
If I could...
Democrats Abroad! || Vote From Abroad
It was fantastic. As a foreigner who hasn't seen much of the U.S outside of the usual suspects (i.e, New York and LA), it was a great way to see some of the glorious American countryside. We got to see mountains, desert, and what my wife dubbed "Yogi Bear Forest" in California. Another fun surprise was what my wife (who is good at naming things) dubbed the "Valley of the Moon". Evidently its a thing to drop your pants and moon the Zephyr if you're rafting down the Colorado river. So I got some interesting pictures, which thanks to google photos sync now keep popping up on my chromecast randomly, typically when we have guests over.
Democrats Abroad! || Vote From Abroad
UK trains can be notoriously unreliable, but there's still a resilience there.
I was going from Edinburgh to Macclesfield last week - the first leg was Edinburgh to York.
That goes fine, but the train for the next leg was cancelled before we even arrived, so a replacement train was provided. Which made it one stop, to Leeds, before we were all told to get off, because the train had a mechanical fault. From Leeds we were all told to board the train to Liverpool, get off at Manchester Victoria, then take the tram across to Manchester Piccadilly, then I'd get the train to London Euston and get off at Macclesfield.
On one hand, an infuriating series of cascading failures.
On the other, I still got to where I was going with a delay of two hours, which would be comparable to being stuck in traffic on the motorway if I'd been driving a car.
Also, I wasn't in a car for all that.
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My worst train experience in the UK was back in 2011 if I recall. I was staying in York, but went to Edinburgh for the day. Around 7:30 PM I ambled back down to the train station and started looking for a train to York. There were none. I walked up to the customer service desk to ask, and I was brightly informed that the next train to York would be early the next morning. So I asked what other trains were going south, thinking that I could go to somewhere else and make my way to York indirectly. I was then informed in a “grass is green, the sky is blue, water is wet” kind of tone that trains didn’t go south after 7pm on weekends or something to that effect.
I couldn’t find any hotels in my price range in Edinburgh, but I had an unlimited tourist rail card, and I found a pretty cheap Holiday Inn in Glasgow within walking distance of the rail station. I learned a few valuable lessons that night with regards to planning.
The real pedantic debate is how many choo choos because the answer is well that depends, what is the train attempting to signal?
A derailment in an urban area
That's less "choo choo" and more "horrific metal squeals*
Everything I read about it is just horrific
I wonder if this will be enough to get rid of the practice of riding outside of the cars there
Signal error, passenger train derailed, hit another passenger train, third freight train was also involved somehow
288 dead so far