As a silver lining, you could do some very, very big lot consolidations without ever having to demolish anything

The American interurbans had a very good relationship with landowners early on, who typically bought shares and donated land for RoW. Usually it was municipal governments that were adversarial. not sure if LR would alleviate that particular situation.

In part the American hate against monopolies was crippling. The Ontario Hydro system is interesting for being publically owned (subsidy politically OK) but it never finished connecting its lines or building its downtown el/tunnel.

Yes the projects that made some interurbans into things worth keeping around like the Los Angeles tunnel, Milwaukee viaduct tended to be near the end of the technology's lifespan.

A lot of them get crippled by not having downtown entrances. The detroit lines had to share with streetcars, later turned into a forced transfer, it was pretty junk. Lots of other examples too, look at Indianapolis

Descriptions of East Coast interurbans are particularly insane, they'd say things like "our line is signalled" and what they meant was they hung lightbulbs on poles connected to switches that conductors would throw with a long stick they poked out the window.

So there's overlap in the form of the national interurban characteristics, but the fixed infrastructure of typical American interurbans was just worse than that of early big 16. There are still examples where it's comparable like Los Angeles and Milwaukee but hard to see on a map.

yes, but the ones that survived and blossomed into major private railways tended to have much shorter shared track from the outset. the ones with a more american RoW mix - say Meitetsu Minomachi - died too, just later than their American counterparts.

These people were laying entire railroads with only cinders and ash for roadbeds, some of them had an insane density of driveways intersecting their route, etc.

There's also a sense of survivorship bias, where the best-known systems like the Pacific Electric and the surviving ones like the South Shore had very atypically good infrastructure, to the point where people asked if they should be considered rapid transit and a regular railroad, respectively.

When people compare to them to Tramway Act incorporated Japanese railways I always remember that the typical Japanese examples had equal or even higher capitalisations per km, despite the huge difference in construction price levels between Meiji Japan and Progressive Era America.

It's a bunch of accumulated decisions going back to the 1960s decision to delete interlined service that have gradually led to more and more line independence

This thinking has a lot of merits but it might play out a little differently with OEM service agreements the norm these days. Line 1 fixed-formation trains are also incompatible with Line 2's yard and shops so routine interoperation is out of the question for rolling stock lifecycle

*of the project that was executed nearly a decade ago

Components are generally similar but software won't play nice.

Well over 20 years if you commit to an already mature product early in the project lifecycle!

Nobody specified that the Line 2 CBTC had to be compatible with YUS CBTC to get a competitive procurement. The Line 1 system is also kind of ancient and presumably a more up-to-date product is better

Line 2's fleet is captive because it doesn't have carborne CBTC equipment and so has to operate line-of-sight (ie. never in service) on Line 1, but the hardware that enforces conventional signals is present on Line 1's trains. So Line 1 can help out Line 2 but not the other way around

This is now only the case in one direction (Line 1 -> Line 2 moves), as used yesterday. But with the Line 2 ATC RFP not requiring interoperability it's possible they will become entirely independent

The description of a rail baron brings to mind the British Railways regional barons. Underrated how bad memories of geographical fiefdoms in UK and Germany drove bad post-privatisation functionally oriented structures

DBB was fine but the Reichsbajn was an unreformed basketcase, they had pretty similar headcounts upon reunification and massive philosophical gap. That was the outstanding problem

OK it was in a book I scanned and sent you once, lost the file now but it had JR Tokai président, DBB+DRB->DBAG CFO, HM Treasury Secretary talking about things.

I forget who but there's definitely some piece jointly written by some JR and DB managers discussing the experiences of breakup and privatisation (forestalled in the Germans' case).

The appalling quality+price of service gap in Nagoya area by 1980s was a pretty good illustration of how much JNR let the whole situation get out of hand iirc

There are some nice 00s post-mortems about the JNR breakup vis a vis Bahnreform too

In a system like Toronto you can see the physical system originally built for through running interlining, but which has basically become a set of independent lines over time as the system optimised for capacity.

Yep you can really see the conscious decision in Soviet and Chinese systems with very standardised specification but without physical interoperation connections, not worth the trouble.

US census gives you... work from home as a means of commuting, I guess

It's also bad that data isn't collected on multimodal trips. Japanese census statistics give a lot of useful information on station access by allowing up to three primary modes that's hard to find in US census data

Soviet metro engineers certainly weren't doing DBOM partnerships but settled on independent lines, it was also a technical evolution to a more economical? resilient? structure. Maybe you can say similarly of Chinese

You can also relate this to the historic shift from depot sharing to operational independence and the decline in the giant underground flying junctions that characterise early metros.