The engineering schematic

Fun find this afternoon: In 1957, the Port Authority did the engineering work to link the downtown PATH to the Lexington Avenue subway local tracks.

I don’t have a quick or easy policy fix for a system that relies on public agencies getting the consent of private railroads to access their tracks, but preserving this system and meaningfully expanding passenger rail use are pretty clearly mutually exclusive.

Pennsylvania just paid $200m for one additional passenger round-trip from Harrisburg to Pittsburgh. Colorado is paying ~$100m per round-trip (on a route 1/4 the length of PA’s). At these prices, the “low-hanging fruit” of US intercity pax rail expansion are a lot higher up than they appear.

well, at least their schedules allow *lots* of time to make this transfer

This is my grandfather at work back in the 80s. He was a test pilot at Grumman starting from the LEM and continuing all the way up until the late 90s.

You may know him from his work as the Apollo suit test dummy, or helping launch the Cradle of Aviation Museum on Long Island.

Shorter, more frequent GO train plan ‘unlikely to materialize’: leaked document Metrolinx locked into agreements for trains it no longer needs, draft fleet strategy says

there’s a ton that could be said about this, and probably more that will be written, but my most overwhelming feeling is just the huge disappointment at watching what was the best hope for north american commuter rail modernization go up in smoke like this

www.thetrillium.ca/news/municip...

quiet part, out loud:

I don't disagree! The railroads had (have) an operating model largely incompatible with highly-frequent urban service. Building rapid transit on railroad ROWs was the easiest way around this.

Anyone have any good sources on the crafting of the Passenger Rail Investment and Improvement Act of 2008 (a.k.a. PRIIA, a.k.a. the law that governs much of intercity pax rail planning) and/or on federal politics around Amtrak more generally in the 2000s?

Anyway, this is all to say that far from the kind of incremental improvement that might've led to major US passenger rail terminals highly optimized for high train volumes, we got incremental whittling away of railroads' provision of the types of service that would've forced such improvements.

The sharing (or outright recapture) of railroad ROWs for urban/suburban transit continued throughout the mid- and late-20th c.—first for the great society metros like WMATA, later for the 80s-00s light rail explosion.

You can see this in @chittimarco.bsky.social's diagram quite clearly; the yellow tracks in the top diagram are the WMATA Red Line, built 1976.

(One also imagines how willing cash-poor RRs were to sell off their ROWs to rapid transit agencies that would provide the service the IRS wouldn't!)

Anyway, fast forward to the postwar era and the simultaneous decline of railroads and rise of suburbanization. Once again there was an opportunity to rethink suburban transit, and once again this role was filled by new rapid transit lines—many of which directly took over railroad rights-of-way!

Penn is probably the most infamous example of the above genre, in part because its construction was part of what catalyzed the explosion in NJ suburbia. (But like...you didn't think to plan for that effect when your busiest rail station was still a series of drawings?)

So you had all these major rail stations, including many of the "union" stations, built around the 1910s and 20s, *after* streetcars and subways had seized the urban and suburban transit market and many of them weren't built that well for commuter transit. (Some aren't really in their CBDs!)

There was a pre-rapid transit period of urban history during which railroads ran rapid transit-adjacent service (we all think wistfully of those late 19th c. LIRR timetables with 5-minute Atlantic Branch headways). But this market was ceded pretty immediately to streetcars and/or rapid transit.

There's probably a story to be told here about American railroads not really caring a whole lot for suburban operations which create the very high train volumes you might try to design a station around specifically.

Anyone have any good sources on the crafting of the Passenger Rail Investment and Improvement Act of 2008 (a.k.a. PRIIA, a.k.a. the law that governs much of intercity pax rail planning) and/or on federal politics around Amtrak more generally in the 2000s?

Donate to Rally for Heather Steele: A True Union Sister in Need, organized by Brian Halko Support Sister Heather Steele: A SMART-TD Conductor Injured Protecti… Brian Halko needs your support for Rally for Heather Steele: A True Union Sister in Need

One of my favorite people to work with is in need of financial support after a horrific incident. If you've been an Amtrak employee or customer, and have ridden the cardinal, you likely know Heather.
If you can, please donate to help her recover.

www.gofundme.com/f/rally-for-...

Sunday evening reminder: I'm hiring! Job posting closes Christmas Eve, so if you're interested, get your application in now. I promise the work is meaningful and mostly fun :-)

No disrespect to Balko and his work against the militarized policing, but this is backwards. It’s otherwise progressive people who drop their principles to defend our system of auto dependence and backfill equity or anti-carceral justifications for it.

oh nooooo i might get some elevated rail infrastructure in my photograph of the iconic chicago loop

photo median sacrificing the natural location for an elevator is a hell of a choice, but i suppose that would ruin the photos

bart has been ~GoA3 (as in, heavily automated) from day 1 and is installing cbtc—the train control system that forms the basis of almost every automated metro—as we speak. the gap between bart today and full automation is both not that large and not technical

don’t there used to be some septa involvement in the keystone service?

Such an elemental yet overlooked reality of planning. If you don't:
- Design a new route to add value to the network overall
- Make changes to the existing network to incorporate the new asset

...you're kneecapping yourself. A key part of transit hist:

homesignalblog.wordpress.com/2024/07/12/t...

in the most recent (late 90s-00s) second av subway studies, one of the eliminated alternatives included a light rail line from USQ to the LES via 14 an Av D, presumably just to get ahead of the recurring “SAS doesn’t help the village” complaints.

yep! or the sixth av branch that…loops back on to the canarsie line. just in case the IND didn’t have enough wacky interlining for you already

the M14 is a feeder bus for the east village/alphabet city, which is pretty full of people and not super convenient to the subway. the east village “cuphandle” is a slightly deeper-cut, but recurring, subway crayon!