BART is planning changes for platform assignments at Daly City that will balance headways and enable more cross platform transfers at Bay Fair and MacArthur.
bart.legistar.com/LegislationD...
plus easy access to water for industrial processes! same combo that once gave the Ohio Valley a genuinely insane concentration of coal-fired power plants
yes!
- preliminary system plan for conrail is here: catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/00096...
- a fascinating FRA study that discusses their network planning activities in the midwest is here:
railroads.dot.gov/sites/fra.do...
eh, 19th century was a bit of col a and a bit of col b. the favorable geographic factors often had already begun producing some kind of pop center before the heavy industry came in, and then the [transport/labor/agglomeration] economies plus those favorable conditions created manufacturing cities
oh yeah, 100%. and fundamentally the things these sectors produce (generally) aren't seeing consumption growth!
(and your plants don't generate cities by existing, either)
i'd add to the above:
- the hit you take from being in a rural environment from a transport and utilities perspective isn't nearly as big as it used to be
- exurban and rural counties often have strongly pro-industrial dev incentives
The cultural imaginary of manufacturing in the US is still tied up with scale, urbanism, and the Midwest, but this really just is not a mental model with descriptive power anymore. "Retvrn to manufacturing" produces small plants scattered across Southern exurbia and countryside, not new Youngstowns.
a satellite view of the mississippi river valley in AR/TN highlighting locations of steel mills
As manufacturing continues moving southwards and outwards from cities, it's fascinating to watch new clusters emerge. A good example: the string of 5 steel mills north of Memphis. They're low-profile and (relatively) low-employment--but are now the most significant group of plants outside of Chicago
Today is Conrail day! 50 years on, I’d suggest we remember its least credited legacy: the Northeast Corridor. Without the region-wide network planning exercise that created Conrail, the NEC would still be full of freight—as it was until the 70s.
Since Conrail, that feat has never been repeated.
And, well, the results aren't that flattering! As it turns out, power imbalances are often fractal and scale problems are real. He's careful not to make the book some sort of rose-tinted endorsement of high-modernist statehood (which I appreciate); a great read.
To the point about these claims being unfalsifiable -- I think Immerwahr's "Thinking Small" remains one of the more underrated books in left circles bc it takes (flawed) attempts of more communitarian solutions seriously and asks how they worked out, materially + structurally
This train is one of many that exports New York City's export trash to a network of landfills and incinerators across the eastern United States. As urban landfills reach capacity, arrangements like this one will likely become more common.
(but once again: american railroading's allergy to slot discipline is a load-bearing element of our stack of problems)
mixing high-variability intercity services with low-variability and relatively frequent regional/local services isn't fun, but with adequate capacity (and good stopping ptn mgmt) it totally can be done
I prob am preaching to the choir here, but there are options for this:
- creating paths in the LSW timetable for those stock moves, and adjusting surrounding trains to compensate.
- figuring out ways to speed slow mvmts. i know canadian has weird reverse stuff going on...so a shunting engine?
hold on, the theory here is that the occasional deadhead move of long(er) distance equipment to or from TMC locks all service off future express tracks?
never! 🤪
Several US carriers pursued major line relocation projects in the 1910-1950 timespan, but their goals and scale tended to be much more modest than elsewhere, and there just never were as many of them. That’s part of what makes this so fascinating—the seeds of something better were there…
unfortunately the sourcing beyond like a *handful* of documents was just too thin to make anything more meaningful than a thread-stub with a high ratio of imputed thoughts to actual evidence
ugh, yeah. a while back i tried to start putting something together on how US and [everywhere else]'s approaches to modernization/intensification really started to diverge post-WW1, w/ US going all in on labor-saving capex and other places chasing capacity/speed/consolidation
I don't think you're going to get as dramatic of a spread as you do with the national figure, but you will probably be able to see that ~nobody was running local pax rail services in the US at the scale seen in the UK
totally, yes. I guess my point is that a more meaningful comparison might also roll in the B&O, NH, CNJ, RDG, etc.
sure, yes, though "east end of the PRR in 1905" is about as hard of a steelman as one could do for US rail traffic density
yep
If I'm doing my math right, traffic density on the eastern core of the PRR in 1905 was ~14k train miles/route mile, so still less than the UK:
(eastern core: original PRR + URNJ + P&E + B&A)
www.google.com/books/editio...
i believe it! i think the point being made back in 1909, though, is that *in general* these were the differences between the networks.
i'm feeling too lazy to find good passenger mile/mile or ton mile/mile statistics, but in 1909, UK railroads rain *trains* ~4x as intensively per mile of road and ~2x as intensively per mile of track than the US
www.google.com/books/editio...
(zotero is a wonderful thing)
well to be clear, I also think that Sandy's thesis can be seen as sort of fractal to the larger problem of the US's dispersed railroad investment strategy. we built a bunch of mediocre railroads and proceeded to make little use of them, even historically
I saw this!
i am still here! just more lurky these days
It's ever hard to escape @sandypsj.bsky.social's conclusion about the peculiar under/misdevelopment of suburban rail service in the US.