BART also never grinds their rails down, resulting in tons of flat spots and corrugation which makes the rail-wheel noise much worse. I don’t know why they thought doing that once would permanently fix the noise problem.

There’s a big thing counting against BART here: the trains are unusually light weight because of the way the infrastructure was designed. I believe they are still the lightest rail car per unit length on the planet so there’s basically no weight budget left for noise insulation.

But the scope of the reevaluation was fairly minor because the alignments are about 90% identical.

They had to do reevaluation anyway because the alignment of the project had changed enough to require it.

For them the schedule risk was not that high seeing as that there was basically no opposition to the project (or at least none that was able to apply much pressure). Building a line in the middle of nowhere will do that.

2030 is also incredibly unlikely to happen seeing as that they still have not begun major construction outside of LV station, and they still only have ~half the money needed to build the project as it was priced 2 years ago.

They did this because the work to get to that point had largely been completely by Desert Express. They reused a considerable amount of the already approved EIR that project had certified.

I’m not sure I would say Brightline West has been fast at all, especially seeing as that they inherited 20 years of permitting work from the prior project owner while also experiencing their own significant delays in delivering the project.

I'm not sure what's wrong with the idea of connecting the two systems together in San Jose. Implementation is obviously bad, but it's not clear to me that the BART extension being priced by an insane person is what is holding Caltrain back rather than its own lack of ambition.

Though I wonder if this would hold up in the case of CAHSR, where Amtrak did not plan to operate service over this railroad.

Ah ok, I found it. The case is National Railroad Passenger Corp. v. Boston & Maine Corp. Supreme court affirmed their right to transfer property to another railroad 6-3.

What case was this? As far as I know Amtrak has never used eminent domain against a freight railroad.

Beyond the fact that even the democratically controlled congress wasn't really even a big fan of this project, the power that Amtrak has to force divestiture of rail lines is completely untested. Railroads occupy a weird regulatory environment in this country.

There are some lower traffic HSR lines in Spain that are like this, but otherwise yes single track with sidings is not common on HSR.

Based on some insider information, I can confirm this is, in fact, a bug. TL;DR the original designers tried to be too clever with the door release system but it never really worked that well in the real world.

I think a lot of the perceived slowness of the turnaround is that part of the red line is padded to hell, so if they get there early or on time they end up waiting a while.

That's what they normally do on the red line. The operator from the previous train walks to the other end of the platform and picks up the next train going the other way out of the station. Ever since they started running the red line through the airport they've been doing this.

Yes. The last time I traveled through the station I timed it. It took 85 seconds between the moment they stopped and pulled out of the station.

The absolute minimum is 120m, and I don’t think you find that anywhere on the mainline network. Only in yards.

But you’re still going to need to stick pillars through the terminal unless the thing is suspended on air. And the curve is still going to be quite narrow and slow as a result, to the point where I’m not sure you’d end up saving any time over the stub end. BART is pretty quick about turning trains.

That would require a curve well below the minimum curve radius of BART. The space inside the domestic terminal loop isn’t big enough to fit a through station without taking out at least two terminals in the process.

I don’t know how you do that without a completely different alignment and/or tearing down most of the airport.

I'm pretty certain this is something that a lot of modern EMUs feature, though it's not really publicized. At minimum there are batteries to keep hotel power going for a bit.

I mean he can cit this in a lawsuit if he likes but there's no real reason why a judge would take that at face value.

Of course all of this work is somewhat moot if we can just get UP to agree to allow OCS on their tracks. Without that we're in for a much bigger uphill battle for full electrification.

Richmond to Emeryville quadruplication is probably not extremely hard, if a little tight in places. This leaves Alviso, which is undergoing a study to build a new flood-resistant alignment. This should include provisions for electrification. All of this would be required to unlock better frequency.

The hardest part is going to be in the middle. The new high level bridge, and widening the ROW between Martinez and Richmond are both expensive and require significant earthworks. Figuring out the JLS portion is also going to be hard if pax separation is required.

I see the latter as much more likely. In that case, building wire segments from Davis to Suisun City and Coliseum to Newark (w/ South Bay Connect) are fairly easy, and only leaves a 55 mile gap in the middle. This probably only provides marginal frequency improvements.

Depends on how full you want to go with it. I think it's probably possible to get partial electrification with BEMUs to bridge gaps done without doing any major infrastructure projects. The biggest upfront hurdle will be electrification on existing tracks, or requiring separate tracks for pax.

I've heard this claim before, but the trains don't have separate e-brake and pneumatic brake controls. It's all done by software which was at fault.