a320lga.bsky.social
I like trains. Opinions mine.
blog: https://homesignalblog.wordpress.com/
155 posts
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Getting Started
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Re H2: yes, sorry, was assuming that green H2 gets mandated at some point.
Re batteries: that’s true-ish. Unless you’re willing to take a significant hit on loco availability your charging is going to happen when trains are in yards, which isn’t going to be strongly correlated w demand troughs.
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and I’m sure they’re worried they’ll be asked to pay part of the bill
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this report is pretty clearly written to provide talking points to those who want to stop legislative efforts around electrifying railroads, so, well, this is about what you’d expect. but to the extent this represents the real level of engagement w research…yikes
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most effective freight rail network in the world!!!!!!
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- no, you probably wouldn’t wire all of our rail mileage. they’re called “main lines” for a reason
- battery electrification solution will require additional generation capacity, and last time I checked hydrogen production requires quite a bit of power.
- re: OpEx impacts, see 1
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ah! too bad--thought italian RRs may have compiled as well
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I'd be really curious to see a graph of track-km/route-km over time for Italy--it's one of the stats that's readily avail for US comparison, so useful benchmark
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(I would love to see this, and probably can make you trains/hour graphs at cordon points from GTFS)
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thank you for finding! that's quite interesting, especially given that, afaik, there isn't a pronounced *peak* during the middays on most rail systems. but perhaps if we bounded to downtown stops there would be?
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yeah, that's the thought I think--and it's a relationship that remains true!
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On the bus side? Rail only opened in 76
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plus, of course, there used to be an identifiable "shopping peak" during the middays in the 20s that just disappeared
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generally I'd be very curious to see a trip composition graph over decades, bc you'll often come across testimony to the effect of "TV is killing off-peak traffic" or similar
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yeah I was just typing -- there are a few unknowns here, including off-peak trip generation rates and flexible hours in the "+" col and declining industrial work in the "-"
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yes, I think you can see transit demand decline as having phases of:
- off peak demand losses, ca. 1930-60
- peak demand losses, ca. 1960-90
...with the latter phase, as well as the slow return of non-work trip generators to (peri-)core neighborhoods, driving the red'n in pk/bs ratios
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via: www.google.com/books/editio...
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I’d say so, yeah. It’s readable in chunks and quite interesting
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as always, it’s fascinating (if also very obvious) how we’ve ended up w a decently strong regulatory regime for point-source air/water pollution and a much weaker one for mobile- and other nonpoint-source emissions
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it was only thru some insane rate distortions plus fruit marketing and a ton of subsidized industrialization that they actually like, could fill trains
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by far my favorite rail traffic history fact is that the initially predominant flow on the central pacific rr was...westbound wheat from the CA central valley to pacific ports
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Indeed, it was only thru consolidation (albeit w a much greater dash of retrenchment) that we got modernization in the NE and Midwest during the 70s/80s. The feds created a winner in the NE, and picked winners in the Midwest w loans
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To sort of synthesize these points: IMO our inability to rationalize the industry’s structure in the 20s contributed to the kneecapping of modernization in ensuing decades—economies of density, network-strategic returns etc were harder to achieve
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we have reached synthesis! my apologies for misunderstanding
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No, not at all! But the way you make it work looks a lot less like hours-long windows and more like careful slotting and/or a decent capacity margin to allow for dispatch creativity.
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Of course some of these have HSR lines, but that hardly means that they’ve cut all their local svc away
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Russia? The Baltic states? China?
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tl;dr operating ratio brain pushes managers to value cost minimization over any rational ROI calculation. This has been a problem for railroads for well over 120 years.
homesignalblog.wordpress.com/2021/12/27/e...
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Yeah, plus freight traffic tends to be heavy on a lot of Amtrak LD lines — large windows would be significant disruptions
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Unfortunately the projects we do today neither build (much) state capacity nor a repository of best practices nor even reusable standards.
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I dunno if you’ve read Jonathan’s masters thesis but the comparison he lays out btwn the efficacy of NECIP and contemporary French TGV work is fascinating, in part for the degree to which “they just didn’t know what they were doing” is a major plot line
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plus most of europe, of course
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yes, save for a brief moment in the mid/late-70s. I don't really see a path to *good* pax rail outside the northeast/CA without that changing
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i once again am saying:
bsky.app/profile/a320...
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NYC tore those tracks up!
definitely need capacity reinvestment, but its hard to do that smartly (cf. the $150 million 2nd Pennsylvanian frequency) without good capacity planning
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heh, yeah, we should
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that's not been the experience of the freight operations which try it! scheduled railroading works, it just so happens that the *specific incentive structure* of US freight carriers isn't good for ops stability
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I would rate changes to this status quo as having an approx. probability of 0 (certainly not in the next 4 yrs), but rail advocates would be well-served with some clarity of vision here. Yes, it's important that Amtrak get fair dispatching. But that's really just the edges of the problem here.
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Mixing structured and unstructured ops on increasingly capacity-constrained infrastructure is a recipe for chaos. And it's worth noting that said chaos hurts passengers *and freight railroads*, whose shippers have said for decades that the primary reason they don't use rail more is...unreliable svc.
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Passenger trains here [strive to] have precise schedules that clearly lay out how the operation will run each day. Freight trains don't; the variance of a train's arrival at any given point is often measured in hours.
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It would be quite interesting to know how much this dynamic changed with WMATA's opening through the 70's and 80's. On the one hand, the region gained significant bidirectional rail service to the suburbs; on the other, local connectivity was often weak.
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An insane transit equity statistic from www.google.com/books/editio...
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It def breaks down south of the Carolinas, but on the whole I think the mappings end up decent in the East, so long as you're willing to be a bit loose about which level of aggregation you're using. Maine doesn't need this level of subdivision, but the rest of the Mid-Atlantic + New Englnd is ~solid
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Gulf is subcategory of Atlantic here?
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imo we should embrace environmental-historic contingency and re-map the states based on watershed boundaries. for the most part, it works incredibly well.