OT: Muppets

You are supporting my claim that they don't plan empty seats for last minute ticket sales.

Don't know where you get your info. Most riders on the MARC train we have been discussing buy monthly tickets. The railroad wants to book the train solid. They have no incentive to leave empty seats as claimed by Bill.

Yes, in the right location with the right population density trains can work as they do in Europe and Japen and even England. Please tell me how to improve this train.

Sounds like you have a complete grasp of the situation. What do you suggest?

???

--
Rick C 

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Reply to
rickman
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snipped-for-privacy@notreal.com wrote: >

Railroads in the United States were built to haul cotton and coal. Passenger service was always a secondary service. I grew up with a major rail line behind my home that ran from Detroit to Florida. There were two daily passenger runs, in a single railcar/engine. It had controls on both ends, and the passengers rode n the middle. It was an express that ran between two cities, early morning and in the evening.

Freight cars were designed to fit bales of cotton, with no wasted space. Coal cars and ore carriers are filled from the top, and emptied from the bottom, over a low bridge. The steel mill had trucks lined up to receive the coal, and to transport it to their mile+ diameter coal pile. It was a 24 hour a day operation to keep a couple week supply of coal to convert into coke, for the carbon needed to make steel.

Reply to
Michael A Terrell

Not always:

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We have some lines here as well that were mostly for freight. The ones into the Sierra are now largely abandoned and one has become my mountain bike route to the east and west. Rail freight has gone to trucks in our area. Last time I saw freight cars being hauled to Schnitzer Steel in Rancho Cordova, CA, a recycling company, was in the late 90's. That track has now become a lightrail line, passengers-only.

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Regards, Joerg 

http://www.analogconsultants.com/
Reply to
Joerg

Not comparable data. The 'highest run-up' is a topology-dependent measure of water movement, and not a seismic energy estimate. Seawalls were expected to be sufficient because the seismic magnitude was beyond previous measured events.

Reply to
whit3rd

Er... no, they're oversold because flights are scheduled, and the airlines make more money when enough people to fill a plane show up at each departure. Passengers didn't force the overselling policy!

Reply to
whit3rd

It's often no point trying to get you to understand things when you have made up your mind. You are cherry picking a few isolated facts to support a wrong conclusion. Railroads have always been about freight and passenger service was only provided because it was needed and often was the justification for giving the railroad eminent domain to obtain right of way. Freight is what pays for the railroad and every railroad in the country would happily see passenger service go away so they can more efficiently move freight. Passenger service really does waste rail time and space relative to the economic benefit.

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Rick C 

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Reply to
rickman

They had several earthquakes around 8.5 around Japan, with subsequent tsunamis which would have over-powered the sea wall. Anticipating that it won't happen again, that there will never be a worse one or one where the tsunami trigger mechanism is worst case is seriously flawed engineering.

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In med-tech such stuff can land engineers in court.

--
Regards, Joerg 

http://www.analogconsultants.com/
Reply to
Joerg

With a few exceptions (that can be counted on one hand) you're absolutely right. Passenger rail in the US is just silly. It makes no sense and (so) people don't want it.

Reply to
krw

I'm beginning to worry about Joerg. He's acting more and more like my dad did, not long before he was declared unable to take care of himself.

Reply to
Michael A Terrell

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e the capital investment, and when it's too cheap to attract much use, use this as evidence that the service should never have been offered. A bit mor e bother and a slightly larger start-up expense and it might have been wort h the trouble.

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telephone exchange should be sized to have four spare switching circuits a t maximally busy times, because that means that somebody who wants to make the trip/connection when they want to has a 99% chance of finding an empty seat or a free circuit.

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or most of the time I was working in Venlo and commuting from Nijmegen, but they are only part of the traffic catered for.

er a service that had any hope of attracting much business.

That isn't the interesting question, which is how much more would have to h ave been spent to set up a real service which could attract more than 150 c ommuters, and why that wasn't what was spent.

Which was probably the whole point - to set up a duff service to show the p oliticians involved that it was a bad idea.

re with the freight rail is best used for transporting.

European railways are happy to mix freight and passenger services, as are t he roads themselves. It's stupid to claim that it can't - or shouldn't - be done.

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red on a highway. Any train that takes 2 hours to cover that distance has t o be stopping at every hamlet on the way.

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Except that you haven't demonstrated that the rail route is much longer tha n the highway. The highway wasn't there to get in the way when the track wa s laid 150 years ago.

A google search on the string "Frederick Maryland to Baltimore rail route" shows four services a day, three of which do the trip in 70 minutes (rathe r less than two hours) while the other takes only 65. The rail route seems to be pretty close to perfectly straight.

None of them show how often the train stops en route.

List the stations along the route where the train does stop - you should b e able to find that information, even if I can't.

a car (which has to cope with other traffic) gets thrown away. Setting up a n express train schedule takes more effort and organisation, and clearly no body bothered.

In England, where the train tracks parallel motorways from time to time I'v e been passed by a train when doing an illegal 90 miles per hour.

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Crummy trains or crappy tracks. US motorway traffic is theoretically limite d to 55 miles per hour. French TGV trains are scheduled to run at 200 mile s per hour, but they do need special track.

rity > these days. Passenger service is also expensive compared to other m odes.

Ralph Nader explained why this happened in the US. In the 1930s the car com panies bought up city rapid transit services - mostly rail - and shut down the passenger operations to force people to buy cars.

Great for car company profits. Rotten for getting lots of people to work.

ctly when most commuters want it to, they'll stick with their cars.

during the working day, beginning early enough to get you there for the st art of the working day, and stopping fairly late to get you home after work .

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Business travellers go to meetings in other cities, and shoppers do travel in the middle of the day. Run short trains in the middle of the day, and ma ximum length trains at peak periods - it's what serious rail operators do.

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t capital tied up and eating up interest, but they don't need to be kept ru nning.

What makes you think that the engines are idling?

They might keep them running to keep the air-conditioning working, but that 's not idling.

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and

traffic jams. Anybody who can set up a train link that takes two hours to c over fifty miles has to be either totally incompetent, or designing a schem e that's guaranteed to fail.

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Stop at fewer intermediate stations.

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My commute from Nijmegen to Venlo was on just such a track. It's not single track all the way, and there were frequent short stretches of double track , long enough to accommodate a full length train. We used to go past at lea st one on every express trip because we'd pass the stop-everywhere train at least once.

We'd probably pass the stop-everywhere train going the other way as well.

Single track is more complicated to use, but nothing a computer system can' t cope with. The only really bad snarl-up I got caught up in happened when the rail-control computer (in Eindhoven) caught on fire and humans had to w ork out how to get everybody home. I got home about two hours later than us ual.

Suicides on the train line didn't happen often but they did disturb the sch edule when they did happen, and that line ran straight past a lunatic asylu m not that far from where we lived ....

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Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
bill.sloman

Passenger rail in the US is implemented very badly. This is probably a more or less deliberate ploy to sell more cars, and to make air-travel more attractive.

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The US political system does work to favour capitalist with lots of money to spend on lobbyists over less well-off regular travelers.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
bill.sloman

f.

As in "not right wing enough to be let out in public"?

Don't worry about Jeorg. He grew up in Germany where all sorts of socialist devices - like effective public transport - visibly worked, and he hasn't been in America quite long enough for the badly implemented pseudo-counter- examples to have persuaded him that they they can't.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
bill.sloman

You haven't said anything about what could be improved. It's easy to complain things aren't good enough and should be better if you don't say how.

You like to ignore the extreme differences between the US and Europe. I don't know how they manage the freight in Europe on tracks carrying regular passenger trains. It's not easy to squeeze mile long coal and ore trains going 30 or 40 miles per hour between passenger service that wants to travel at 60 mph and faster. It's stupid to compare this to highways where all traffic travels at the same speed.

The train tracks were laid to carry train traffic which needs much more level ground than does autos and trucks. Highways go over hills in as straight a line as practical or carved through when needed by cuts. There's also the issue that the roads go from city to city while the railroad was laid with longer routes in mind. It was common for a new city to spring up after the rail road came through.

Check the trains to DC Union Station which is what I"m talking about. I screwed up when I said Baltimore. Both cities are about the same distance from Frederick and I got the name confused. It was the Washington route that was added with the purchase of the three new trains. It's also Washington where most of our commuters go.

Three trips a day, between 100 and 110 minutes each way.

Numerous, Boyds, Rockville, Dickerson, Gathersburg to name a few. Ultimate destination is Union station. Then once in DC you have to take the metro to get to your job. Total time more like 2.5 hours. That's why so few do it.

US has 70 mph speed limits in places, but not the stretch I'm talking about. But traffic tends to go 70 even in 55 zones.

You are talking about city services, not commuter rail of today.

Business travelers don't have time to waste time with trains. Drive or fly depending on the distance. Shopping is not commuting with much lower volumes. Commuting is much easier service to organize, the same trains go into the city in the morning as come out in the evening.

I see and hear them. They never shut down the engine of a locomotive unless they have to. That's not unheard of with trucks for shorter periods of time as well.

What AC? There's no one on them!

And have fewer passengers? Great plan!

Lol, that's not double track, those are sidings! They have them to allow one train to pull off and wait for another to pass.

Single track is *much* more difficult to use. You don't understand that because you don't really know much about the railroads. Get a job as a Dispatcher then tell me how easy it is.

--
Rick C 

Viewed the eclipse at Wintercrest Farms, 
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Reply to
rickman

Don't forget, the passenger train has to have priority, which screws up all scheduling on that line.

Railroad crossings are also an issue. They're much more disruptive than normal intersections (cars and trucks aren't a mile long).

Vermont has the issue in spades. The route they added in the '00s had so few riders that it would have been cheaper to hire each rider his own limo. But the politicians were happy, as was the RR company, since the federal government paid to upgrade their track.

That shows how much Slowman knows about the US. It's amazing that he's so "knowledgeable", yet *so* wrong.

Reply to
krw

On 23/12/17 02:02, snipped-for-privacy@ieee.org wrote: > In England, where the train tracks parallel motorways from time to time I've > been passed by a train when doing an illegal 90 miles per hour.

And in places they also run parallel to canals, sometimes within a stone's throw.

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If you think about history and incremental economics, that is completely unsurprising.

Reply to
Tom Gardner

You are right that there are significant differences between the US and UK - but not necessarily in the way you think!

Many people (>700/day the last I heard) commute from Bath to London. That is - 115 miles, - 2.5 hours by car/coach, or - 1.5 hours by train, - two trains/hour. Much more civilised and sensible than trying to drive/park in London; for a start you can (safely) fall asleep while travelling :)

There are many other such commutes; e.g. Ashford to London has become popular recently, 38mins by train, 90 mins by car. ISTR some people commuting from France to London by train.

Some people commute from Swansea; I can only think they don't like their families.

Another amusing statistic that the AA/RAC occasionally trots out: it takes the same time to cross London in a car as it did in the 1930s. No, that isn't quite comparing like-with-like, but it is indicative.

Reply to
Tom Gardner

Americans on average have the conflicting requirements of wanting low taxes and "small government", while also simultaneously feeling entitled to high-quality services, or at least something on par with second-world European and Asian countries, rather than third-world.

Those conflicting requirements prime the stage for neoliberal-style "public-private partnerships", since as without revenues the only way the government can provide even a minimum level of service is to farm out the work to someone who thinks they can make a buck from doing it. Ideally they use the money they save from their enormous tax cuts to put in the VC for these ventures.

Whether they succeed or fail isn't really material as private industry has no vested interest in whether a public-private partnership is successful in the long run, so long as the investors get a return on their investment. If it's successful private industry will get the credit, if it's a failure government will take the blame.

Either way it hardly matters as most times the transfer of wealth has occurred successfully, which was the goal. Kind of like how the statement "The unrestricted free market is the most efficient system for the equitable distribution of goods and services there is" may very well be true for all I know, except for the fact that in America the "equitable distribution of goods and services" isn't the goal of economics. It's a solution looking for a problem, the best "solution" nobody wanted.

Reply to
bitrex

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ise the capital investment, and when it's too cheap to attract much use, us e this as evidence that the service should never have been offered. A bit m ore bother and a slightly larger start-up expense and it might have been wo rth the trouble.

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a telephone exchange should be sized to have four spare switching circuits at maximally busy times, because that means that somebody who wants to mak e the trip/connection when they want to has a 99% chance of finding an empt y seat or a free circuit.

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vations for overseas phone calls.

for most of the time I was working in Venlo and commuting from Nijmegen, b ut they are only part of the traffic catered for.

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over a service that had any hope of attracting much business.

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to have been spent to set up a real service which could attract more than 1

50 commuters, and why that wasn't what was spent.

how.

You said the service took two hours to cover 50 miles, and there is an obvi ous way of improving that. In fact the four (not three as you mentioned) mo stly take 70 minutes, though one take only 65. Even that is pretty slow, an d implies a stopping service. An express service, with minimum stops, ought to be faster.

he politicians involved that it was a bad idea.

rfere with the freight rail is best used for transporting.

But it would interfere with the roads being used for local traffic, and the local traffic would have interfered with the express buses.

re the roads themselves. It's stupid to claim that it can't - or shouldn't

- be done.

And Americans like to invent "extreme differences" to explain why their ser vices are rubbish.

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It may not be easy, but it's done all the time in Europe. You've got a lot more control over the trains than over road traffic. Where there's heavy ra il traffic, European systems put in double tracks, and throw in long siding s where long freight trains can be taken out of the way when a faster passe nger train needs to get through

way)

Three of the direct train services take 70 minutes, and the fourth takes 65 .

The booking system seems to insist on breaking the journey, and the two leg s do total up to two hours or more, but that's not what ought be being offe red to commuters.

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sured on a highway. Any train that takes 2 hours to cover that distance has to be stopping at every hamlet on the way.

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than the highway. The highway wasn't there to get in the way when the trac k was laid 150 years ago.

Have you looked at the map? The rail route looks to be even more direct tha n the higheway.

ty

ute" shows four services a day, three of which do the trip in 70 minutes (r ather less than two hours) while the other takes only 65. The rail route se ems to be pretty close to perfectly straight.

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You specified the destinations in the first place. If you couldn't get that right, it's really not worth talking to you.

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ngle track all the way, and there were frequent short stretches of double t rack, long enough to accommodate a full length train. We used to go past at least one on every express trip because we'd pass the stop-everywhere trai n at least once.

That's what I said.

l.

can't cope with. The only really bad snarl-up I got caught up in happened w hen the rail-control computer (in Eindhoven) caught on fire and humans had to work out how to get everybody home. I got home about two hours later tha n usual.

But not so difficult to use that it isn't useful.

If you can't remember where trains you are talking about come from and go t o, you aren't eligible to get a job as a dispatcher, or credible when you t alk about what they might have to do.

In fact the job is one of those that got automated out of existence about a generation ago, and modern dispatchers just manage the computer system tha t keeps track of everything on the chunk of the network it controls.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
bill.sloman

with

ng

our

the capital investment, and when it's too cheap to attract much use, use th is as evidence that the service should never have been offered. A bit more bother and a slightly larger start-up expense and it might have been worth the trouble.

he

ty

elephone exchange should be sized to have four spare switching circuits at maximally busy times, because that means that somebody who wants to make th e trip/connection when they want to has a 99% chance of finding an empty se at or a free circuit.

ly when most commuters want it to, they'll stick with their cars.

imum, and complain that the people who get the money don't thrive. The Swed es pay out a bit more - not much more but enough to allow the kids of the people on welfare to do pretty much as well as regular people's kids.

plement that approach badly enough that it doesn't really work, and blame t he consequent mess on the approach, rather than the implementation.

are.

other - but the Republican enthusiasm for "small government" that can get b y while not collecting much in the way of taxes from the rich, has generate d a lot of under-funded designed-to-fail government initiatives.

It's rich Americans - the top 1% of the income distribution - that want low taxes. Since most of the never seem to have been to Europe, they don't kno w how third world their public transport is, or how much superior the north

-western European equivalents are.

The unrestricted free market isn't the most efficient system for the equit able distribution of goods and services when the goods and services involve d constitute a natural monopoly. Natural monopolies have to be closely regu lated to get them to work sensibly, and it's easy to get that wrong - as EN RON existed to remind us. Running them as publicly-owned public services wo rks just as well - not perfectly, but well enough.

Thatcher and Reagan put a lot of money into the pockets of their well-off f riends in the process of making the point.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
bill.sloman

Crossing NYC at rush hour isn't going to be much fun, either, but that's not the point. No one is saying that mass transit doesn't work. We're saying that it only works for commuting where the population density warrants it. Something that doesn't exist in the US, except for a hand full of cities. Long-distance rail is a stupid as most lefties.

Reply to
krw

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