Hi, friends!
What’s going on today?
Amtrak passenger train derailed in rural Missouri this afternoon and there were 3 fatalities and several injuries. So glad we have reliable non-car transportation with solid infrastructure.
Maybe we’ll just go back to horse and buggy as other countries keep building bullet trains, etc.
Amtrak is a national disgrace. Years ago I was in LA for a little R&R and to subsidize my trip I made up a reason to visit a company I hired that was up in Santa Barbara, next door to Montecito, where Ellen DeGeneres spends quite a bit of time compulsively flipping houses and where Hazza and Megs live. Better Half was with me, so I got to LA’s Union Station OK and the trip up was uneventful. Then, on the trip back, the train kept stopping and eventually I arrived at Union Station two hours after the scheduled return.
An Amtrak employee on board made the mistake of transiting through the car I was in so I asked her what was up. “I don’t know why they print the schedules like that, we don’t own the tracks so the freight trains and the LA commuter trains have the right of way. We’ll be arriving in LA at [two hours later than on the schedule] same as we always do, unless the train breaks down or something.”
PS: This also wasn’t a cheap rail excursion, it cost about twice what renting a car and paying for gas would have cost, but my company found it perfectly reasonable to take a public transit option, because it was a good NYC-centric company with an almost primal loathing for the West Coast, somewhere none of them had ever been.
The freight railroads get monopolies in their regions and little regulation and that’s a toxic combination. Tracks, bridges, tunnels, road crossings, switches, they all stink.
The only place where passenger trains run fairly OK over much distance is DC to Boston, and that’s because it’s the only place where the government runs much of the infrastructure, And even then you get political interference, like Chris Christie blocking the modern tunnel into NYC..
A decent chunk of the supply chain problems in the country are because the freight trains are so bad — the freight companies have done endless cost cutting to turn their timelines slow and unpredictable, and huge amounts of their business has ended up hauling scrap metal, coal, and other low value, low urgency bulk.
Other places run express trains, and it would be hugely profitable for the freight companies — they could completely outcompete trucks because a crew of a handful could go 100+ mph all day and all night on dedicated tracks and haul as much as 200 trucks in much less time. And passenger trains could slip into that kind of system easily.
But that would require investments and regulation, and the freight companies just don’t want any of that.
To be fair, (but certainly not defending that beached whale), Christie killed the tunnel that was strictly for NJ Transit, was designed for a separate station under Macy’s, and only had like 8 stub end tracks. And New Jersey taxpayers footed most of the bill……BUT! the fact that he “repurposed” that money into roads and bridges and didn’t do a damn thing for rail, well, ….
Mrs Butcher and I are saving up for an extended train trip. But we’re not stupid enough to go with Amtrak. We’re going to take the Rocky Mountaineer from Vancouver to Banff.
One of my uncles used to do that trip every year but he and his wife were all in so they started in Vancouver and went all the way to the Maritimes. I forget which city VIA eventually ends up in. I asked him how it went after one of these trips and he said, “It’s really beautiful until you get up and over the Rockies, and then it feels like you’re serving a six-month sentence in solitary confinement until you get to Toronto, and then things pick up again.”
The prairies has that affect on people. Northern Ontario is pretty much rocks and trees without mountains.
As someone who has driven through the US Midwest more than once, and through Alberta twice, there is no way I’d take a train through the prairies.
My favorite train trip was taking the Shinkansen (bullet train) from Tokyo to Hiroshima to Nagasaki then back to Tokyo.
My dad wanted to see the places where the US dropped atomic bombs on Japan (not to gloat being a Korean who lived under harsh Japanese rule, but he wasn’t in favor of nuclear war.)
I got to see a lot of Japan zooming away at 200kph. The Bento box lunches were superb and cheap compared to the rest of Japan.
It was probably the most expensive trip I’ve ever been on (not my dime, but I think my dad saved up for 4 years to take it.)
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were still quite somber places. An eye opener for 14 year old me who also didn’t want to die in a nuclear war.
Looks like this NOT is on track with Trains tonight.