I'd be interested to know what that would be.

Could we put it all on red, and -if we win- build Houston a commuter rail tunnel and RER network? Maybe an initial 4 lines radiating in roughly cardinal directions, the North line going to GHWB Intergalactic, the south line eventually connecting to Galveston. Any leftover money will be for bribes.

With all due credit to @starlinechicago.bsky.social it'd have to be #buildthetunnel, although as an initial step the Crossrail Chicago proposal from MidwestHSR might be better. It links O'hare to downtown Chicago with a high frequency commuter line through an area with little fixed guideway transit.

I guess the only question is how many people are going to die for his vanity project. He so desperately wants to recapture that Tony-Stark-like energy he so briefly had, but landing Americans on the moon isn't going to make us forget what he did.

My apologies for not being clear. I wasn't referring to their opposition to others stringing wire, but rather to the freight railroads' total opposition to using catenary for their own operations. The easiest way to get costs down would be for them to generate economies of scale, but they will not.

At the very least a 5 to 6 hour trip between SF and LA begins to build a political coalition which can effectively argue for investments in HSLs which can further reduce travel times. It delivers something concrete which people can point to, rather than forcing advocates to appeal to some future.

I hate to say it, but unless one of the freight railroads can be convinced to put a significant amount of their mainline under the wire we'll just be scraping the surface while the root of the cost problem is miles below. Unfortunately the freight railroads' opposition to wire is now ideological.

DRPA thought the same, back in 2007, which is why they conducted a TOD study. IINM it was parking neutral, or even increased the number of parking spots while adding retail and residential. Of course this would never fly today with the death of DRPA economic development. www.drpa.org/pdfs/PATCO_T...

Just going back to the Internet Archive of SVMetro.com is enough to induce nostalgia for what never was. We'd have had a direct link between Manayunk, then the up and coming neighborhood and University City which became a major job center in the mid-2000s.
web.archive.org/web/20050213...

See? Should have kept a few around to become cab cars. Sure the crews might have gotten freaked out seeing the ballast whiz by at 125mph through the holes in the floor, but it'd be cheap and apparently that's all that matters.

Not for nothing, but freight should be electrified, with overhead catenary, not battery locomotives. This should be the norm, their irrational opposition to a technology which by all rights should save them money notwithstanding.

Put it at Bustleton and the Blvd!

Some true-believer DOJ lackey is going to blurt out a variety of info from highly top-secret sources and methods in a last ditch effort to ensure a conviction and we'll all find out what it was Five Eyes used to replace the stuff Snowden revealed.

This is the reason he wanted the peace prize last year. He knew he wouldn't stand a chance in the next 3 years as we either fight a bloody jungle insurgency to secure oil fields, Venezuela descends into chaos, or both. Meanwhile Putin finally got the western hemisphere war he's wanted for 5 years.

This is like 'The Grasshopper Lies Heavy': a glimpse of a better past we were denied. A past where a pair of Little Joes were painted in Amtrak's scheme before being retired in favor of GF6CHs and E60CPs as the 25kV was installed, the gap was bridged, and trains ran from Montana to Tacoma on juice.

What would your solution be to the clearances in the Haddonfield cut, White Horse Rd bridge, and the curve under 676 in Camden?

Why not extend PATCO to a proper cross platform transfer station at Atco? One or two intermediate stations could be added. And it'd be cheaper than changing clearances.

Hey, the USS Harvey Milk is once again available courtesy the DUI hire Hegseth. These things won't be be built for upwards of a dozen years. Plenty of time for future administrations to fix the ship names and do the funniest thing since we started naming ships.

With operations that concentrated the AAR's continued insistence that electrification is a complete impossibility becomes harder and harder to believe. With diesel/electric dual mode lashups or E-tenders to obviate the need for clearance improvements the case for electrification only gets stronger.

Die modernen Züge verdrecken die Bahnhöfe Einst plumpste das «Geschäft» von den Zügen direkt auf Schwellen und Schotter. Jetzt sind wir fast schon wieder so weit.

So the Swiss Federal Railways moved from retention toilets to 'bioreactor' units which seek to separate solid and liquid waste, then dispose of the liquid overboard at 'low speed'. Except it appears to not work, and, per the article, makes the stations stink.

www.infosperber.ch/wirtschaft/d...

I'd be very interested to hear how we're considering anything to be a cost overrun of another project. They're independent allocations of money with wholly separated DBOM contracts. HBLRT and the Riverline may be contemporaries, as political winds favored both, but their financing was not linked.

At the very least it'd make the Meridian Speedway live up to its name rather than the piddling, slow diesels we've saddled our rail system with today.

In theory they're counting on the loaded downhill-bound trains storing enough regenerated energy to power the empty trains back up to the mines. This will of course remain to be seen.

Electrification with wire would allow surplus energy to be used to power other grid users, including the mines.

Sishen–Saldanha railway line - Wikipedia

14 trains per day per their Wikipedia article. That should be more than enough to justify electrification. As for distance, so long as the Sishen–Saldanha line in South Africa exists, nobody really has any excuse to use distance as an excuse.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sishen%...

I was going to say the GM6C or GM10B, but I think they've been done in brass, or at least kitbashed. So instead the E25B. An awesome little 4000hp Bo-Bo road switcher which served their time in Texas before being ignominiously scrapped in the 2000s.

Gee, if only LI had a plant, maybe on the north shore, perhaps about halfway out on the island, that could make inordinate amounts of electricity regardless of weather and without requiring new natural gas pipelines. I'm sure the heating oil lobby wouldn't have killed that off, right?

It needs to be mentioned that freight trains are almost infinitely cleaner than trucking the same freight. But yes, absolutely, electrification is long past due. The AAR has hidden behind claims of high cost, both rolling stock and infrastructure, but tech has caught up and will bring down costs.

Ah yes, just another scene from a better future where the SP electrified the Sunset route between New Orleans and Los Angeles like they should have.

See, you can tell it's done with the Photoshop cause the wires are way too nice for anything Amtrak would actually run under.

We went through this with the Riverline, which was derided for costing "a billion dollars" when it was a decade-long Design-Build-Operate-Maintain contract for that amount. It unfortunately plays into the hands of the anti-access types to conflate DBOM awards with direct capital costs.

Also, the LIRR, MNRR, the lines south and east of London, Berlin, and Hamburg S-bahn, complete with their 1200vdc third rail. IMHO MNRR's Valhalla crash illustrates the danger of third rail in a grade crossing crash as it intruded into the passenger cabin and caused fatalities.