Uday Schultz

A lot has happened to PATH in the past 25 years -- 9/11, major construction work, COVID, etc. But consistent across all of these events have been ensuing reductions in off-pk service levels: since 2005, the number of PATH trips crossing the Hudson on Saturdays has fallen by *50%*

every time I see the mothballed spans over the calumet and read about colehour-area shenanigans a little part of me dies

passenger trains!

touche

Obviously a lot of the double track in the above was in the wrong places; "retvrn" here is the wrong takeaway. Nevertheless, our failure to do as much of the "intensify" in the "shrink-and-intensify" strategy that characterized a lot of postwar rail planning across the globe continues to harm us!

You really begin to see the divergence between the US and everywhere else when you compare this map (18% double track, 1950) to Italy, where about 26% of the network was double track in 1956.

Also gulf coast access. UP’s (relative) lock on that market hobbles competition for high-value traffic, and is at the heart of a lot of shipper distaste for mergers

Much more, yes. But even there, the focus was very much the "X" and much less any N-S freight flow

Also potentially an opportunity to do some honest to god freight planning and reroute some traffic that currently uses CHI-STL either away from Chicago entirely or away from the pax line. Having the fmr. wabash in the picture helps!

(decatur-KC line here)

Heh, yes. I mean if anything CPKC's recent IT SNAFUs are the single largest reason to believe this will remain vaporware.

really speaking there are only two possible outcomes:
- NS + UP / BNSF + CSX (my pref, solely for network balance reasons)
- CSX + UP / BNSF + NS

I don't see a world in which one pair merges and the other doesn't as being realistic, nor do I think either Canadian road will get involved

This, of course, is an issue that has been recognized as important at several points thru the history of American railroading. In the 20s, our federal gov't even put together plans for system groupings! But we eventually chose a wildly different approach to rail regs

Literally this! Like even if you assume railroads are perfectly rational (lol), cuts/mergers took place within each individual railroads' contingent set of constraints/incentives, absent any facility that represented the public interest or the general health of the industry

bsky.app/profile/mrbt...

Strongly agree w this. As ever, the choice not to pursue more intentional network planning meant we got waves of consolidation mergers (to reduce duplication) followed by expansion mergers (to increase access) without ~any thought about the synergies/interferences btwn each

bsky.app/profile/gwol...

Efficiency and the Decline of American Freight Railroads Over the last two years, the crisis of America’s supply chains, the push to expand public passenger rail service, and the urgency of the climate crisis have put America’s freight railroads in the l…

For those of you who want to dive in more, some of my past writings on railroads’ peculiar blend of metric design, coordination, and business strategy problems:

homesignalblog.wordpress.com/2021/12/27/e...

homesignalblog.wordpress.com/2023/07/18/c...

homesignalblog.wordpress.com/2025/05/11/w...

The caveats here:
- The set of regulatory conditions imposed will matter immensely for how well or poorly this plays out
- For ~120 years, the primary target of railroad management has been *productivity.* This blinkered focus may be just as corrosive in a big network as in the current one.

At a high level, this is a good thing. Railroads suffer massively from the friction inherent to carrier handoffs. Mergers can mitigate that, potentially opening new markets and allowing more effective competition w already continent-spanning trucking companies.

Unclear! Advocacy space doesn’t see much ops discourse in the states, but agencies definitely have some awareness of the issues

Huh! Glad to hear that’s the case, the ridership data made it look like the profile was much more overwhelmingly feeder-y.

Also, for those of you who might be interested: I do plan to upload my code for these analyses, just need to clean it up.

As @chittimarco.bsky.social and others have been saying for a while, it’s time for us to start thinking in greater *operational* detail about how our planning of streets and bus timetables ramifies our ability to achieve policy goals!

How a Bus Route Falls Apart All opinions in this post are solely my own, and do not represent the positions of my employer or any organizations of which I am part. About two months ago, I found myself waiting for a 77 bus in …

A few months ago, I paid a visit to Boston and spent some quality time with the MBTA’s bus service. After spending a while digging through T’s (excellent) open data, I had some Thoughts to share about the experience—and bus operations in general.

homesignalblog.wordpress.com/2025/06/29/h...

I'm in!

Feels like there's an excellent operations research project to be undertaken looking just at terminal ops on Amtrak

I think a lot about that quote from one of the MWRRS studies you posted way back when on twitter that was to the effect of "we initially modeled this intercity expansion with Euro ops costs, but then were bullied into doubling costs to match Amtrak's"

the above is whole day -- and in fact the top few blocks there are all evenings

the outlier effect at the block level is...high cc @zmapper.bsky.social

indeed. don’t know enough about the timetables offhand to say but the “start off behind and stay behind” thing can definitely appear in the Ts network due to short recoveries

(final timepoint in each direction excluded due to data quality issues; gap is defined consistent with MBTA performance metrics for frequent routes, so scheduled headway + 3 mins)

A heatmap of service gaps by trip for the MBTA's 77 bus. Extremely high levels of variability are visible.

A heatmap of service gaps by trip for the MBTA's 66 bus. Extremely high levels of variability are visible.

Going to publish a much longer look at bus operations soon, but it is just _incredible_ how significant the trip-level effects on performance are, even on fairly frequent routes. Two examples from the MBTA's network: