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Dolly Parton's Dollywood Express

thetransitguy.substack.com

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Re: Dolly Parton's Dollywood Express

#91

Post by WorldMaker »

bell-cot wrote: post #44
jancsika wrote: post #35

In real life freight trains have the right of way in the U.S. In other words, the Dollywood Express would be a lot less fun if it spent half the day waiting while trolls unload corndogs from two-person handcars randomly distributed along the track.

Back in the day, America's RR's ran their own passenger services (no Amtrak), on their own track, and generally gave right-of-way to the passengers. They got out of that business because it was losing ridership and money.

When they started getting rid of passenger service had a lot less to do with losing ridership and money and lot more that cargo contracts paid a lot more and with a lot more regularity. The "Robber Barons" get that nickname for a lot of reasons, but one of them was using public land and eminent domain tactics under the "public utility" excuse of providing passenger service for a time for an area, while negotiating for the shortest possible passenger service requirements and the least possible public oversight of their use of once public land, because they knew all along the real, big money was in cargo. A lot of passenger services ended to the day of passenger service requirements contracts ending, even if they were profitable and had high ridership.

The scam was in from the beginning. The car helped exacerbate the problem and the train companies made big fusses about all the lost ridership to the car, as things went along, but even at the beginning a lot of the US rail companies were built on the knowledge that cargo was lucrative and passenger travel the necessary trojan horse to pickup land for cheap.

Re: Dolly Parton's Dollywood Express

#92

Post by Exoristos »

danans wrote: post #82

> I love Disney and I love Dolly Parton, but it says something deeply broken about our national priorities when their theme park trains outclass public infrastructure in billion-dollar economies. Be serious Reducing public transit to an unserious/unreal thing is the point. People who live in car-bound places (most of America) visit theme parks like Disney's where a big part of the novelty is the make-believe urban wa…

Main Street's "make-believe urban walkability and transit" represent all American towns of the pre–Henry Ford era. American families with roots here are well aware of this. Or people who browse classic American literature or film. In fact, I'm straining to think who besides yourself might think ubiquitous American rail and walkways were imaginary.

Re: Dolly Parton's Dollywood Express

#93

Post by pythonaut_16 »

benterix wrote: post #24
flippyhead wrote: post #3

> Dollywood Express, the heritage steam train that operates within Dollywood, has a higher rail ridership than 27 states. I don't now if it's useful, but this way of putting quanties in context, would be neat to see about all kinds of things. Like how they seem to always do rare things compared to your chance of getting hit by lightning.

I believe the point of the whole article is that the public transportation is broken if a train in a theme park has more users than regular trains in many states.

I'm pro public transit and trains, but the stat has more shock value than actual logic.

What's feasible for a theme park doesn't necessarily extrapolate to public transit.

Re: Dolly Parton's Dollywood Express

#94

Post by ethbr1 »

danans wrote: post #82

> I love Disney and I love Dolly Parton, but it says something deeply broken about our national priorities when their theme park trains outclass public infrastructure in billion-dollar economies. Be serious Reducing public transit to an unserious/unreal thing is the point. People who live in car-bound places (most of America) visit theme parks like Disney's where a big part of the novelty is the make-believe urban wa…

Related: Chaumont-Sur-Loire [0] and Chenonceau [1] are both absolutely gorgeous in person, especially when everything is in bloom, and less than 3 hours drive from Paris. (Or train, since it's a civilized country)

Would highly recommend a château trip down the Loire valley over Disney. ;)

And if you really need a faux fix, there's always Mini Castle Park [2] near Amboise...

[0] https://domaine-chaumont.fr/en

[1] https://www.chenonceau.com/en/

[2] https://www.parcminichateaux.com/

PS: Yes, I know Neuschwanstein, but haven't made it to Bavaria yet. On the list!

Re: Dolly Parton's Dollywood Express

#95

Post by hollywood_court »

esseph wrote: post #89
shortformblog wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We know how to change a damn tire. We just couldn’t easily buy one because Gatlinburg didn’t have any garages open on Sunday morning.

A very large portion of the country doesn't have garages open on Sunday.

In the US, I've only lived in Chicago, Portland (OR), San Francisco, Dallas, NYC, and Auburn, but I don't think I have ever seen an automobile garage open on a Sunday unless it was a WalMart, Sam's, or Costco.

Re: Dolly Parton's Dollywood Express

#96

Post by TimTheTinker »

conception wrote: post #21
chrisco255 wrote: post #20

Dollywood is great, but unfortunately the article gradually shifts into bashing Tennessee and America for not using enough passenger rail. That train left the station a long time ago. Car ownership is very high, sprawl is very high. We do not have urban cores with the same density or concentration of business districts as European or Asian cities. Most of the time buses make more sense for public transportation in Am…

Best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, etc etc.

OP wasn't making a shallow excuse. But this rebuttal does lack nuance :)

The overlapping network effects OP mentioned of how modern metropolises were built, combined with modern bureaucracy, make widespread passenger rail an exceedingly difficult political and economic proposal - far more difficult than it would have been 100 or even 50 years ago.

I'm sure others have mentioned this here, but look at how high-speed rail in California is faring for a good example of the political difficulty involved. The legal hurdles, environmental reports, back-and-forth bargaining between varying levels of government, the NGOs that need to be called in and paid a lot... it's not at all easy. And that's before you get to the structural mismatch between widespread rail transport and all the network effects that led to car culture.

Perhaps Tennessee can fare better due to it being a comparatively very conservative state (which currently codes as having less regulatory burden). But I'm not holding out hope.

Re: Dolly Parton's Dollywood Express

#97

Post by benji-york »

siver_john wrote: post #30
chrisco255 wrote: post #20

Dollywood is great, but unfortunately the article gradually shifts into bashing Tennessee and America for not using enough passenger rail. That train left the station a long time ago. Car ownership is very high, sprawl is very high. We do not have urban cores with the same density or concentration of business districts as European or Asian cities. Most of the time buses make more sense for public transportation in Am…

I mean the passenger train from Lebanon, TN to Nashville, TN is quite busy. I rode it over a decade ago and it was quite used and my partner rides it now and it is much the same. If it still ran at night like it did back then, I'd probably take it into downtown (and go downtown more often) for events. I don't believe the train left the station a long time ago, we just simply shifted it off the tracks.

> I mean the passenger train from Lebanon, TN to Nashville, TN is quite busy.

From the article:

> Outside of Amtrak’s once-daily City of New Orleans, Tennessee has only three rail transit systems (two of which are currently suspended). That leaves just the WeGo Star in Nashville, which is among the lowest-ridership commuter rail lines in the country.

Re: Dolly Parton's Dollywood Express

#98

Post by ethbr1 »

shortformblog wrote: post #39

The irony being, of course, that it is surrounded by an area where it is basically impossible to get by without a car. My wife and I once left Gatlinburg after a week there and our tire blew out on the way out of town. It was a Sunday morning. Literally our only option to get it replaced that day was a Walmart location 15 miles away. So we had to wait for AAA for an hour and a half to tell us we were stuck using a do…

Minor observation: you were in east TN, so chances are if you'd stood by your car with your thumb out, the next car would have stopped and happily offered you a ride to Walmart. (Said as someone who's hauled more than a few random people where they needed to get to in east TN)

Part of Tennessee's charm is how far you can get with a smile and "Gosh, I hate to bother you, but could you..."

Re: Dolly Parton's Dollywood Express

#99

Post by WorldMaker »

pizzathyme wrote: post #43
conception wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, etc etc.

Is the suggestion here to build more subways/rails? The problem is that more rails would not be useful because there is lower density in the US. Denmark is 141 persons/km^2, whereas the U.S. is about 36 person(census data). Even if you built train lines everywhere outside urban areas, any stop you step off at would still require a 20 minute drive to get to where you are going.

Density follows infrastructure more than infrastructure follows density. Building a station in a place is more likely to spring up new businesses (and residences) around it. It's not a guarantee and there are a lot of variables in play, but the same reason train stations wouldn't remain "20 minute drive to get to where you are going" are basically the same reasons on average most Interstate stops aren't "20 minute drive to get to where you are going" either.

The density map of the US already resembles the US highway map. Many of the few pockets that don't are explainable with old passenger train maps overlaid on top of that.

Just adding passenger train-only routes on top of existing interstate highways, stopping only at existing exits, would go a long way to service a lot of the US population. It would also presumably spur more walkability efforts at a number of those exits if it was also a passenger train stop.

Re: Dolly Parton's Dollywood Express

#100

Post by ethbr1 »

hollywood_court wrote: post #66
shortformblog wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem was less that we had to replace it and more that it was a fairly significant distance away. (A distance made longer because we weren’t on the freeway but heavily trafficked roads in a tourist-heavy area.) We were near downtown Gatlinburg, and there were places that were closer, but they were all closed because it was a Sunday. We also would have had a better shot at not having our tire blow out if the clo…

15 miles is nothing on a spare tire. I'm not sure how many poor people you've spent time around, but I regularly see Nissan sedans driving around with multiple spare donuts on them. For some reason, it's always a Nissan.

Nissan's been making minimum cost models for awhile*, that are just reliable enough to stay rolling.

Ergo, if you want the cheapest car you can get, it'll probably be a Nissan.

* Before the late-10s Renault–Nissan–Mitsubishi insanity

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