81–90 of 316 posts
Wow, I don't know why I thought there would be... Way, way more trains active at a given time. I suppose I overestimated passenger rail popularity in this country.. I knew it wasn't relatively huge, but there's several hundred miles in some cases between trains.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That would be a curious comparison point. I feel like every discussion of rail in the US always turns into pointing and laughing at how bad the US is at rail because it's viewed through a passenger lens, completely ignoring how much rail is used for freight. My impression is that a lot of the rest of the world has much better passenger rail, but uses freight rail quite a bit less. I wonder if part of it is due to the…
I assume it would be less about the dominance of passanger displacing freight and more about scale/distance. Germany is smaller than Texas (half the area). How often is it economical to put stuff on trains before loading them on trucks again for distances sub 1000km?
Europe does have more favourable rivers, so some bulk goods (grain, coal, fuel, chemicals) are transported by barge. Other freight can go by sea.
It would be cool to see an equivalent map for freight rail. These threads always focus on the lack of passenger rail service in the US but ignore that the US also has one of the largest, safest, and most efficient freight rail systems in the world[1]. I'd love to see it live! https://railroads.dot.gov/rail-network-development/freight-r...
I did a bit of a deep dive on this over the weekend and left feeling more confused than when I started. From what I can gather, outside of CN's holiday freight train, most of the tracking is done by community members with SDR antennas and Raspberry Pis. They report to centralized servers (which I've yet to find), and the data indicates where trains are in signalling blocks. I'm the least knowledgeable person on train…
https://traintimes.org.uk/map/tube/ https://traintimes.org.uk/map/tube/schematic/
Similar but for the London Undergroound: https://traintimes.org.uk/map/tube/ https://traintimes.org.uk/map/tube/schematic/
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That would be a curious comparison point. I feel like every discussion of rail in the US always turns into pointing and laughing at how bad the US is at rail because it's viewed through a passenger lens, completely ignoring how much rail is used for freight. My impression is that a lot of the rest of the world has much better passenger rail, but uses freight rail quite a bit less. I wonder if part of it is due to the…
I assume it would be less about the dominance of passanger displacing freight and more about scale/distance. Germany is smaller than Texas (half the area). How often is it economical to put stuff on trains before loading them on trucks again for distances sub 1000km?
My curiosity is if the US has just traded off having better passenger rail for better freight rail, and if that's maybe a somewhat environmentally justified choice. How much more freight is going by truck in Europe because of the bias towards rail for passengers, and how does that compare to US people traveling by car when train would be better?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Acela isn't HSR, and Metroliner which came before had travel times from NYC to DC as low as 2.5 hours. Acela does the same trip in 3.5 hours. Metroliner lowered trip times primarily through faster acceleration.
By any definition but yours Acela is indeed HSR, it’s the fucking fastest train in North America!
Leaflet makes this incredibly simple; just add the suggested text to the attribution field when you initialize the layers:
L.tileLayer('https://{s}.basemaps.cartocdn.com/light_all/{z}/{x}/{y}{r}.png', {
maxZoom: 19,
attribution: '' // here!
}).addTo(map);
var railwayOverlay = L.tileLayer('https://{s}.tiles.openrailwaymap.org/standard/{z}/{x}/{y}.png', {
attribution: '', // and here!
}).addTo(map);
[1]: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OpenRailwayMap/API
[2]: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1P7bhSE-N9iegI398QYDjKeVhnbS... via https://carto.com/legal