Recent content by Joel N. Weber II

It would be interesting to ask what people think National Park Service funding is at that point, too. I think the chances that more than 50% of the automobiles sold in 2020 will run entirely off batteries are far better than the chances that by 2020 you could move 25% (or even 10%) of the...

Aside from money from Congress, what is preventing Amtrak from observing the state of the trees on adjacent properties, and sending letters to the adjacent property owners expressing Amtrak's concerns about the possibility of the trees falling onto Amtrak's tracks, and Amtrak offering to cover...

Do you figure the votes of the Senators from Connecticut will have any effect on what gets built?

In looking at Google Maps, I'm wondering if this might be a viable high speed route from Trenton to downtown Philadelphia: Follow the existing track from the Trenton platforms to the vicinity of the yard in Pennsylvania that NJT uses for overnight layovers for the Trenton trains; this is close...

Sure. But if a catenary outage could be isolated to something like 5, 10, or 20 miles, I'm wondering if it would be possible to put enough batteries in a locomotive to get past an outage like this. A Nissan Leaf which will go on sale in about four months can go 100 miles on batteries and isn't...

Especially when we consider the travelers willing to buy the more expensive seats, though, will people originating in Harrisburg and Lancaster prefer to fly to some other airline's hub if they can take a one hour flight to some other hub instead of a three hour train ride to Newark Airport? Do...

How long is it likely to take before BNSF finds that they cannot economically maintain the existing rail to 40 MPH freight standards, and what will they do at that point?

How many miles of catenary were de-energized as a result of this?

How time competitive is Chicago - Madison going to be with flying? (On the other hand, at least in the first few months of Lynchburg Northeast Regional service, three of its top 5 city pairs were WAS - Virginia, and the other two were NYP - Virginia. NYP - Virginia is significantly more than...

Sure, but do those fuel taxes on that shipping cover 100% of the cost of the wear and tear on the roads? Or is it something less than 100%? The other thing that will be very interesting to watch over the next few years is whether battery powered cars prompt a shift away from user fees to fund...

That seems quite reasonable, with the 30th Street Station to Newark Airport train time being a minute or two over an hour. (It would be nice if the Northeast Regional would stop at the terminal instead of having the AirTrain transfer, but there's not much that can easily be done about that at...

I'm not sure what the rules are on the railroad frequencies, but on some non-railroad bands, the FCC requires transmitting stations to identify themselves, and Morse code has traditionally been an accepted way to do that identification. It may be that defect detectors that are old enough to...

I wonder if Google Street View and Amtrak could work something out for Google Street View to have twice daily images along the routes with daily service in each direction in a way that would be profitable for Amtrak. (Of course, this might involve cab cameras in P42s and not refurbished...

When the discussion of Amtrak and dome cars comes up, there's typically the argument that at least some believe that Amtrak is supposed to be a cost effective provider of transportation from point A to point B, and some believe that using federal Amtrak subsidies for providing more than a...

If you follow that argument too far, you might start thinking that abandoned railroad rights of way should be converted into residential real estate, which a few decades later you might not be so thrilled about when you find yourself wishing there was a cost effective place to build track...