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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...

Warren Buffett's letter in the 2009 Berkshire Hathaway annual report ends with ``P.S. Come by rail'', the last paragraph of the letter being about their annual meeting. (This is on the 22nd page of the pdf, which has page number 20 printed within the page.) I don't see any explicit mention of...

Wikipedia's Wind farm article says: To get an idea of the size of a large blade used in an offshore wind farm, I looked at Wikipedia's Cape Wind article, which claims the blade diameter for that project will be 364 feet. Consider a railroad car 400 feet long, on a track with a curve with a...

When the Boston and Providence railroad was built, I suspect its designers weren't planning for the day some parts of it would support 150 MPH operation, as the Acela achieves on that right of way today. Does the California HSR alignment have any long straight sections that have the potential...

The long range plan for Downeaster expansion includes service to Brunswick, and to Auburn, with the Auburn branch potentially extended to Montreal. But I don't see any proposals for service to Bangor. Is there a viable track route to connect Portland to Bangor? Who owns the track from...

This pdf has some information about the battery pack used in the Tesla Roadster. The battery pack itself weighs about 450 kg/1000 pounds; the Wikipedia article claims the entire car weighs 2723 pounds, which makes the battery pack a bit more than 1/3 of the car's weight. The range of a...

When are we going to start seeing transit buses and school buses powered by the same type of battery system a Tesla Roadster runs on? I get the impression that if you can charge the bus at night and for an hour or two at mid-day, most transit and school buses need an awful lot less than the...

The MBTA is apparently in the process of designing the Type 9 Green Line cars. (I haven't quite figured out why they don't just buy more Type 8 cars.) I think their basic goal is to get a different manufacturer to design something that behaves about the way a Type 8 is supposed to, but I've...

The FRA's set of designated ``High Speed Rail'' (by which they mean 110 MPH or better on at least a short stretch) corridors includes Boston to Montreal. I don't think well maintained conventional speed track on that route is a terribly good way to get from Boston to Montreal. It would...

In Portland on Saturday, we saw a spare Amfleet coach parked, presumably there so it could be swapped into the Downeaster if one of the Downeaster trainsets had a coach that needed to be swapped out unexpectedly. Given that the spare coach is unlikely to carry many revenue passengers in any...

Wikipedia's First class travel article claims: I mentioned this to someone who was skeptical that Japanese employment laws would really allow this degree of sexist hiring, and suggested this part of Wikipedia might have been carelessly researched/written. Has anyone here spent enough time in...

Let's hypothetically assume that the issues with coupling one Acela trainset to another could be resolved to the point where they could be run together at 150 MPH, to allow for longer Acela trains without needing longer maintenance facilities. (I've previously suggested that a possible way to...

As far as I know, neither Amtrak nor Congress is making any plans for a Superliner III order. However, I think it's interesting to think about what new services we won't be getting if there are no Superliner III cars anytime soon. If Congress did hypothetically decide to buy Amtrak 300...

There are statistics readily available for the number of deaths per billion train and airplane passenger miles. Something I'm curious about is whether I can directly to determine whether I would be safer traveling 1000 miles on Amtrak or 1000 miles on an airplane by looking at those statistics...

The Tesla Model S, in its higher battery capacity version, is expected to be $65,000 with a 300 mile range battery. That may be as much as $45,000 more than a similar gasoline powered car. If the buyer has to amortize that $45,000 over 100,000 miles, that's $.45 per mile in extra costs for a...

GM Considers Shutting Factories for Nine Weeks If GM then goes bankrupt, is that temporary factory shutdown going to remind us of MBTA Arborway service and the eastern part of the Sunset Limited?

One of the big news stories today has been that the EPA has decided that greenhouse gas emissions are a problem that needs to be dealt with. Here's one news story on the subject. Are we likely to see some or all of Amtrak's diesel routes electrified as part of cutting down on greenhouse gas...

Back when the Metroliner passenger cars were EMUs with powered axles, were all of the axles powered? What fraction of a total Metroliner trainset's weight was sitting on powered axles, vs what fraction of an Acela trainset's weight sits on the powered axles?

I believe somewhere I came across a book (possibly Stewart Brand's How Buildings Learn, but I might be completely misremembering) that claimed that people in wheelchairs generally would prefer ramps to elevators. Meanwhile, the MBTA's major project to retrofit accessibility into stations seems...

I get the impression that the current industry practice in the US is that one facility for transfering intermodal shipping containers between rail and trucks within any given circle with a diameter of 100 miles is generally considered plenty. I've been wondering if a much greater density of...