by page 122 of _Metropolitan Corridors_

It has already become clear that railroads and associated industry intentionally caused sprawl for exactly the same reasons the automobile did/does (cheap land, isolate workers so you can exploit them more, avoid pushback when engaging in noxious activities, room to grow) and the whole congestion of railroads problem was even worse than I had imagined.

Something history something doomed.

ETA: You know I should have expected this. Obviously, power generating plants that burned coal wanted to take delivery via water if at all possible (cheapest), but the places that burn coal for heat also have waterways that freeze, which means they had to do icebreaking, particularly if the canal operator didn't otherwise bother. Sometimes they were stuck shipping the coal by rail, which cost a bit more but was more resilient in the face of bad weather, but still subject to floods, wrecks, congestion. All well and good. Here's the bit I should have seen coming:

According to one Dixon, writing in a 1906 Engineering Magazine article (one in series), when a coal miners' strike made it difficult to get coal "it is the practice of the railroads to seize all the coal they dare, which is on their tracks, for their own use; and while such coal is ultimately paid for, coal at such a time is the most precious jewel of the power plant."

It's little details like these that get passed over in too-short summaries of commodity price theory.

ETAYA: Fascinated by cap and trade?

One C.H. Benjamin writing in Cassier's Magazine (R. recognized Cassier because he was an electrical engineer) in 1907 on the subject of the aesthetics and pragmatics of smoke in the industrial zone:

"Plumes of black smoke wreathing the tops of the stacks were badges of industry, and more smoke meant more work" : so in the beginning, pollution = prosperity, more is better. Then reformers got pissy about the smoke as bituminous coal was more commonly used. The reformers didn't make much headway at first, until the engineers figured out that, "It may as well be understood first as last that smoke abatement becomes a commercial reality when it saves fuel, and not till then."

Climate legislation should, like cap and trade for acid rain, provide the incentive for smart people to go out and figure out ways to make more money by polluting less. They always complain at the beginning, so they will again this time. But when they tell you they'll go broke? Yeah, laugh.

cool diagram of Amtrak service

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/3/3c/Amtrak_schematic3.png

This is _so_ well executed that it includes the discontinuity between North and South Station in Boston really, really clearly. Thruway routes even are shown where they supplement rail -- there's a black line through the red Cascades route, for example, because it only serves north to BC twice a day, but Thruway is available more often for people who want to start the Cascades route from BC the other times Cascades leaves from Seattle south.

I am _really_ impressed.

modes by energy intensity

http://www.bts.gov/publications/national_transportation_statistics/html/table_04_20.html

I don't know if I believe this. The clear implication is that if we _really_ wanted to reduce our energy intensity, we'd all be riding motorcycles.

ETA: I've concluded that I absolutely do not believe this. I don't see how they can possibly _have_ btu per passenger mile for cars; the data does not exist, and in fact I question whether there can exist any reasonable approximation to the data. I can think of a variety of assumptions that could swing it by a factor of 3-5 depending on what you assumed. The data _does_ exist for airplanes after one date (when they started keeping passenger lists) and only much later for trains (late 1990s, IIRC). And that's assuming they are using that data, which is pretty damn questionable.

you've heard of overnight trains

The most popular Amtrak route with an overnight is the Empire Builder.

R. remembered a bus in years gone by that trundled up and down the west coast (maybe a turtle bus? possibly an ancestor of Green Tortoise hostel operations?) that was a sleep-while-they-drive. Here's a contemporary overnight bus:

http://jezsik.blogspot.com/2009/03/overnight-bus-to-kunming.html

Over course there are lots of buses that travel by night without berths, where you sleep in your seat. I was specifically looking for bunks.

infrastructure funding

I have an extremely serendipitous style of researching (google is my friend); I skip around a lot and hope that eventually a coherent idea of the topic area will emerge. I still feel like that hasn't happened with the train stuff, but I can tell, objectively, that I must be learning a lot. That diagram, for example, makes a lot of sense to me, an artifact of reading the _Transit Maps of the World_ book, and knowing a fair amount about routing and about the bus extensions, and abandoned rights-of-way. Further, knowing that Amtrak runs partly on roads it owns, partly on roads owned by various states and mostly on freight lines has clarified a lot of why things were the way they were and are starting to be very different.

There are some extremely widely held ideas about what kinds of rail travel are viable. At this point, everyone recognizes that the Northeast is a reasonable place for trains; passenger rail has been so successful that the best efforts of a wide variety of individuals and interests with widely variant motivations were unable to kill it off entirely or even to privatize it (altho goddess knows they gave it their best shot). This is sort of amazing, given that Amtrak's mission was never commuter rail per se -- that was preserved by the individual railroad companies for themselves. They handed over the national passenger network. It should not be surprising that Amtrak's current success is attributable largely to a focus on commuter lines (albeit inter-city commutes aka exurban commuters, and a fair amount of people commuting via rail to where they work for state government from where they live: Sacramento to SF, Albany to NYC, Seattle to Olympia? Don't know about that last one, actually) and a removal of the _mandate_ to maintain a national network.

It shouldn't be surprising, but it is.

What's really interesting is digging through the breakdown by state Amtrak info (State Fact Sheets, click on News & Media on the bottom of the page at Amtrak's web site) it becomes clear that Amtrak is _not_ funding the new cars, additional sidings, etc. that is making those train commutes possible. I first noticed that Vermont owned track and maintained it. Then R. said Illinois maintained track, and now it's looking like a _lot_ of states have taken over track. The amount of money that the State of Washington is plowing into Amtrak Cascades compared to the amount of money put in by the federal government is eye-popping. Compared to asphalt roads, still tiny (roughly a 2 latte a year habit for everyone living in the state, unless I screwed up the math in my head).

So if you live somewhere and you're trying to figure out why trains aren't being developed on lines that you think would be wildly popular for commuters, especially lines that could serve several small cities and/or large towns and shift exurban people from cars to trains? The blame should probably go to your state government. Because where it's working, it's not the feds making it happen. And it _definitely_ isn't the freight railroads going out of their way to be helpful. Quite the contrary.

Oh, and rail bloggers who screed about how Amtrak isn't restoring service from New Orleans to Florida? Amtrak isn't restoring service _anywhere_, unless a state government is willing to fund that service as well -- to the tune of 5-10X the amount of money, committed over a period of at least a decade.