questions and observations

It seems so unimportant, and yet I just can't let it go. Did science fiction grow out of the railroad/railway fiction genre? I didn't even know there _was_ a railroad/railway fiction genre, but the brief snippets of description I've seen sound enticingly like a predecessor.

Interesting and probably salient bit o' info: it was _really_ hard for the California -> east leg of the first transcontinental railroad to hire laborers, well, actually, it was easy to hire and tough to keep 'em, because they'd use it as an opportunity to get close to the Comstock Lode and then hike over the ridge to stake a mining claim. The reason why so many Chinese laborers were hired? The mining camps wouldn't let the Chinese in until it was more or less played out.

Did GM _really_ instigate depreciation rules in modern accounting/tax treatment? Or were they just a big early participant? And was this an explicitly anti-railroad thing, or was that just boneheaded regulators focused on the short term gain?

How common was it to name boats (especially smaller ones) after fictional characters in the 19th century (ran across the Artful Dodger delivering the first locomotive to California -- I'm assuming this is a Dickens reference, but perhaps I am wrong)? Is it still common?

rail on interstates

http://www.carfree.com/papers/interstaterail.html

I've been doing all this train research as a result of a bunch of people saying Trains! when talking about peak oil, climate change, blah, blah, bleeping, blah. Usually, it goes something like this: walk, bike, take public transit -- no, not buses, trains! Because all us white folk hate buses, but we love trains.

I dunno. I've ridden trains (in the US, Canada, the Netherlands and France). I've ridden slow trains, fast trains, commuter rail, overnight trains. I kinda like trains, but I see a really big dislocation going from driving on interstates to riding on trains. Obviously, a lot of freight has already made the switch, and some people are as well. And trains exist as trams and trolleys and so forth. But I keep thinking about that massive installed base of roads we have and scratching my head about how every time we get crap off those roads it's going to induce demand because a lot of people with the money for a Volt or whatever are going to look at that empty road and go, geez, I'll have so much more freedom if I can bring my non-human-powered-ground-transport with me.

Road diets can only get you so far.

I had been thinking, I wonder if you could use the interstates for trains, but the more I read about grades for rail vs. grades for cars, the more concerned I was. But still...

It took me a little while to find this thing via google, but have at it. Obviously, as J.H. Crawford notes, this is only conceptual. But it's conceptual with a lot of the obvious details worked out. I'd love your opinion, informed or otherwise.

trains on interstates, commentary

Having contemplated this briefly, I see some problems, by no means insuperable.

First, I think he's thinking those cars can be wider than they really can be. If you really put a Jersey barrier between the train-lane and the car lane(s), and don't put the Jersey barrier entirely within the car lane (which I guess you could), he's allowing less than 12 inches of clearance between the edges of the lane and the car bodies. Tractor trailers are the same width as railroad cars (more or less) and they feel like they pretty thoroughly occupy a lane. Having something 2 feet wider than that zooming by next to you at 100 mph seems...not entirely safe.

In any event, the history of attempts to use other than standard gauge is not the sort of thing to inspire one to attempt doing anything other than standard gauge, as appalling as that is. OTOH, if you _really were_ to convert the entire interstate highway system to this thing, you'd probably have put down so damn many miles of the new gauge that it might actually have a real chance of dislodging standard. I don't know.

Second, I think for a laundry list of reasons (several of which he enumerates) this isn't a great cargo/freight system. If you treat it as a passenger + light/high value cargo (like FedEx/UPS/USPS, anything you might contemplating sending as air freight), most of those problems go away.

Third, I think he has skipped right over a couple of severe problems. One is what do you do if you want to, say, go from Las Vegas to Seattle. You're really going to make everyone doing that get off of one train and onto a second? Really? Because you think you can avoid swapping cars around this way? All right. Does that then mean when you're running a through train Boston to Seattle on I-90 you're really going to run that many empties through the big empty of South Dakota and Montana?

Really, I think what would happen is you'd do your absolute damndest to make sure that all your facilities for re-arranging the cars that make up your trains happen OUTSIDE of major cities. Not necessarily a long way outside of major cities, just far enough out in the burbs to avoid trouble. The downside is that everywhere there is a junction of two interstates (which is where you really want to make it possible for through passengers to switch from one interstate to another without getting out of their nice, warm sleeping compartment, navigating a cold platform station and getting onto another train and settled into another sleeping compartment. While still sleeping it off from a long weekend in Vegas.), there is also a mall and similar development. I still think it can be made to work, especially if you initially focus on getting the freight cars and the sleeping cars through the junctions without forcing stuff on and off cars. At night.

Fourth, 100 MPH sounds really fast, but if you're really stopping at all those overpass stations, you're never going to get up to that speed. Like the Northeast Corridor, you'll probably be running some stop-little (express) and some stop-a-lot (local). How do you manage that?

I think here, you just plan on taking over more lanes: the innermost lane is the through/stops-a-little one, and the outermost is the local/stops-everywhere one and there may or may not be more in between those two and possibly the ability to switch from one lane to another. Major signaling stuff required, but probably worth it and no worse than tractor trailers passing each other. Probably.

Fifth, and probably most important, if you really are going to run any cargo/small-box containers on this system, how do you get them on and off? Any vision of a simple platform at the overpass with a minimalist elevator for ADA + stairs for everyone else gets shot all to hell and gone when you start needing hoists to get containers on and off. (I'm ignoring the how do you deal with bursty traffic, because I'll allow an assumption of a really sophisticated web-oriented dispatch system so stuff only shows up when there is space for it ready to go. It won't really work, but hey. I'll humor him.)

I think all of these are solvable. But I think they all involve the nasty unpleasantness of actually having stations, switching yards and dealing with making up trains. The good news is, there are going to be a lot of big parking lots available for this purpose in the world he's imagining.

how not to write about trains

http://webspace.webring.com/people/bk/king5021/

Words fail. Okay, here are a few anyway.

In the section that lists the various high speed corridors, the corridors are listed by name, and words like:

"Pacific Northwest Corridor (with stops in Eugene and Portland, Ore., Tacoma and Seattle, Wash., and Vancouver, British Columbia);"

What a useless piece of shit that would be. It should be written more like:

"Major cities served: Eugene and Porland, OR, Tacoma and Seattle, WA, and Vancouver, BC"

That at least is a close match to the Federal language at:

http://www.fra.dot.gov/us/content/645

Obviously, this would not be useful service if it didn't stop in places like Everett, to name only one. We know they mean for there to be more stops than cities, based on the description of the Northeast Corridor, which already exists with high speed service:

http://www.fra.dot.gov/us/content/643

But far more irritating is the focus on cars/GM are evil for engaging in monopolistic/anticompetitive practices. Because if the history of rail tells us one thing, it tells us that railroads do that, too. A lot.