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POPULATION ALONE DOES NOT SOLELY TRANSLATE TO HOW SUCCESSFUL PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION WILL BE! Practice Safe CSX Evidence to support this position is ample in the greater Los Angeles California area. :D Metro Detroit --- 1104 people per square mile San Francisco Bay Area ----- 1065 per square mile Gre...

MQT1223 wrote:Sorry. I just forget where I am typing this stuff sometimes.

"edit post" is your friend, always wise to improve a post when possible.

Remember when a bunch of military bases got shut down a few years ago? BRAC (Base Realignment and Closure). The flipside was other bases got more important, and Selfridge was one of them. It now has a major Gnomeland Security operation there, much too "hot" to let the museum train trundle through. O...

When containers plug into ships, they usually use 480 volt AC 3-phase. This is the standard industrial power drop in the U.S. and any utility can provide it anywhere except residential and very rural areas. So it's quite possible those containers sitting around Chicago are plugged in to "house power...

I would truly love to see the RS1's saved but the ugly truth is they are worth far more as scrap. Worth more hauling 12 coaches full of Ann Arbor fans. Figure $39 a pop, 80 seats per coach, do the math. ...and also word coming from a few solid sources that good old #20 might need to leave Shepard, ...

Sure, you'd expect people to hold a grudge about that, i"m only saying that NS does not appear to. About 10 years ago they donated something like 3000 ties contingent on prompt pickup at trackside. SMRS dropped the ball and didn't pick them up, so NS moved half of them to a depot location, and were ...

This may come across as ignorant, but I'm assuming that the penut allergy is a self reporting policy. Why even bother to report that the kid has the allergy? He gets a to ride, odds are he won't have an issue, and if he does most responsible people are prepared for such a situation by themselves if...

A side note on the diamond, the story I heard from someone involved in the SMRS at one point was that a group of the members found out about an NS OCS going through on the wabash line and decided it would be a good idea to take a bunch of speeders down and wave in order to try and get ns to let the...

In 1998 they had a gigantic 10,000 person rally up in Humboldt county, California. Thousands of people camped onsite. When I got there, the choices were slim except for some lovely spots on the beach of the Eel River. This time of year, the Eel was barely a creek by Michigan standards, and you could...

Saturday April 5, the Southern Michigan Railroad (the heritage railway in Clinton) is doing a training/orientation. If you've wanted to volunteer and have a lot of fun with real trains and a good crew, it's a great opportunity. It's also a good time to get on the engineer track, as you could be full...

No, self serving. If they don't paint over the reporting marks, it takes longer for the car owner to paint over their vandalism (it isn't art). Yup. The car can't interchange with defective reporting marks. If the tagger paints over em, the next shop HAS to paint em back on. There's a "code" among ...

To add to what CAT said, passenger trains cannot operate over excepted track, they must have at least Class 1 track. Which opens a whole 'nother chapter in the story. Congress passed a law which requires FRA to lighten up on tourist railways and railroad museums. If the railroad is in the "General ...

Yes, fear of preferential treatment was the notion. They figured train operators owning track is going to interfere with their high-minded utopian ideal of "open access". I'm not quite sure that's true. But they THINK it's true, and it's driven public policy over there at an epic scale, to epic fail...

What's even more interesting is compare America to Europe from the end of WWII to present. All their railroads were in roughly equal decline until the 1970s. And then America passed the RRRR act and Staggers act... and Europe did not. And the downward trend in European freight continued on up until ...

Land owners want their land back... Their land back? When did they first have it? They didn't. With the Old Road, it is almost certainly the case that the railroad owned the land "in fee simple" which means owned outright. That would be the case for similar properties in that network of lines. My u...

Well the Brits just did a more difficult line extension. For a museum.
http://www.bluebell-railway.co.uk/blueb ... tprog.html
It wasn't as long, but it did involve re-excavating a half mile long, 40 foot deep cut that had been filled with garbage.
Just sayin'.

Anybody can sue with the thinnest of cases. Courts should be accessible. Winning is quite another thing! These plaintiffs don't have a prayer, as long as Uncle Pete sticks to their guns. The cancer is people naysaying and deciding the system doesn't work, and so refusing to even try. And thus, causi...

The Southern Michigan Railroad Society is looking for volunteers! Especially if you want to be an engineer, conductor, brakeman or ticket agent, you don't want to miss the upcoming orientation and training. It's coming up this Saturday, March 23, at 9am. It's not at the normal location. It's at the ...

I think the heart and soul of Coe Rail's business was the tourist train and the dinner train. I know some people only see "freight" ... but passenger can make the difference in profitability. Trouble is, passenger equipment is expensive to keep up, so you have to run... a lot. And Larry Coe sure did...

Yup, I was the painter on that one. We had a devil of a time getting the paint match. Even now I think it may be a half a tick too green. This whole project started last year when I climbed up to look at the roof, which is fiberglass. I found dinner-plate sized areas where the paint had come off. An...