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I have little knowledge of the braking systems of modern transit equipment. At the museum, our one operable Chicago PCC car is not air nor is any of the recent CTA equipment. One series of older CTA equipment which I do operate has automatic air as I described above just like the interurban cars...

Thanks. I started with straight air as well but only single cars have straight air. It has the advantage of giving you direct control of the brakes while automatic air is essentially indirect control - you control the brake pipe and the brake pipe in turn controls the brakes on each car.

How train brakes work is widely misunderstood. Air does not directly keep the brakes released. Rather, a loss of air in the brake pipe causes pressurized air already in the reservoir on each car to flow from the reservoir to the brake cylinder. The longer explanation is starting from a train...

According to the last PDF timetable I could find, all stops from Fredericksburg north are discharge only so an early arrival at any of them is a possibility any day of the year. There's something wonky with the schedule reported for 98-6, probably related to the time change. Normally, 98 is...

As a former airline operations analyst with considerable involvement in schedules, I disagree that airline schedules are more complex than railroads (well, in some ways they are but in others they aren't). First, at least at my carrier, schedules are based in UTC (aka GMT) and are then converted...

The Pacific Surfliner website schedule notes (Schedule Change | Pacific Surfliner) says it's for "equipment logistics." The equipment for 794 comes from 761 which leaves San Diego as the first train of the day at 4:01am. I have no idea what the arrangement is at San Diego but the schedule shows...

Except for the line relocation in Elko that occurred in the mid-80s. None of the track through Elko existed pre-Amtrak.

As Chicago area residents who attend 20 or so theater and similar events per year, I find Metra generally unusable for them. For evening events, generally the 10:30-10:40 trains are too early and the 12:30-12:40 trains too late. Having departures at around 11:30 would make it far more usable...

Maximum Authorized Speed is not the same Maximum Track Speed. Authorized is the lesser of track speed, speed restricted by order, bulletin, etc., and speed restricted by signal. I have never heard anyone think it's synonymous with maximum track speed. It's just long-time railroad slang (at least...

It's done because some businesses can't be bothered to comply with standards and reject standards-compliant email addresses. A lot of special characters are standards-compliant but rejected by many sites. Email trivia: per standards, the part before the @ is case-sensitive (so technically...

Another place where tight connections get prioritized is Schipol (Amsterdam). A few years back, we were connecting from a flight from the U.S. to another Schengen (European combined immigration area) destination. As such, we needed to clear Immigration (passport check) but not Customs (baggage)...

As someone who worked in airline scheduling (now retired), your first sentence is about 180 degrees from the truth. Airline schedules are developed in periods of one to two months (sometimes shorter such as the holiday schedule which might run from only around 12/20 to 1/4). While there might be...

One the issues that plagues food service accounting is the idea that food service needs to be its own profit center as if it operates independently of the train. It doesn't. It's dependent on the train and its passengers. Sitting at home, I can't decide let's go to the Amtrak Dining Car for...

That looks like it. The building in the upper left diagonally across from the station entrance appears to match the building currently at the NE corner of S. Water St. and Michigan Ave. and although the lower floors have been extensively changed, the window pattern on the 3rd floor matches...

That sort of stuff happened a lot at my carrier. Sometimes it was because the flight crew, not understanding CBP hours, sped up thinking they'd get to bed earlier than planned only to sit until scheduled arrival before the door could open. We had one flight that became a big problem because it...

One additional thing about enroute winds: there is both seasonal and daily variation. We had a good handle on seasonal variation (winds are normally out of the west with stronger winds in winter) and divided the year into five seasons to account for the seasonal variation. Domestically, we had...

Yes, we had an Arrival 00 goal. As for the alleged padding, scheduling the length of flights (block time - time from departing the "blocks" to arriving on the "blocks") is far more complicated than 99% of the customers (or even employees) realize and much of the reason for that can be answered...

Different airlines have different goals. The US Department of Transportation considers a flight on-time for purposes of determining "chronically delayed" flights to be 14 minutes or less late (Arrival 14 as it is called in the industry). A given airline is likely to have both Arrival 00 (exactly...

From someone who spent part of my career doing delay analysis for an airline, destination weather is just one small factor. Enroute severe weather, when it closes off airways and forces flights to longer routes and also increases congestion on the routes bordering the weather issue, can...

Tipping on a cashless train today is no different than tipping in today's cashless airline club lounges. For the complementary beverages, I leave a dollar bill on the bar top and not once has it been refused due to them being cashless. :) Cashless really means no cash for transactions between...