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After two weeks, I return to Heredia to ride the train for real this time. (I also visited a large, modern shopping mall, but that is in a different video). The Heredia-San Jose line also sometimes runs all the way out to Alajuela, the site of the airport, but this one had its origin in Heredia...

I guess I should clarify what I said above about the true cost of maintenance, especially because I was particularly writing it on here, where the focus is trains. When something like this happens on an airplane, I sometimes ask: what would have happened if this had been on a train? And the...

Another piece of standing but unused infrastructure-- the Caldera train station. This is located about 5 miles south of El Roble and the peninsula. Based on the size of the station, and what looks like a pretty solid design, I am assuming that this must have been a pretty important, and even...

A difficult shot to get, I took this out of a bus window while travelling to Puntarenas. This shows a railroad bridge parallel to the freeway. From what I can tell from looking at a map, this is over the Quebrada San Francisco, closer to San Jose than to Puntarenas. That isn't a very wide body...

About an hour ago, I bought ten eggs from a convenience store. I didn't ask the cashier, but I assume they weren't produced on site. But seriously, I think what I was saying was a pretty obvious Econ 101 idea--- consumers put pressure on retailers, retailers put pressure on wholesalers...

I think the rise of LCC and ULCC also has a lot to do with it, as well as Google Flights. Back when the big airlines were big and institutional, they could basically afford to enforce standards, because people had high loyalty to established carriers, and also bought their tickets through...

If it is a manufacturing problem, it still reflects back to how much people are willing to pay for air travel, because the cost of manufacturing a plane is going to go to the airline that pays for the plane, which is then going to be paid for by customers in ticket prices. Of course, that is an...

One of the big picture issues for me, is whether this is a sign that the real cost of maintaining flight services is more than is accounted for. Basically, whether there is a big backlog of maintenance problems that are slowly creeping forward, much companies feel economic pressure to keep costs...

I went back to Puntarenas, on the coast. There are a lot of interesting things to see in this video, including lizards and me getting lost, but from a train point of view, the most relevant thing is that I show the tracks that go northwards. This rail line, which used to go from San Jose to...

New year, new adventures! I went back to Cartago, where I had been previously. But unlike in my first trip, where I came and left by train, this time I took a bus, and had several hours to walk around town, on a nice day. The video mostly speaks for itself, but a few things from a transit...

I am sorry, that sounded a lot crankier than it should have. The reason I asked it is there are very different answers to someone who is looking at a map, and who has taken the routes. But in your case, you might use the service differently than I did. The short answer is, for someone living...

Out of curiosity, which one of the counties do you live in, or have you lived in?

That is especially apparent when comparing states near Chicago that have corridor service with more than one train a day (Michigan, Wisconsin, Missouri) with those that do not (Minnesota, Iowa, Indiana). I imagine that having the flexibility to travel to and from another city is a bigger driver...

Oh, good catch. That is part of the formatting that I need to clear up. Basically, it is just a matter of, for example, Pennsylvania having more letters than Virginia, so the font is smaller. "Virginia" isn't actually in bold, but its a bigger font size, so that makes it look bold. When I...

I should actually know what that means----but I don't. I took it from the State Fact Sheets, like this one: https://www.amtrak.com/content/dam/projects/dotcom/english/public/documents/corporate/statefactsheets/NEWYORK22.pdf But now that I look at it, it doesn't describe what those ridership...

The other day, I posted an old cartogram I made in another thread. I started thinking about cartograms and wondered what a cartogram of Amtrak's ridership would look like. So, using the 2022 figures, I made this: I know the aesthetics and organization are a little confusing---but basically I...

I found this old map (actually a cartogram) that I made a few years back. I should perhaps update it, since the data is about 10 years old now, but it still is probably mostly accurate as far as the proportions go. Diagrams like this can easily show data that might take a long time to explain in...

Years ago, Slate produced a great interactive map where you could view the US, county by county, and see what percentage of that state's population were farmers. I forgot what the methodology was, because sometimes people live on farms but aren't farmers, and sometimes people work on farms but...

After two weeks of being sick (after I fainted on the train in that trip, I ended up with a difficult ear infection), I went on a trip again yesterday, to Heredia, which is a suburb just outside of San Jose. It is not that far from San Jose, only a few miles, but because of the roughness of the...

I actually only learned a few weeks ago that smoking on trains was still permitted in Japan. I was quite surprised for several reasons! Along with it being permitted, what is the attitude towards it? Are people totally nonchalant about it? Or is there some understanding that its a bad habit?