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I read a fascinating article from Rolling Stone on Joby Aerospace, a company that is developing eVTOL (electronic Vertical Take-Off and Landing) helicopters. The Rolling Stone article goes into detail about the biography of the founder, and for a Rolling Stone article, it seems less cynical than...

Well, these are all complicated questions, but they are also the questions that get to the heart of the matter. But there is a different answer for different questions, and sometimes they are contradictory. For the question of why there is no N/S service between the the West Coast and...

The Columbian published an article about whether the expanded Cascades service is enough to be a commuter rail option: https://www.columbian.com/news/2023/dec/21/is-amtrak-cascades-a-new-commuter-option-from-vancouver-into-portland/ The answer is that while it isn't specifically meant to be...

One of the ironies of bus companies being anti-train is that, as you yourself have noted, once a train route is cancelled, nearby bus routes start drying up as well. Which is especially evident in the Pacific Northwest, where Flix/Greyhound seems to be doing very well---every Flixbus I took in...

One of the elephants in the room is that rail projects often have to carry social and political problems outside of their technical costs and benefits. There are a lot of people who will scream "boondoggle" at any rail project. There are also a lot of people who dislike trains or transit because...

And sometimes we need the dreamers and people who will pursue "unrealistic" plans. I guess another thing for me is that I can work on both planes---like, I have lots of aspirational plans, things I think should eventually happen, I just keep them in a separate mental cabinet than the plans I...

I guess a lot of it has to do with my own philosophy of infrastructure, which I know not everyone shares. I am more interested in concrete and incremental progress. For example, I think that Amtrak would attract more customers with some very simple repairs and upgrades (fixing drinking...

I found this relevant Calvin and Hobbes:

As someone who has lived in some pretty mountainous areas, including Montana, the Pacific Northwest and Chile, I have been surprised by the mountains here! They are a few thousand feet tall, but they seem to be several times that based on how treacherous they are. I can certainly imagine them...

And finally, before I forget, here is one from Friday! And this one involves an actual train! There are three lines on the Costa Rica Incofer system, and so far, all of my rides have been on the busiest one, the San Jose-Cartago line. This is my first trip on the Belen-San Jose line. I walk...

Looks like I am behind on my updates: this is one from a week ago. This doesn't involve a rail journey, but I include it because it is rail adjacent. I chose San Ramon because it uses the same terminal as the bus to Puntarenas, so I already knew where it was. I also chose it because it was a...

One other thing to mention about this...in part because I think the moderators changed the name of my thread to add the word "rural". Which is clear enough, and when I explain the concept casually, I do usually just refer to FAR areas as "extremely rural". But there is a wrinkle--because not...

I was almost going to call this thread "How to do rail anti-advocacy"? Of course, I am a big rail advocate, both for Amtrak, other long distance rail, and local and commuter rail. But a lot of my transit experience has been in areas that can't support rail. And I sometimes have discussions with...

I think it does have to do with folklore, in a way. Or at least, that is half of it. The first part is more tangible---those cities were big enough that there wasn't a pressing need for people to travel outside of them, but didn't have high enough population densities to give economy of scale...

There are a lot of technical reasons, I am sure, why those cities started with bad service, and cities in less populated parts of the country had good service. But overall, it seems that if there was demand, and political/social advocacy, it wouldn't have been that hard to repair and maintain...

Two more updates to my recent activity: First, last Friday I took a short trip to Tres Rios. For context, this is just a 20 minute train ride from where I live. It does highlight a point I have made a few times, which is that the layout of towns and cities is sometimes hard to understand...

Is the pass a true hop-on, hop-off service, or is it like the Amtrak railpass where you still have to plan/book your route?

(...and one more thing...) One thing that got me thinking about this again was this map, and variations on it, that has been going around. And it shows perhaps a change in direction. Most of these routes seem to address the "Missing Middle", offering train travel between medium-sized metros...

It is an interesting map! It also might have some surprises for some people, especially in that states like Ohio that many people think of as rural have no territory that is in FAR areas. North Carolina and Indiana also have very little. And all of this is very relevant to issues of rural...

I realized I could make a link to a Google Spreadsheet: With a long URL, but such is the way of Google Spreadsheets. A few interesting notes that can be gathered from this spreadsheet: the train with the most FAR stations is The Empire Builder, which also has the longest stretch---between...