The reason for the flurry of videos is WordPress just made it easy to upload iPhone videos to the blog.
If the Charlotte thing fell through, this is probably where I would have landed. This condo project was a fiasco financially – built just as the real estate bubble burst. Condos here were originally $200k+, but now can’t be sold for half that.
The building is directly across the tracks from the Franklin Park Metra train station – with something like 28 Metra trains a day and frequent freight trains. Have I mentioned recently I like trains?
WordPress – doesn’t allow video rotation apparently.
I couldn’t find it, and nothing on the phone. It’s not a trivial process – the compression is looking from by frame for what it can cut out with human vision not noticing. Rotating the image changes the scan lines and it would have to interpolate what the dots have to be (recognizing it doesn’t have access to the original bit map. I don’t know if I even have anything on the PC that can do it.
I’d like to see implementation of Putin’s planned New York to London train. The missing link is the Siberia to Alaska part. It would be an underground tunnel. Keep in mind that it is about 55 miles but there are two islands in the middle.
Not sure I’d want to ride it regularly through the earthquake zone, but it would be fine for freight and could be computer controlled like the trams at Disney.
You had mentioned that you liked trains, Art… and that you had lived in Connecticut. Had you mentioned that the Connecticut ex-Governor also likes trains?
http://theweek.com/article/index/260202/speedreads-watch-connecticut-senator-richard-blumenthal-narrowly-avoid-a-train-during-a-railway-safety-press-conference
That’s too rich for words. I intensely hate Blumenthal – he was an activist Attorney General who felt it was his job to create law, not enforce the laws passed by the legislature.
I’ve stood on that very platform – I lived in Milford my first nine months. Amtrak and the Metra/CTDOT trains share those tracks with very tight headways. During the day, you can expect a train every few minutes.
The Milford station is not an Amtrak station – there are two variants of Amtrak – the Northeast Regional that stops at Bridgeport to the west and New Haven to the East. The Acela “high speed” train from New York to Boston is equipped to go 150 MPH, the Regional trains usually go 80 mph through stations (up to 125 mph between stations). The Acela trains try to use the tracks in the middle to reduce the significant danger of blowing people off the platform or at least flattening them and not have to slow down. Anyone who has ever been on that platform knows why the Yellow line is there.
I’ve been on that Amtrak train.. from NYC to New Haven.
It would have been a kick in the head for the tax payers to have to fund yet another special election this year…
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatchewan/jared-frank-poised-to-earn-big-bucks-from-kick-in-the-head-video-1.2617033
From Stratford to New Haven, the line narrows to three tracks, and then two tracks from New Haven to Boston.
Metro-North owns the tracks through Connecticut up to New Haven. The tracks from New Haven to Boston are now owned by Amtrak and electrified only about five years ago. The only place on the route from New York to Boston that get up to 150 miles an hour is a few miles in Rhode Island. Metroliner service from Washington DC to New York has a much longer history of high-speed operation.
The basic arrangement in Connecticut is they have a cycle of trains – the Amtrak’s Acela comes through first, then the Amtrak regional, then the Metro-North express trains, then the metro north local trains. That way the trains that make the most stops and run the slowest stay in the back – and the cycle repeats once an hour, as long as everybody stays on schedule.
If you look in Google earth, you can see they have been replacing the ties with concrete. This is part of the program to upgrade the Northeast Corredor service. Concrete ties were very popular in the Soviet Union and Cuba, and places without a ready supply of trees. In harsh weather, they tend to fall apart faster than wood. On the other hand, you can create concrete ties with the rails pre-attached in great big factories – but railroads long ago moved to continuous welded rail on mainline track. This is one of those religious arguments among train people.
I’d take the train back in the 90s from NJ to Hartford, change engines in New Haven from electrified to diesel on the way north.
There were three issues regarding extending Accela service to Boston- the first was the electrification was necessary and that is fixed. The second was that the ties needed to meet higher standards for higher speed (especially around turns). The third issues still exists today – the turns were designed and built about 150 years ago when trains didn’t move at 150 mph. If I remember correctly, they did widen some of the worst case narrow turns but there are still big issues regarding narrow turns.
As you mention, the NYC-DC stretch is very fast. You can do Philadephia-NYC with two stops in NJ in well under an hour and it is over 100 miles. People have been known to sit at the toll booths for almost that long even when Gov Christie has all lanes operating.
The Acela trains lean on curves.
A more pesky problem is there are several drawbridges – at least one if which has no electrification – so the trains have to drift uncontrolled going over the bridge. If the engineers forget that or the train doesn’t make it all the way across – a rescue locomotive has to be sent to extract the train. Another of the upgrades was replacement of an old bridge over by Old Saybrook.
Tight curves for high speed need to be banked…. but not so much that a slow train derails.
Another Acela issue is Penn Station in NYC and more to the point the 100 year old tunnels under the Hudson River.
When Amtrak bought the Acela and when NJ Transit more recently replaced its trains with double decker trains, they both had to be specially designed for that route and were unable to use standard trains that the manufacture sold everywhere else.
The US Government didn’t build that!
The US government built Obamacare, and it is a train wreck.
Good news Oregon has thrown in the towel and turned over their exchange to the Feds.
I went to healthcare.gov a day ago, and it now works the way people originally intended it should – you can now get actual real price quotes without having to register first.
Did anyone get fired over the Oregon exchange? Did the taxpayers get their money refunded? Same old, same old.
😉