To play H2’s advocate for a moment, if LA can’t seem to get the financial and political backing to invest in electrification quickly, it is a potential way for LA to pull a “passenger train network” out of its ass in time for the 2028 Olympics…
It’s quieter and no emissions at the location of travel kind similar to CNG/LNG. (Some electricity face similar problems of not being zero emissions from generation)… but I do think it’s worth exploring for some minor applications.
Edit: to be clear, electric and battery trains are better technologies by miles and miles. Just that the oil and freight rail lobbyists are in California’s pocket for now so I’m just saying the best case scenario for Los Angeles given the powers that be and hold SoCal back
Honestly, if LA did tons of rail and it was all diesel powered, it would still be a huge improvement in carbon emissions, not to mention the traffic and urban density benefits.
I posted this because I think this is absolutely silly. A hydrogen-powered train that runs on a low-volume 9-mile track? Why on earth couldn’t this just run on gantry-provided electric power? I guess it’s fine as an experimental trial system, but let’s not pretend that hydrogen is better than electric in basically every rail application imaginable.
But what’s wrong with working in parallel? Develop hydrogen while the grid becoming greener. A traditional electric train has the same issue of being grid based.
So glad that caltrain go ally has what would be considered normal in the rest of the world 🙄. But seriously this is a massive improvement and commuter rail systems should see this success and do this instead of trying to have battery powered trains and diesels that run under northeast corridor wires.
Agreed! I feel like Americans can’t imagine a future without seeing it somewhere in their home country. They travel to London or to Paris, enjoy the high-speed trains and the frequent metro service, and then come home and keep getting in their cars. So actually experiencing modern electric rail service (albeit not yet high-speed rail) in their own country is a big deal.
This is taken from my window, and I’m not sure how I feel about leaving expensive equipment out in a suburban area for anyone to pick up and run off with
I don’t know what it’s like where you live, but as rule, who knows? There are scheduled trains which are notoriously unreliable, but also unscheduled trains. Basically whenever there is enough cargo to justify a train it gets put out on the tracks and they move it when they can. Caveat: this is for Canada and is largely based on info from some former neighbors who were conductors and brakemen.
Freight is definitely tracked but not necessarily scheduled in regular intervals. This is true for both trains and ships. Like it costs so much and the world isn’t always that consistent.
But yeah like cp/cn/CSX/ns/BNSF etc all know what’s on their lines and where.
However these lines are fully private unlike aviation so there is no requirement to publically provide any data.
For planes position data doesn’t even come from the airline but a govt mandated transponder that communicates on public frequency on the aircraft and private websites use a network of recieving radios donated or not spread across the world to provide the public with a service they also try to profit off of. This doesn’t exist for trains as far as I know. And I don’t think for ships either.
They track them, but they’re not all scheduled. If there is enough cargo there they put on a “special” and they will move it between the scheduled trains. Train scheduling and tracking is an art unto itself.
It’s funny to read this article painting electric trains as a great novelty, when the majority of trains in western Europe (excluding certain island states) have been electric for decades. But good for california, sounds like a nice improvement!
Or that the Northeast Corridor (DC>Philly>NYC>Boston) is all electrified and has the fastest passenger train on the continent (Amtrak Acela can do 150mph, soon to be replaced with a 165mph variant that can do like +30 in turns). And that NJ Transit on that line (following US 1 and I-95) is electric along that massive population concentration. But yeah, good for California. I get it, running power is a really expensive project but at least this section goes back at least as far as the GG1 loco days.
America is a petrostate that uses diesel and coal for most industrial purposes and trains have usually been used as cargo movers and not people movers, so they usually use diesel.
Thanks. I was going to look it up today. I am going to try and build a LEGO version of it. I was unsure if herzog was the manufacturer or the operator. But I figured either was it was a good place to start.
If you go, pay attention to the schedule. They still run one steam loco per day, so two round trips, but most runs up and down the mountain are powered by the biodiesel fleet. The cog railroad dieselized to reduce operational & maintenance costs, and to reduce emissions. Parts for the steamers were getting hard to source, and while the coal smoke coming out of the steam locomotive makes for good photos, it’s not always the best image, if you know what I mean.
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