Recent content by Aaron

Here's another announcement of Wifi service on the Amtrak blog: http://blog.amtrak.com/2015/10/sun-sand-and-wi-fi/ They seem to have buried the lede, though. The bigger news is that the Auto Train is apparently now a single level train.

Two cycle interest calculation has been illegal in the US since the CARD Act of 2009.

If anyone read this and cares about the outcome, the Supreme Court ruled yesterday that the establishment of the Commission was indeed legal, and the initiative process is consistent with the constitutional requirement that the manner of conducting the elections be prescribed by the state...

Dear Mary, ██████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████ ████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████ ███████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████ █████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████...

Just guesses on my part, but it could be that until there are enough new baggage cars in the system, they can't guarantee that one particular train will have a new car for every single run, so it's easier to not change policy until they can be confident of being able to accommodate things under...

On the surface it appears so. For fiscal year 2013 (the first complete fiscal year under the new schedule), the ridership on the SL increased 1.7% compared to .4% for the long distance trains as a whole. Revenue was up 6% compared to 1.9% for the LD trains as a whole (probably due to more...

Of course this starts out as "I heard from someone who heard from someone that...", so don't get too excited just yet. However, Jim Loomis writes on his blog that he had a conversation with an Amtrak higher up regarding the Sunset Limited. Among other things, the Amtrak dude said the SL East...

The light rail has a station at 44th street that's fairly close to the airport. When the light rail was opened, there was no direct connection to the airport, so passengers would have to take shuttle busses. At the end of 2013, the PHX SkyTrain was opened, which is an automated 24 hour train...

Coincidentally, this excellent article showed up today in the New Yorker, all about the Colorado River, the negotiating and squabbling over the rights to its water, and the sad state of the river today. The New Yorker - "The Disappearing River"

That doesn't always work. Arizona voters passed an amendment to the state constitution to put redistricting in the hands of a bipartisan independent redistricting commission. The state legislature (as a body) sued the redistricting commission for cutting them out of the process, making the...

I have no idea if anything like this is implemented, but it seems like it should be theoretically possible for a train to "weigh itself" based on how the locomotive is accelerating. If an onboard computer system knows the performance characteristics of a given locomotive or set of locomotives...

Jim nailed it. Water has been the story of the west for pretty much the entire history of American settlement there, although the general populace is still not quite aware of this (even here in the west). Controlling the flow of the waterways and subsequent fights over access to the water there...

Yeah, it's easy to make predictions when they have a time horizon far enough out that you don't have to worry about being around to take the crap if you're wrong. 50 years from now, I'll be 92, so there is the chance I'll still be here to eat major crow. Actually, did I say 50 years? I meant 65.

In a perfect world of infinite money and political will, you'd go underground precisely because of the heat. It's nice and cool even 50 feet underground at the same time that it's 115 degrees outside. That's always been my problem with the light rail in Phoenix. You can't have the same...

I'm guessing markings for underground utilities. Probably it's a regional term for something we call "blue stakes" out here. Basically a state sponsored phone number where a property owner or contractor calls, and then requests are sent to all of the various utilities in the area to come out and...