Recent content by RCrierie

"What you meant to say here is "most went bankrupt, unable to compete with the massive government subsidies given to other modes of transportation"." Actually, what you both meant to say is "most went bankrupt, unable to change their schedules or timetables because the government wouldn't let...

I'm reading a book "The Box" on containerization, and the amount of regulation and governmental rate fixing and interference in the 'free market' of the time was pretty astounding. The ICC basically set rates for everyone, and woe betide you if you tried to streamline your business, and then cut...

The problem goes back to how Amtrak was created. Remember that the 1970 act that created created Amtrak, created it as a private entitity that was chartered by the government (not an unusual concept, look at the Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War), which would have have large and broad...

So what? By that argument, we can add in all the government support for railroads, from exclusive monopolies in that market in the early days of railroading on the Eastern Coast, to spending huge sums of money to complete the Transcontinental Railroad(s) via land grants and payouts to incredibly...

Model Railroader, January 1997 indirectly references this -- it points out that the VL I Sleepers use Amfleet I and II glass; so it simplifies the difficulty of scratchbuilding a VL sleeper -- that issue also has some nice drawings of the inside and outside of the VL I sleepers.

The Viewliner I's do. They use Amfleet I windows for the topmost, and Amfleet II for bottommost IIRC. This was cheap since Amtrak had huge piles of them. Now? It makes no sense; why should we constrain ourselves to window sizes decided in the early and then late 1970s? Remember, one of the...

Won't work, I think. Loading gauge restrictions would prevent it from going into NYP, which is important for the Silvers. I don't want double rows of windows. That made sense in the late 1980s when the Viewliner I's were being designed, as Amtrak was short of money, and had a huge pile of...

No no no no NO NO NO O NO GOD NO. In about 30 days, I'll be taking the Silver Star down to Orlando from Washington, and then the Silver Meteor up from Orlando to Washington, and in both cases, I wish that both trains had superliner consists. There is no substitute for the Superliner Lounge...

Each reactor unit at Calvert Cliffs Nuclear Power Plant (CCNPP) in Maryland when originally brought into operation in 1974, used 93,480 kilograms of UO2; enriched to about 2.05% to 2.99%. The average efficiency of this initial fuel loading was 12,000 megawatt-days per tonne (MWd/te). Thus, if...

Left unsaid is that these were far more prevalent in the 1970ies; and they're mostly gone now, since the subsidies are gone. There was a nice round up of these in a Aviation themed forum Link Here's the revelant bitz: I found that while looking for information on the Alaska Railroad's...

How can you tell what roomette you are in if you've made an online reservation?

Gee, you mean like the old Pullman open sections?

I wonder if it would be possible to make it so that if there is x percentage reliable OTP over freight trackage, then that freight trackage from the point of view of the IRS is counted as the cheapest possible track for tax purposes...even if it's a multi-track heavily signalled mainline; making...

Ugh. I much prefer Amtrak security with the adorable PUPPEH DOGGEHS; to TSA 'reach around' security.

I was talking to a guy from Amtrak at WAS Union while I was admiring OCEAN VIEW before I boarded, and he said that those two windows got broken, so they replaced them with the metal plates.