Month: December 2011

  • eNewsletter for December 26, 2011

    Speed is attractive on any travel mode. Higher speeds can lead to greater productivity. But ridership is also determined by other factors such as price, comfort, safety, convenience and the number of markets served. Speed can be very expensive which can make the price of the service uncompetitive. By-passing towns to improve running times will…

  • eNewsletter for December 12, 2011

    This is from testimony by retired Republican Congressman and current Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood given on December 6th before the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure. It didn’t get much media coverage… The effort to derail the California HSR Project is part of a larger partisan effort to derail the presidency of President Obama by…

  • eNewsletter for December 5, 2011

    Total public spending on transport and water infrastructure has fallen steadily since the 1960s and now stands at 2.4% of GDP. Europe, by contrast, invests 5% of GDP in its infrastructure, while China is racing into the future at 9%. America’s spending as a share of GDP has not come close to European levels for…

  • eNewsletter for December 19, 2011

    Duh, they are just now noticing that building a 220 miles per hour railroad is expensive? While speeds of up to 220 miles per hour is a reasonable long term goal, first we need to look at getting service up to 125 miles per hour in California in the near future. Full funding won’t be…

  • Coast Daylight/CRCC Policy Meeting Report

    By Bruce Jenkins, RailPAC Director The Coast Rail Coordinating Council (Coast Daylight) held it’s Policy Meeting on Friday, Dec. 16th in Monterey. The foremost concern now is to achieve a satisfactory capacity model. The initial capacity modeling resulted in unrealistic and unobtainable scheduling. The Coast Route remains a strategic line for Union Pacific freight operations,…

  • Southwest Chief and the snow delays

    Report by Russ Jackson, RailPAC The first major snow storm of the winter affected Amtrak trains 3 and 4, the Southwest Chief starting December 19, and is still affecting the train’s on time performance as of this writing. As the winter progresses we will see how prepared this season the Amtrak system is for this…

  • Amtrak Advisory: Coast Starlight Train 14 and Amtrak Cascades Schedules

    From Amtrak.com 12/19/11: Coast Starlight Train 14 and Amtrak Cascades Trains 508 and 1514: Track Work Affects Schedules and Service Effective January 3 through February 8, 2012 Track work being performed by Union Pacific Railroad will affect the northbound Coast Starlight and Amtrak Cascades on select dates, as described below: Train 14 Operates Two Hours…

  • We hear you, Mr. Boardman, now let’s see some Action!

    Commentary by Russ Jackson, RailPAC There has been much discussion in the past month or so about the immediate fate of the Amtrak long-distance trains. This writer provided his share of the verbiage in an article posted on www.railpac.org, titled “Amtrak long distance trains, the kinda good, the pretty bad, the really ugly,” which explained…

  • RailPAC’s Bob Manning Goes to Washington, Meets with Senator Boxer and others!

    Report and Photo provided by Robert Manning, RailPAC Executive VP Often we complain about things but fail to correct the problem. Yes, I’m referring to the underserved passenger train service in the west. This conveys the sad possibility that some service may be cut while we are attempting to inaugurate daily service between Los Angeles…

  • How High Speed Rail is like Rail Rapid Transit

    Opinion of Noel T. Braymer I grew up in Orange County in the 1960’s. In Orange County all the TV stations were in Los Angeles and my family subscribed to a local newspaper and the Los Angeles Times. Even as a child I followed the news and read the newspapers. I remember all through out…