Never happened. Why?
50 ‘peeks’ and no opinions? Nobody wonders or cares why?
$2.45 billion Federal loan was appropriated in 2016.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1s2sVnRw_KYqOe9st5g1-opQd_aYMXZreZTlng9arbLs/edit
I can’t see a thing.
Nothing is displayed on the screen?
Here is how your post appears to me:
We kind of had this discussion several times over but in limited ways. Amtrak is not charging other carriers the true cost of using the Corridor or it’s charges that it is charging are way below sustainability of the Corridor Infrastructure. Hence we get these press releases from Amtrak each year as to how many 100’s of millions of dollars more Amtrak has fallen behind in maintence of the corridor due to lack of the Feds paying for it via grants.
Well the bottom line is Amtrak has enough trains transiting the Corridor they do not need Federal Grants apart from major improvement projects. They should be able to keep the cooridor in a good state of repair year to year without outside funding just via user fees. How many privately run toll roads do you see falling apart in this country and issuing press releases each year that they could not fully afford the maintenence on the toll road that year and have fallen further behind on their multi-Billion dollar maintenece backlog?
I can see the NEC asking for help on unpredicatable weather disasters, I can see them even asking for help on major speed improvements or line relocations.
However, I do not understand why they need to do so with just basic maintenence which should be fully covered via transit fees. We should all see the NEC maintained in a good state of repair plus enough left over for incremental improvements in speed so that over time the overall NEC speed and maintence level increases. That has not happened since Amtraks inception.
The only conclusion I can draw is mismanagement of the NEC and Amtrak either not collecting the bill for usage in full each year OR not charging what it costs to keep the NEC in good repair each year. Given that it cannot maintain the NEC in good repair it is sheer buffoonery to state the NEC makes a profit.
We see in a recent
How about now? The picture comes up on my screen. ???
[quote user=“CMStPnP”]
243129
Never happened. Why?
We kind of had this discussion several times over but in limited ways. Amtrak is not charging other carriers the true cost of using the Corridor or it’s charges that it is charging are way below sustainability of the Corridor Infrastructure. Hence we get these press releases from Amtrak each year as to how many 100’s of millions of dollars more Amtrak has fallen behind in maintence of the corridor due to lack of the Feds paying for it via grants.
Well the bottom line is Amtrak has enough trains transiting the Corridor they do not need Federal Grants apart from major improvement projects. They should be able to keep the cooridor in a good state of repair year to year without outside funding just via user fees. How many privately run toll roads do you see falling apart in this country and issuing press releases each year that they could not fully afford the maintenence on the toll road that year and have fallen further behind on their multi-Billion dollar maintenece backlog?
I can see the NEC asking for help on unpredicatable weather disasters, I can see them even asking for help on major speed improvements or line relocations.
However, I do not understand why they need to do so with just basic maintenence which should be fully covered via transit fees. We should all see the NEC maintained in a good state of repair plus enough left over for incremental improvements in speed so that over time the overall NEC speed and maintence level increases. That has not happened since Amtraks inception.
The only conclusion I can draw is mismanagement of the NEC and Amtrak either not collecting the bill for usage in full each year O
Photobucket does not allow hot linking unless you are paying them like $349 to host your pictures for you.
So your pictures do not show up as pictures we can view…unless we open the link back to photobucket, for each individual picture…very time consuming.
Just A SUGGESTION, but there are image hosting services that allow hot linking on free accounts. IMGUR is one such service…note I have no commercial interest in imgur.
Note: I’m getting “404 file not found” error messages on all the boxes under the top image
Thank you for the info, I shall try it. I did however C&P, does it display now?
I’m seeing the top image now, with the Boston-NYC and NYC-Washignton blurbs on it. however everthing after that is still empty boxes.
OK thanks. I only posted one image.
In answer to your core question, I would offer that “hype” is frequently never realized. I believe PT Barnum had a thing or two to say about the mechanism of hype.
Frequently I see these “public-private partnerships” hyped with these really grand artist sketches of how great the finished product will be, only to find that after the taxpayers have been baited into some commitment, suddenly the “private” end of the partnership loses enthusiasm for the grander parts of the original hype.
And the Taxpayers end up doing most of the heavy lifting that is gonna get done.
Naive people enjoy being lied to…that is my conclusion
I’ve been out of town and didn’t see this thread until Sunday afternoon. The picture appears correctly (in Firefox 66.0.3 on Mac OS 10.11.6) as a rendered image.
There’s more involved, I think, than meets the eye regarding “why this never happened”. A very pointed objective of Carter’s original Northeast Corridor improvement plan was to implement track speed of nominal 150mph in a variety of places; it was very obviously not going to result in very much continuous 150mph running (the crossovers in the middle of Princeton Junction famously remaining 85mph as I recall) and it was probably doomed from the start with the preferred-subcontractor setasides, but the 2h45’ timing could probably have been achieved with the same kind of train used for the “2 hours and 59 civilized minutes” in the 1970s ads. A great deal of expense and sacrifice went into some somewhat unfortunate concrete-tie trackwork that Did Not Ride As Advertised (or have particularly long unmolested service life, either). However, there was starting to be some fruit from these efforts by 1986, when I first noticed that train speeds were beginning to seem dramatically higher. How much of that was ended by Ricky Gates, I can’t say.
I suspect most of the reason Acela never reached its “speed potential” was circumstantial, and perhaps hushed-up if not actually hidden. I remember the early discussions for the Boston electrification and line modifications (remember the granite center-of-ROW markers that were such a disaster?) there was extensive discussion of sustained 140mph capability, and why that ultimately was limited to just a few almost meaningless miles is its own interesting topic.
Things like spoke breakage and tilt issues surely indicate all was not well with ROW high-speed improvements as well as Bombardier’s engineering of the Acela trains. I have yet to see the raw data from the vertical accelerome
Here! Here!
[quote user=“Overmod”]
I’ve been out of town and didn’t see this thread until Sunday afternoon. The picture appears correctly (in Firefox 66.0.3 on Mac OS 10.11.6) as a rendered image.
There’s more involved, I think, than meets the eye regarding “why this never happened”. A very pointed objective of Carter’s original Northeast Corridor improvement plan was to implement track speed of nominal 150mph in a variety of places; it was very obviously not going to result in very much continuous 150mph running (the crossovers in the middle of Princeton Junction famously remaining 85mph as I recall) and it was probably doomed from the start with the preferred-subcontractor setasides, but the 2h45’ timing could probably have been achieved with the same kind of train used for the “2 hours and 59 civilized minutes” in the 1970s ads. A great deal of expense and sacrifice went into some somewhat unfortunate concrete-tie trackwork that Did Not Ride As Advertised (or have particularly long unmolested service life, either). However, there was starting to be some fruit from these efforts by 1986, when I first noticed that train speeds were beginning to seem dramatically higher. How much of that was ended by Ricky Gates, I can’t say.
I suspect most of the reason Acela never reached its “speed potential” was circumstantial, and perhaps hushed-up if not actually hidden. I remember the early discussions for the Boston electrification and line modifications (remember the granite center-of-ROW markers that were such a disaster?) there was extensive discussion of sustained 140mph capability, and why that ultimately was limited to just a few almost meaningless miles is its own interesting topic.
Things like spoke breakage and tilt issues surely indicate all was not well with ROW high-speed improvements as well as Bombardier’s engineering of the Acela trains. I have yet to see
OVERMOD: " A great deal of expense and sacrifice went into some somewhat unfortunate concrete-tie trackwork that Did Not Ride As Advertised (or have particularly long unmolested service life, either). "
You can and should stand by the points you made in the previous article (for which you received so much flak) concerning Northeast Corridor improvement, as well.
I do think there were different reasons for abandoning the SST in the Seventies, perhaps first among them being that relatively few people would actually want to pay the required ‘pro-rata development costs per trip’ to get the nominal benefits for those destination pairs over land – even had there been no convenient ‘excuse’ over sonic boom issues.
Interestingly, we are now seeing that the chosen alternative strategy, flying larger numbers of people per aircraft at relatively high subsonic speeds, also has limits; the Airbus A380 is apparently an accelerating commercial failure even though it promised to offer (and, in fact, could deliver) a good mix of Sybaritic luxury and lots of cheap seats in steerage on any given flight.
It remains to be seen whether passengers would pay for the necessary very, very fast accelerations and peak speeds needed to retain current stops and still gain significant-to-customers time reductions between New York and Washington. Or where the money could possibly come from to build a real ‘second spine’ with 220mph peak between Boston and New York, let alone how you could repay its cost out of increased revenues.
There are lots and lots of people who would benefit from, and would gleefully ride, true high-speed Corridor service. Problem is, all the ones traveling within a particular schedule slot outside of logical ‘peak’ times could probably be accommodated on a couple of railbuses’ worth of seats … think People Express rather than Midwest Express … and that’s not a good fit with anything Am
Well, it WAS a vision, and it’s STILL the 21st century, so methinks they have another 81 years to make this come true…
Very fitting that the ‘pointless arrow’ is used in the ad…
I never knew Amtrak kept using it for so long!