This is a bizarre story of a municipality seriously looking at a heritage light rail line as a precurser to it’s modern day equivilent. That seems to be a recurring scenario of gestating rail transport by gaining a tourist oriented foothold, and then expanding it from this orientation to that of a working system. Well…reading further on this is to eventually become a hydrogen fueled transit line…huh?..do they know something that we don’t? As far as I know, this is still in the experimental testing stage. Or are they requesting it’s use as a test bed for this purpose? Odd…maybe a pie in the sky has been sighted?
It sounds like more of sacrifice the practical to expedite the political. Pile on the Buck Rogers in hopes of being granted public bucks.
If you wanted to push such a project say in Iowa, you would use the agriculture angle. Rapid transit from Des Moines to Ames fueled by soy diesel, or better yet methane from hog manure. Throw in a grant to Iowa State University to research and engineer the project.
“Free” money in the form of government grants is in no way connected to logic. Someday it will be public transport dollars to perfect, “Beam me up, Scotty.”
Yep. Just another case of attaching as many political brownie points as possible in the hopes of getting all kinds of ‘free’ (read ‘your’) government money.
Tourists? Hey mom and dad - let’s go to the city with publicly funded light rail!!! It’d be great! We could go back and forth on the trains and see all the sights and sounds, all the while content with the knowledge that we are saving the enviroment.
I finally got around to reading the story. For some reason, I find it a bit of a pain to have to do the “cut and paste” bit with the URL. [:(!]
I hate to spoil everyone’s party, but hydrogen fuel cells are a developed technology. San Jose has had three city buses for quite some time now that use hydrogen fuel cells. Performance-wise, there isn’t any apparent difference.