Probably too many variables to pin down in hindsight. Also the ebb and flow of AC.
Glad to be excluded!
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Questions and comments here of courseā¦
Just curious why canāt those MOW windows be at night and get the track workers to come in in a 2nd or 3rd shift? Is that not possible or hard to do. I have seen other railroads do trackwork at night when cleaning up wrecks or installing new bridges. Is that latter work an exception to practice?
I see that a lot with Amtrak and Depots as a rule of thumb, they are led around like a blind person with what Depot to use with little thought to the future or operations. With the service they are attempting to start up (Chicago to Madison), I believe it was MnDOT did studies on the Pewaukee, WI depot location. WisDOT did not come up that on itās own, pretty sure it was Minnesota that pushed it (gasp! a Minnesota tie-in to the Wisconsin portion of the Chicago to Twin Cities corridor). In the past though, Amtrak seems to take the path of least resistance with Depots and I feel that is a problem. Amtrak should use GIS systems and Census Bureau population plots as well as consumer surveys to determine the best location to put a new train depot for net ridership benefit. I think what they do now is basically part voodoo. I am curious why the host railroads did not talk Amtrak out of that idea, maybe they attempted to. The host railroads will be most impacted by the decision. Also, think MnDOT should have spoken up. So not sure what is going on there. Definitely they need a better track plan if Minnesota is going to eventually serve surrounding Twin Cities locations with Amtrak Service. Wisconsin got almost $100 million to reroute frieght trains through Muskego Yard in Milwaukee to improve Amtrak service. Twin Cities options might be a lot more pricey but they should and could start planning or work on them now.
That is too cynical for me personally.
I think it makes sense in part these days with the price of automobiles and two working heads of household to see if you can get by with one auto vs two. That used to be the more predominant attitude in the 1970ās and 1980ās. Also from what I read of the former Milwaukee road Milwaukee to Watertown service. The former passengers stated riding the train became a type of club which they looked forwards to after a day of work where they could socialize or communicate with others plus they had a Friday type club where some of the passengers would bring booze on the train and they would make and serve drinks on their own. So in my view it goes well beyond just parking fees. Of course the social part was that railroad employees were more friendly and open with the public (not a slam)ā¦ just noticed growing up near a railroad, prior to 1975-1976, it seemed railroad employees were friendlier to railfans as a bunch as well vs after 1975 and onwards to today. Granted some of that has to do with railfan behavior deteriorating but I also think the internal culture of railroading has changed to be less friendly to outsiders. Of course the disappearance of public interaction via passenger trains probably has not helped.
Wow, I finally figured out how to do quotes in responses, the HTML tags have to always be against the left marginā¦go figure.
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Some craft contracts specify a higher rate of pay or time and a half Overtime for hours worked outside those specified in their contract.
Needless to say, āManagementā everywhere want to pay the least possible price for the labor they use. Some managements look at the big picture and some look at a micro picture and there are many views in between.
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Theyāll work 24/7 (rotating crews if needed) to do a big project or restore service after an outage. And there are places where nighttime windows are the norm rather than the exception. But as Balt mentioned, it costs more to do it that way. It also has some āsoft costsā in terms of lower productivity and quality, worse coordination with track inspectors, etc.
In the Twin Cities terminal, thereās also the fact that Amtrak 7 and 8 plus the high-priority Z trains all tend to come through overnight.
Dan
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Itās amusing how someone so vocal about working from home wants others to work nights.
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Oh please. Expectations of the job and we are still under employment at will arrangements.
A lot of jobs, many of the very good variety that people like as a career are from home with only periodic visits to an office. One nephew and a niece work from home . Three of their children the same as do their spouses. Perhaps itās a generational thing?
RTO is becoming a moot point. Technological and societal change is making it obsolete pretty fast. How many IT workers do you need onsite to maintain a plug and play chrome book with software as a service. Already being tested and deployed as I write this.
Which is another reason why I think Commuter operations need to look at RTO as a flash in the pan by old people who feared the change and loss of control. Also, I disagree that blue collar trades that work outdoors or in the field will be immune as many suggest they will. They are only saying that now because robots lack the dexterity at the moment. That is not a forever use case beyond the near term.
Wall Street is starting to discuss new methods of how to tax to avoid complete revenue collapse for the Federal Government. Tom Lee was discussing how robots will need to be taxed on Friday. 33% of wallets used for Bitcoin security will be hackable via Quantum computing and will need to be upgrading which of course impacts the blockchain they protect (Something Crypto holders should be worried about). Software as a service companies stock is plunging as I write this because Wall Street is now saying the per seat charge has to be rethought as an AI Agent can control many seats at once and Agentic AI can rewrite the software (look at SalesForce stock price). So you see change is happening faster than RTO implementation. Though I think Wall Street is oversold with their various theories now.
Sure. Alright, look: as someone who works in a repair shop and sometimes also helps with repairs in the field, weāre talking a matter of decadesāif not more than a centuryātill my job is obsolete. If thereās a robot that can reconnect the hydraulic lines on a certain valve underneath the cab of a specific Ford tractor, then I would like one. Since I doubt that such a thing is going to exist soon, Iāll have to go reconnect the lines myself in the meanwhile!
Thereās more than a lack of dexterity at play here: how much does it cost to pay someone part-time less than $20 an hour compared to how much one of these (currently not even available) robots might cost to purchase and maintain? Thatās the key pointāeven if manual labor is automated, somebodyās still got to fix the things when they break down!
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I tend to agree speaking as a retired old person. Recently I observed increased use of robots in the nearby Northwestern Med hospital, not just robotic surgery but also delivery of meds and other supplies. I donāt think AI will replace professionals (MDs PhDs, NPs, RNs) in diagnostics, only in screenings and less complex cases.
Strictly my opinions.
Speaking from experience: one of the first best applications for what we called AI/ES in the āolden daysā was a differential-diagnosis system developed at Mass General for ER presentation of suspected cardiac cases. The implementation caught and correctly identified all the cases confirmed by the attendings, and also several that were either missed or misdiagnosed by them.
This was back in the days that Soundex was high technologyā¦ unfortunately Soundex apparently is still too high a technology for modern systems to implement (and yes, Iām bitter about it).
No, you wouldnāt want the system running as default without human oversight and confirmation of results, and yes, the human might spend as much time confirming correct firing of rules and recursions as it might take to do the actual differential diagnosis classically. And perhaps more pointedly, you wouldnāt be able to check the processing at all using modern neural-network instantiations.
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Baysian approaches are not necessarily the best.
These threads seem to be drifting farther from Trains. And not much participation as interests dies
Thatās likely because they are using text-based approaches, not Bayesian rule-based logic. One of the points of the Mass General approach was that the rules were based on clinical observation and testing to assess and describe the symptoms, with the firing order of the rules following principles of cardiac differential diagnosis. In my opinion, any ātrainingā of something like a LLM that expects a reasonably effective diagnostic methodology to develop via emergent complexity would be at best unreliable and, if hallucinatory, potentially both dangerous and expensive.
Back to Northstarā¦one other issue regarding Covid was the shutdowns of businesses and industry lead to higher unemployment, meaning fewer tax dollars. Busses, light rail, and the Northstar are (were) all controlled by the Metro Transit Commission (MTC), part of the Metropolitan Council (Met Council) that coordinates a number of issues in the seven-county Twin Cities metro area.
If youāre in downtown Minneapolis, downtown St. Paul is about 10 miles east. Bloomington, the next largest city, is maybe 15 miles south. The light rail lines from Minneapolis to Bloomington (Twin Cities Intl Airport, Mall of America) or Minneapolis to St. Paul have been popular from the start, and supported by the area elected officials.
However, the Northstar ran from downtown Minneapolis out to the north and west. I can see where a state legislator from the southeast metro (like Newport) might not see how funding a commuter train thatās 25 miles away at itās closest would benefit your community. Plus the cost overruns on the new light rail line going west from Minneapolis didnāt help of course!
It seems to me via my reading they started out OK with Northstar but then lost interest and also failed to ramp it up to itās full potential by extending it further. From what I read, Minnesota did not want to spend money on improving BNSF track or meeting BNSF track improvement requests. I know yourself or someone earlier stated in the thread that money was not a problem but this point indicates otherwise.
Then covid came, they cut back and never restored service to what it used to be.
Another striking point, at least compared with TRE. I did not read about any bus service that intersected with the rail line or met the trains on their schedule for intermodal passengers? Only automobile inputs?
Also, I have a fairly dim view of passenger train advocacy up there as well. Does not seem they really embraced or supported this service.
There were connections to MTC bus lines at the Fridley, Riverdale, and Anoka stations, and a bus connection from Big Lake to St. Cloud. Part of the reason the Northstar line was built was that the northwest suburbs were somewhat underserved by MTC bus service.
As far as passenger train advocacy, important to remember about half of all Minnesotans live in the Twin Cities and tend to vote for one political party, and the rest of the folks spread out in the rest of the state tend to vote for the other party.
Those not in the Twin Cities tend to resent their tax money going to the Twin Cities. So when their party took control of the state House of Representatives, with a long-time anti-rail legislator becoming chairman of the House Transportation committee, it pretty much was the death knell for the Northstar.
That same pattern is seen in Illinois and on here, though in Illinois, ~3/4 live in the Chicago metro area where most of the economic activity is that provides 65-70% of state taxes.
Thereās a news story about how Loop office building sale prices have dropped dramatically, 60% to 80%. Tried to copy and paste link here but was unable to. Pointed out the impact of remote employment. Imagine taxes, poor government management, and crime havenāt helped either.
Very strange for prices and occupancy to do that given this:
"#1 U.S. metropolitan area for companies looking to relocate or expand, according to Site Selection Magazine.
With more than 600 corporate end-user facility projects in 2025, the Chicago area ranked No. 1 in the nation in Site Selectionās annual rankings, ahead of Houston, Dallas-Fort Worth, New York-Newark, and Atlanta."