Amtrak and other U.S. passenger carriers take note!!!
http://www.cs.umd.edu/~nanda/Personal/Collections/OverCrowded.jpg
Nothing new! Anyone able to post some 1945-1946 shots of New Haven’s West Chapel Street with open cars going to and from the Yale Bowl games?
A recent traveller’s guide to India allegedly contained the following remark:
“Electrification has done much to reduce the number of people travelling on the roof”
I wonder how the conductor collects the fares.
Here’s another suggestion that seems approprite given that this story begain in India…provide each and every prospective rider a cup of really strong and typically lousy 7-11 ten hour old coffee and force them to drink it about four hours before train departure time and also provide the appropriate number of toilets to take care of the resulting “discharge” and the resulting reduction in overall passenger weight will make room for even more passengers.
I guess there are various modes of increasing passenger capacity – 3+2 seating on commuter trains, “pushers” to crowd in a few more standees, I read that Japan has a “widebody” double-deck bullet train with 3+2 seating on the lower deck, 3+3 seating on the upper deck.
Colorado Railcars is promoting a double-decker (DMU and trailer), but a true double decker – full length decks on both levels, and a height from railhead to tippy top of those rooftop radiator fans of 20’ 10" – this is beyond Superliner height, beyond double-stack height, this is in AutoMax territory. How is this supposed to run with soft enough springs for passenger service without tipping over from side sway?
Well, this is my third try to get this posting accepted. Please wish me luck.
I have an article from the October 3, 2003 edition of the London Sunday Times that follows this theme. The photo shows people all over the engine and cars of the train and the caption reads “This is the 8.15 to Mumbai. It is carrying Indian commuters, on the way to do YOUR JOB” One can only guess the jist of the article. Of interest in the picture are the rods running from an armstrong tower (behind the camera, darn!) to switches and the engine having both knuckle and hook and eye couplers. Just wonder how the engineer can see where he is going with all the people on the train. I will try to get the picture scanned and post it on this site.
Guy standing on coupler: “Gee, I hope nobody decides to run a gate today…”
I guess we all make jokes about India and the business about Asian outsourcing and people riding on the rooftops of the train cars, and we all have seen the David Attenborough/Ben Kingsly movie “Gandhi” and seen the people up on the rooftops, but hey, it looks like people are riding the trains. All of the pictures I have seen of the interiors of the Pacific Surfliner trains shows hardly anyone occupying the seats.
Air travel used to be fun during the regulation days when often times in off-peak times there was hardly anyone on the plane and you could have the armrest all to yourself, but I guess the airlines these days would have people riding on the wings if they were permitted. Part of the advantage of rail travel is that you have a lot of room compared with other modes, but rail travel is subsidized (yeah, yeah, the other modes are subsidized too, but they manage to pay their direct operating costs). Making rail cost competitive may involve packing a few more people in.
The Aerotrain was created by making railcars out of bus bodies. Maybe India has found a use for the retired London double-decker buses.
As I understand it, grade crossing gates are attended (manually operated), so there’s someone to make sure the crossing is cleared. It’s not surprising therefore that Indian Railways has 1.6 million employees. Their total track length is 67,000 miles. In contrast, as of 2004 U.S. railroads operate 140,806 miles of track with a mere 251,000 employees.