looshi

The minutes from SORTA's last planning meeting include a report recommending the disposition of it's rail assets: https://www.go-metro.com/uploads/Infrastructure%2C Bike and ROW Packet (7-20).pdf

More exaggeraed reporting from Cincinnati.com on this one. There is the possibility of a handful of special excursions this summer. There is no talk about a regular excursion service. Details are still being worked out with the railroad ownership. Nothing has been publically announced, but you can check out a sneak preview of what is being planned on https://www.ohiorailexperience.com/. Please note that this schedule is not final and things can change.

Yes this is the route of the Cardinal. It's single track from Orange (east of Charlottesville) until Clifton Forge where it re-joins the C&O main. This is the old main and is currently leased by CSX to the Buckingham Branch railroad, one of the few Class III shortlines to host Amtrak.

Due to the fixed-cost nature of rail it is harder to justify a seasonal service. Say NS requires a passenger siding of $10 million for regular service (for example). It is a lot easier to spread that cost over 365 trains per year (or more) than 20 trains over the course of the summer. The other big issue you will run into with a non-Amtrak operator is insurance. I have heard Iowa Pacific was required to provide a $200 million dollar liability policy to operate the Hoosier State (using Amtrak crews). This is why a lot of seasonal excursion trips like the New River Train are run as Amtrak charters. Anything is possible with enough time and money, but it would be a challenge. I could see maybe a special event Amtrak charter, or an annual train at best, but I think anything beyond that would start running into the roadblocks above.

I also had to disable SPDY to access the site via my install of Firefox. I haven't run into any other sites with the same issue. I think the problem started around the last time the server was down for upgrades. If anyone else runs into the problem, this is the preference I changed in about:config in Firefox. about:config with network.http.spdy.enabled

It's not that uncommon. The Lebanon UDF has no pumps. However I can't think of a new location they've opened that was not a gas station. Most of the ones I can think of are older locations.

Will today's Acela trainsets replace conventional trains in the Northeast Corridor? Or will they be scrapped? The units that are on long-term lease from Bombardier will be returned and the ones owned by Amtrak will be scrapped.

Milacron is planning on demolishing most of the offices. They needed way too much work to be brought up to code and were practically falling apart. They are keeping the Cimcool lab and the Cimcool production facility as it would be very expensive to cleanup the existing site and move to a new facility. I would expect they would keep the curved spur that Cimcool uses. Don't know if you could use the third track on the ex-B&O, but the freight railroads would probably be against it. That line is owned by CSX and the track is leased to the I&O.

Solari was a famous manufacturer of this type of mechanical display. There are very few of them left because of the intensive maintenance of all the mechanical parts. There still is a well-known one at 30th Street in Philadelphia.

I've ridden the Cardinal 7 or 8 times out of Cincinnati. Anecdotally, ridership is normally around 20-50 people training and detraining per trip at Union Terminal. One thing to keep in mind is that in it's normal configuration the Cardinal's capacity is around 175 riders (50 per coach + 25 in the sleeper). So that 306 riders each direction includes each seat turning more than once. Amtrak is short cars right now. They were able to bump the Cardinal to 4 coaches and 2 sleepers during the holidays, but that required rearranging the maintenance schedules, and it's running with only 2 coaches right now. Normally about 3/4ths of a coach turns at Cincinnati. I think that's impressive giving the crappy call times and schedule.

Tried that... but apparently being in the KY portion of Cincinnati's tri-state area is preventing me from doing so: "This action is not available to people in your area." It's not available for Ohio zip codes either.

I found this fascinating: Apparently the Kasich administration doesn't want to just kill passenger rail planning. They want to bury it and make sure it never comes back.

Todd Portune is still beating the Eastern Corridor drum. There's a whole slew of these videos that were posted by OKI around the beginning of the month.

What makes it more complicated than the rest of the line? I would have expected the diamond to be the most complex.

I think it comes down to the ultimate goal for transit in Cincinnati. Do we want to dedicated-ROW light-rail system with the streetcar serving as a pedestrian circulator? Or do we want more of a hybrid approach, with the streetcar serving as the core of the system, with higher speed lines radiating away from the city? Some of the recent press that described the streetcar as "built to light-rail specification" seemed to favor this idea. The hybrid approach would essentially be rebuilding the interurban system, with all the pitfalls it had . Slow running on surface streets in the city increased trip times significantly. Part of the rational for the subway was to get the interurbans into downtown quicker. But it would probably be a lot more cheaper, possibly with a better ROI than a larger light-rail system.