On my map blog, The Map Room, a couple of recent posts about subway maps: Madrid’s new metro map is encountering some resistance; a designer is trying to get his new map of the New York subway into circulation. In both cases, the new maps are so different from their predecessors that, even if they’re […]
Heavy snow derailed a Norwegian train between Bergen and Oslo on Monday morning; a second train sent in to assist got stuck in snowdrifts, so about 130 passengers were stuck on board for most of the day. No injuries. Ottawa’s light rail expansion project, killed in December, showed some signs of revival last week, but […]
Metroland is a web site about the London Underground’s Metropolitan Line, in particular its service to Amersham, a station (and town) northwest of London which also has mainline commuter rail service. The site is a source of all kinds of material and minutiae about Amersham and the line, including old photos, timetables and material about […]
This company dreams of inexpensive monorails — at a cost a fraction that of existing lines — with trainsets built from used Boeing airplane fuselages. Frankly I can’t see how this will work — the trainsets are not usually the most expensive part of a rapid-transit system — but, as far as I can tell, […]
Treehugger reports on the opening of a new light-rail line in Buenos Aires after an absence of 50 years. (If you can read Spanish, the article is here; I haven’t been able to find any other reports.) The line, dubbed “Celeris,” uses modern trainsets from Alstom; from the photo it appears that it uses third-rail […]
This is a project that imagines personal transportation — frequently a tapis volant (flying carpet) on which someone sits cross-legged — on disused or abandoned city rail lines: in particular, the petite ceinture surrounding Paris, but other localities are imagined as well. In most of the photos, the vehicles are inserted via Photoshop, but others […]
Steve Cox changes his mind, reintegrates his N-scale model railroad and railfanning blogs back into a single blog (previously). Marcel Marchon found some more rail and transit blogs a couple of weeks back. Highlights include transit blogs Transit Sleuth and Live from the Third Rail, both of which covers rail transit issues from light rail […]
What does it take to move 15,000 people per hour using various forms of transportation? This diagram shows that a street would require 17 lanes, a freeway would require seven lanes, but light rail, subways and other rail systems could do it with a double-track line — and with capacity to spare. To put it […]
To follow up on my previous post, Ottawa’s city council has voted to choose neither plan to expand its light rail line, forgoing something like $400 million in federal and provincial funding and risking $250-300 million in claims from contractors on whom the city has now cancelled. The city has already spent $65 million; the […]
I live about an hour outside Ottawa, Canada’s capital city, and lately there have been a couple of local rail-related stories that you might find interesting. First, Ottawa’s city council voted last week to revise a proposed expansion of their experimental light-rail project, the O-Train, which currently uses diesel-powered trainsets on existing (former CP) track, […]
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