FRN

Nice panning shot of an ICE departing Zürich station. Photo by Dreamer7112.

Marcel has the best blogroll, where I discover the following blogs about trains, most with a fairly specific focus: Alta Velocidad Ferroviaria is a Spanish-language blog about high-speed rail. Amtrak Tracking for My Commute Between New York City and Philadelphia‘s title is self-explanatory — it started as a way of tracking Amtrak’s on-time performance — [...]

A German ICE (Inter-City Express) leaves Berlin in the snow; this photo was apparently taken about a year ago. Photo by JoJo4Art.

Travel blog Gadling has a post about the Eurostar’s move to St. Pancras Station next year but, mystifyingly, links to a two-year-old press release about it. A more recent press release fixes November 14, 2007 as the date when Eurostar will move its London terminal from Waterloo to St. Pancras. The move will mean dedicated [...]

Though it’s been in testing since the spring of last year, and there are photos of it on Flickr (see, for example, hiziri‘s photo at right), the N700-series Shinkansen — the main feature of which is that it adds tilting technology so that it can maintain higher speeds on tighter curves — made its press [...]

A long, seven-page article on high-speed rail in Spain, which network is called AVE, from a special advertising section in MIT’s Technology Review. A good read, but technical. High-speed rail had more than its fair share of challenges in that country: Spain’s national rail network, RENFE, was dilapidated compared with other countries, and it was [...]

A Thalys — essentially a TGV for Belgium and the Netherlands — passes at speed. Photo by Patricks Pics.

USA Today has a story about the new, higher-speed passenger trains on the upgraded, electrified line between Philadelphia and Harrisburg, and segues into the general lack of success faced by high-speed rail proposals in the U.S. since the federal government began designating high-speed rail corridors in the 1990s.