By Noel T. Braymer For years in the past the Greyhound Bus Company complained about how unfair it was that as a private business it had to “compete” with Amtrak which received a government subsidy. An example of this is a California State Law, Senate Bill 804 (Perata) for the year 1999 which Greyhound sponsored.…
By David B. Kutrosky, Managing Director Capitol Corridor Joint Powers Authority Year-over-year ridership on the Capitol Corridor trains was even with last September. 132,937 passengers rode the Capitol Corridor trains in September 2013, closing out FY 2013 with a total of 1.70 million riders and representing a 2.6% decrease in riders compared to FY 2012.…
By Noel T. Braymer It is no secret that the key to being profitable is to bring in more money than you spend. To run a profitable passenger railroad the keys are maximizing productivity and increasing revenue with increased ridership. Here are basic steps that other successful transportation services use to do more than just…
By Noel T. Braymer I wasn’t in the mood this time to ride buses for 2 night in a row for this year’s meeting in San Francisco. So I got a flight out of San Diego at 7:56 AM for an arrival at 9:35 AM at San Francisco. Since the first Coaster Train to San…
By Noel T. Braymer Recently there was excitement among techno-geeks about a patent application by the Tesla electric car company for a hybrid metal-air/lithium ion battery car. The speculation was this could be Tesla’s 400 mile range electric car it has been working on. So what is a hybrid metal-air/lithium ion car? The idea is to…
Here are this month’s 5 photos by RailPAC photographers. Click on each photo to see it full size! Contributions to this page are welcome. Send your jpg rail photos to RailPAC Photo Editor, at [email protected]. 1. Two Metrolink trains connected together, at the Oceanside Transit Center. On September 20 RailPAC’s Noel Braymer was on board.…
By Noel T. Braymer The prospects for the future of the Southwest Chief don’t look good. The BNSF has made it clear that they will not spend more money on the route between Albuquerque, New Mexico and Newton, Kansas to maintain the tracks to passengers standards with so little freight traffic on them. BNSF wants…