There were a few news reports on June 27th of an Amtrak train from Chicago that was stranded overnight in Iowa because of a bridge wash out. This was the westbound California Zephyr leaving Chicago on Friday the 26th of June. What was not reported was that this train arrived at Emeryville 36 hours and…

The interview in the June 30th Los Angeles Times by reporter Dan Weikel with Art Leahy gave some hints of what the future plans for Metrolink are. What was missing in the interview was background information about what was discussed. Leahy in the interview makes it clear that his priorities are dealing with the problems…

The State of California’s official policy is to reduce its emission of Greenhouse Gases (GHG) 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050. The Governor recently set a new goal to insure the 2050 goal is met by executive order for the State to cut its GHG emissions to 40 percent below those of 1990 by…

Almost every town that has railroad tracks with passenger rail service on them would love to have a train station. If a town has a train station, it would love to have every passenger train going past to stop at its station.The problem with that is if every train stopped at every station, you would…

The recent crash of Amtrak Train 118 in Philadelphia on May 12th set off a series of rhetorical contortions that tried to “blame” this crash on a lack of funding for the Northeast Corridor (NEC). As it turned out the crash was the result of human error. The errors were on the part of both…

The derailment by a speeding Amtrak train this May in Philadelphia resulting in 8 deaths and over a hundred injuries of passengers has recently dominated the headlines. As spectacular and avoidable as such train accidents are, the majority of the damage and deaths occur on the railroads at grade crossings and trespassers on railroad rights…

Begun in 1967 with one commuter rail line, Go Transit now has 7 lines. Daily ridership on Go Transit trains is 215,000. This is carried with 1,500 train trips a week. The Province of Ontario this April announced a 13.5 billion dollar plan which will electrify 5 of the 7 rail lines by 2024.By 2020…

Sacramento is the State Capitol of California. If not just for that reason alone there is quite a bit of travel to Sacramento for government related business and tourism. Sacramento is also a major metropolitan area of almost 2 million people. Sacramento because of geography is a natural transportation hub. But despite all of this…

Since the Anaheim Regional Transportation Intermodal Center (ARTIC) opened late last year, some local media in Orange County have been complaining about it not being an overnight success. To get some prospective we need to look at some of the problems the old Amtrak station had in Anaheim and what the future holds for ARTIC.…

I’ve seen this before, and it didn’t go well the other times it was tried. Congress is pressuring Amtrak to “save money” again. This is particularly true on food service and long distance trains. We will likely see Amtrak raising prices and cutting back on food service. We will continue to see Amtrak running shorter…