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Sunday Train: The Ends of Amtrak
At the beginning of last month, Paul Druce of "Reason & Rail" discussed the possible impact of the pending upgrade of the Amtrak Acela route in Acela II is the path towards Amtrak operational...
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Sunday Train: Cap&Trade Funds should help finance the California HSR
An encore of a Sunday Train from 22 April, 2012, on a topic that has come back in the newsBurning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy IndependenceOne element of the recent California HSR "revised" draft...
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Sunday Train: Four Rules for Transit-Oriented Development from Five leaders
This week's Sunday Train features a piece from John Karras' urbanSCALE.com, How Your City Can Succeed In Transit Oriented Development. John looks at DC, Portland, Denver, Salt Lake City and Cleveland...
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Sunday Train: Car Subsidies & Ebbing Vehicles Miles Travelled
Earlier this month, the philly.com from the Philadelphia Inquirer carried a story, Drop in traffic on area highways forces review of plans. It cites several "area" road funding decisions based on...
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Sunday Train: Our Trebly Broken Highway Funding System
Over the balance of this year, you are likely to hear more and more about our broken Highway Funding system. For instance, William Moore, of the consultancy group Vianovo and member of the...
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Sunday Train: Koch Brothers Aim to Screw Tennessee Transit Riders & Motorists
In a move to squash the freedom and local political autonomy of Nashville residents, the Koch Brothers-finded Americans For Prosperity turn out to be supporting a proposed State of Tennessee law...
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Sunday Train: Transport Cycling and Austin's Awesome Bike Plan
Last week, I came across a post at People for Bike, called Four Simple Lessons from Austin's Brilliant Bike Plan Update ... and after reading the post, I clicked on through to the overview of the Bike...
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Sunday Train: What's in SUPERTRAINS for Small Town and Rural America?
{Reprinted from the Hillbilly Report.org, April 21, 2009.} { Except for updating images to correct for link rot, edits in braces and italics.}This last weekend I wrote up a small diary, cross-posted to...
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Sunday Train: Freight Transport and the Highway Funding Crisis
We are going to be hearing increasingly this year about the Highway Funding Crisis. Much of that discussion will be directed toward exploiting the political leverage that our car addiction gives to the...
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Sunday Train: GOP Transport Bill proposes to Cut That TIGER
I guess Sunday Train did not cover the White House transport proposal, which put forward a $302b 4-year surface transportation authorization, more than $20b per year higher than current levels. With...
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Sunday Train: A "Bipartisan" Transport Bill You Can Support
For me, when I hear the word "bipartisan", my first reaction is to brace myself to confront a piece of corporate mischief making being peddled under the excuse that there is some other piece of...
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Sunday Train: The Solar Fight, Is Going Right, Deep in the Heart of Texas ...
Well, what do you know? I look around, and see a story saying Solar power gains momentum after long struggle in Texas. And not in "Grist" or "Solar Energy News!" or any such ... but in the Dallas...
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Sunday Train: California HSR Receives Cap & Trade Funding in Budget Deal
Sunday Train has covered the California HSR project on a number of occasions in the past. However, there was no special attention given to what was widely covered at the time as the "end of California...
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Sunday Train: Improving the Conventional Amtrak California services
I'm a terrible tease ~ that is, in the sense of "not terribly good at it" ~ since I teased more on Texas Rooftop Solar, both two weeks ago when I talked about Texas Utility Scale Solar, and last week...
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Sunday Train: Is There A Beam of Hope for Texas Rooftop Solar?
A few weeks back, I teased that I wanted to take a bit of a look at Texas Rooftop Solar in the Sunday Train (which is, recall, focused on Sustainable Transport & Energy, and so both not just about...
View ArticleHobby Lobby Corporation Speaks Out Against Human Owners
While attempting to reach the owners of the Hobby Lobby corporation for comment, an attempt that proved ultimately fruitless, your reporter was fortunate to be brought into contact with the person...
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Sunday Train: Thinking About a Bakersfield Express Bypass
From the Sunday TrainSince Gov. Brown saved the California HSR project for the second time (the first time was in 2012), I've had a look at the general issue of funding HSR with Cap and Trade, and...
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Sunday Train: Crutches vs Splints for the Highway Fund's Broken Leg
There was a gleam of hope this week for state officials faced with the prospects of having to start delaying projects and lay off people working on maintenance and new construction funded from the...
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Sunday Train: What Future for America's Deadly Cul-de-Sacs?
The Great Recession of 2007-2009 triggered the Depression that we appear to be exiting this summer. And it was triggered by the collapse of the Great Turn of the Century Suburban Housing Bubble.In...
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Sunday Train: HSR from Houston to Dallas one step closer to reality
The Texas Department of Transport and Federal Railway Authority announced in June that they were beginning an Environmental Impact Study for the proposed private Texas Central Railways (TCR) High Speed...
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Sunday Train: Fast and Slow Transit Should be Friends
As noted this week at The Overhead Wire:There has been a lot of chatter recently on the issue of fast vs slow transit. This week is the perfect time for this discussion as two major United States...
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Sunday Train: The Era of Reverse Pumped Hydro
In a sense, Sunday Train has been mentioning reverse pumped hydro before the Sunday Train actually existed. In 2007 at Daily Kos, in "Driving Ohio on Lake Erie" (reprinted in 2012 at Burning the...
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Sunday Train: The Two Transitions to A Renewable Electricity Supply
The topic for this week's Sunday Train was brought to my mind when I listened to the Energy Gang podcast. They were discussing the question of whether "CSP (that is, concentrated thermal solar power)...
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Sunday Train: Yet Another Airport Terminal Station Opens on Dallas's Orange Line
YAATS (Yet Another Airport Terminal Station) has opened in Dallas for the "orange line" in the Dallas Area Regional Transit light rail system. This is not at the regional airport Love Field, even...
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Sunday Train: NEC High Speed Rail for Under $20b (from 15Jul2012)
Sunday Train this week is a re-run from 15 July, 2012Burning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy IndependenceOne of the transit bloggers that I enjoy reading is Alon Levy who blogs his observations on a...
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Sunday Train: Reflections on a visit to the East Coast
Cross-posted from The Sunday Train ~ apologies for the jet-lag induced cross-posting delaysYour intrepid sustainable energy and transport reporter was recently required to engage in some official...
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Sunday Train: Future of Rail Technical Symposium, Washington DC. 3 Feb, 2015
Last week in Washington DC, your Sunday Train correspondent was able to attend the "Future of Rail Symposium" held in Washington DC. The presenters discussed various aspects of building a Steel...
View ArticleSunday Train: On Amtrak, I've got some good news, and some bad news.
This last week, there was the surprising start to a headline in the Washington Post that began, "GOP House and White House agree on something" ... and that something was: Amtrak funding (and pets on a...
View ArticleSunday Train: Five Levels of US Intercity Rail Policy
Daily Kos does not want me to post this story ... that is, the diary editor cannot handle the drop-outs in my WiFi here at University in Beijing, so it keeps giving me a fresh "new diary" page every...
View ArticleSunday Train: The Hole in the PA Keystone West Feasibility Study
One of the things I was waiting on last year was delivery of Pennsylvania's feasibility study for improvements on the "Keystone West" corridor. The "Keystone East" corridor connecting Harrisburg and...
View ArticleSunday Train: A Steel Interstate for the Keystone West Corridor
In the last Sunday Train, I talked about the study on Keystone West improvements commissioned by the PennDOT. This study finds that upgrades are expensive, and benefits are modest, in terms of allowing...
View ArticleSunday Train: Variable Renewables and Dispatchable Demand
Much of the focus on the Sunday Train is on electrification of transport, ranging from 2,000 mile hauls of electrified freight through to hopping on an e-bike to pick up some groceries. And spending...
View ArticleSunday Train: Benefits of the Maryland Red and Purple Lines
Just as national attention has been focused on the sections of Baltimore that have been largely locked out of the revival of economic activity in downtown Baltimore and the Inner Harbor, the new...
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Sunday Train: In Worrying News, Non-Petroleum in Transport Hits 60-year High
The US Energy Information Administration released a story last week which sounded like good news: Nonpetroleum Share of Transportation Energy at Highest Level Since 1954. "Since 1954" means, since...
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Sunday Train: Making An Energy Revolution
Writing for Politico, "Energy Visionary" Vaclav Smil writes in Revolution? More like a crawl:Undoubtedly, the U.S. is experiencing two notable energy transitions, from coal to natural gas and from...
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Sunday Train: The New Gulf Wind, NOLA to Orlando
In this September's Trains magazine{+}, Bob Johnston looks at the history and current state of play of the eastern section of the Sunset Limited route, running from New Orleans through to, most of the...
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Sunday Train: Cuomo Backs the Worst Air Train to LaGuardia
Back in January, Yonah Freemark covered the news that Governor Andrew Cuomo proposed a genuine clunk of an Air Train to La Guardia airport. The proposal was, as Yonah Freemark put it, "an AirTrain that...
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Sunday Train: Can Nuclear and Renewable Energy Be Friends?
There is an ongoing general discussion in the field of sustainable energy that does not carry the risk of the destruction of our current industrial society and economy about variable renewable...
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Sunday Train: Hobbling & Liberating Renewables with Markets
A concept that has been percolating into debates over the feasibility or desirability of moving to an all-renewables, no/low carbon energy supply system is the ceiling on what percentage share of our...
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Sunday Train: First California HSR Service to connect Bay & San Joaquin...
A mock-up of a possible California HS Train designHey, long time no see!The Sunday Train was on hiatus during the Chinese Fall Semester, as I had four sections to teach four hours a week with two new...
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Sunday Train: Washington State Labor Council support Steel Interstate...
Sunday Train has long supported the Steel Interstateconcept … but Sunday Train is “merely” an online activity composed of my online blogging in various forums and your discussion in various...
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Sunday Train: Adventures on the Beijing Subway
I have ridden the Beijing Subway and lived to tell the tale!xYouTube VideoOf course, the youtube clips you might be able to find about incredible overcrowding on the Beijing subway is just part of the...
View ArticleSunday Train: Rapid Passenger Rail moving ahead
As you are probably well aware, the US Government is gridlocked, which means that for years and years, nothing has been getting done.However, because of the appropriations for "High Speed Rail" in 2009...
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Sunday Train: A Cycle Track In Downtown Akron
This past Thursday, thanks to twitter, I learned that just one county to my west, a Cycle Track was being opened: Akron opens new bike trail through downtown:The path is part of the city’s effort to...
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Sunday Train: Sleeping On A Trip, In Transit
Patent application for the original Slumbercoach, passenger capacity halfway between coach and traditional sleepersWell, as they say, the best laid plans of mice and men gang aft aglay ... and so when...
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Sunday Train: Going to Tianjin by Subway and High Speed Rail
OK, so after years of (off and on) writing about High Speed Rail, I've finally been on a High Speed Rail train ... on the Beijing - Tianjin Intercity Railway.Though I have to say that I went to Tianjin...
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Sunday Train: An Ohio Universities Rail System, Part 1 (Southern &...
Well, the 2016 High Speed Rail unlock has been postponed to 2018 or 2020.When transportation policy at the Federal level is grabbed with both hands by the Oil and Gas death lobby, we have to turn to...
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Sunday Train: Is Cuomo Dragging His Feet on the Empire Rapid Rail Corridor?
It's been two and a half years since I started working full time for my University here in Beijing, and in that time, the frequency of the Sunday Train dropped from once a week a week with only the...
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Sunday Train: The Steel Interstate & Sustainable Transport in the Age of...
So, we are two weeks into the Trump administration, and we see a runaway rush to promote economic suicide through pandering to oil and coal companies. Because, it would seem, the slogan was really...
View ArticleTime to Create a Term Limit on Serving on the Supreme Court
This essay is inspired in general by the retirement of Justice Kennedy, leaving the ideologically driven radical reactionaries that have taken over the Republican Party within reach of their long time...
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