SPUG: railroad bandwidth (was: Ride to Oscon?)

Carroll, Frank frank.carroll at wamu.net
Sun Jun 24 00:19:58 PDT 2007


There's a short but interesting article about presence of high-speed
rail in just about every developed nation except for the U.S. in the
latest edition of Wired.  It mentions that the airline lobbyists are
effectively fighting against the development of high-speed rail here in
the states.

Good luck finding a ride, Mr Kimball.  I won't be attending the
conference or I'd probably ride the train with you.



-----Original Message-----
From: spug-list-bounces+frank.carroll=wamu.net at pm.org
[mailto:spug-list-bounces+frank.carroll=wamu.net at pm.org] On Behalf Of
Mike Schuh
Sent: Friday, June 22, 2007 12:29 PM
To: 'Perl Users Group'
Subject: Re: SPUG: railroad bandwidth (was: Ride to Oscon?)

On Fri, 22 Jun 2007, John Costello wrote:

>On Thu, 21 Jun 2007, Bill Campbell wrote:
>> Train service from Seattle to Portland is reasonably reliable, but 
>> the Portland to Seattle trains are commonly hours late.
>
>The problem isn't scheduling as much as that Amtrak has to yield 
>right-of-track to freight trains, which often delays the trains.

Amtrak trains along the I-5 corridor routinely pass waiting freight
trains (I've experienced this many times between Portland and Seattle).
Nonetheless, the passenger trains are often delayed and occasionally
significantly late.

The problem (to couch it in IT geek terms) is that the bandwidth of the
rail lines south of Seattle has been oversubscribed.  BNSF (who owns the
tracks and has experienced significant growth in freight traffic), WSDOT
(who actually owns track and rail cars elsewhere in the state), Sound
Transit and AMTRAK are working on alleviating this.  Ultimately,
portions of the corridor will become four tracks - two for passenger
service, two for freight.  Passenger speed limits will be increased to
at least 79 MPH for the entire corridor, and possibly to 110 MPH
(Amtrak's Acela trains in the Northeast Corridor reach 150 MPH).  If the
latter limit could be maintained for the entire route, then we'd have
two hour service to Portland...  (WSDOT's goal for 2023 is 2 1/2 hours,
an hour faster than today's travel time)

 http://www.wsdot.wa.gov/rail
 http://www.wsdot.wa.gov/projects/rail
 
http://www.wsdot.wa.gov/NR/rdonlyres/E768E7BA-4788-42B1-ADC8-1BE01D1424E
7/0/DraftLongRangePlanAmtrakCascades.pdf

All of which is probably more than y'all wanted/needed to know...

We now return you to our discussion of interpolated print strings, which
is already in progress.  Enjoy.

--
Mike Schuh - Seattle, Washington USA
http://www.farmdale.com
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