This is the 300th week of this blog! I’ll return to the subject of the first blog I wrote on 28 April 2019, trains. After this week I’ll go to a posting schedule of less than once a week. It’s going to be a busy semester ahead and although I really enjoy writing about something …
Continue reading “Dallas High Speed Train & Other High-Speed Rail Projects”
Pikes Peak is one of Colorado’s fifty-three “fourteeners,” or mountains that have an elevation of at least 14,000 feet (4267 m). The mountain is named after an American explorer with a legendary name, Zebulon Montgomery Pike, although he himself never managed to get to the top of the mountain. At 14,115 feet (4302 m) above …
The Lehigh Valley Railroad (LVR) went into service in 1846 in the northeastern US. Its main purpose was to transport anthracite coal from northeastern Pennsylvania to New York City and Philadelphia. By the end of the 19th century, the LVR wanted to get into the passenger train business. There was demand for a route between …
Continue reading “A Brief Overview of The Black Diamond Express”
By the mid-1850s, the city of New York was faced with severe traffic congestion. Engineers and city planners in the metropolis came up with a variety of different ideas to try to solve this problem. Last week’s blog covered an attempt to build a railway underground, an idea which would take several decades to come …
Continue reading “New York City’s 19th Century Elevated Railroad”
In the late 1800s, many of the growing American cities suffered from a woeful state of public transport. The streets were terribly congested, and fights often broke out in the areas most prone to traffic jams. One potential idea to alleviate the traffic congestion was to build a railway underground. One challenge of building underground …
Continue reading “New York’s 19th-Century Pneumatic Experiment: Its first Subway”
The Panama Canal is a well-known corridor through central American that allows the cheap transportation of goods from the Atlantic to Pacific Ocean. Opened back in 1914 and preceded by the Panama Canal Railway in the 1800s, this water channel through a narrow strip of central America is key to delivering goods for the global …
On 5 February 2023, fifty cars of a train derailed in East Palestine, an Ohio town near the border of Pennsylvania. The train cars contained, among other things, vinyl chloride, a substance that raises the risk of developing several types of cancers. The derailment caused an enormous fire that required the evacuation of a three-square …
Continue reading “Almost A Year since the East Palestine, Ohio Disaster”
Hydrogen trains are those that use the element hydrogen as their source of fuel. The hydrogen generates electrical energy in a fuel cell when oxygen is added, and steam containing water vapor is the only output. Electrolysis, or the splitting of water into hydrogen and oxygen, is the process used to obtain the hydrogen for …
In 2018, Brightline became the first private intercity passenger service to open in the US in over 100 years. This rail line with its distinct yellow-patterned trains began on a 70-mile (112-km) stretch of track between Miami and West Palm Beach. The operation soon expanded to cover Fort Lauderdale, Aventura, and Boca Raton. In September …
On 24 June, a train ferrying hazardous materials derailed into the Yellowstone River in Montana after the bridge it was traveling over collapsed. A number of cars carrying molten sulfur and asphalt were damaged and leaked their contents into the river. According to initial reports, the molten sulfur and asphalt solidified on contact with the …
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