it turns out that on 31 August, 1934 there was an incident here in which 110 people were killed or injured when the anti-Manchoukuo resistance blew up a Seoul-bound passenger train

For decades, China's only electrified suburban railway was a 300km-system in Fushun, an industrial city of a little over a million in Liaoning province. I wrote a little about it: kaptrice.blogspot.com/2025/11/the-...

Metrolinx publishing a meaningfully specific set of goals and the infrastructure work required to achieve it for GO Expansion? Am I dreaming?

I have a feeling this suffers heavily from the data completeness problems encountered by European-compiled indices lol

The advance into the modern metropolitan is weird, you have Braudel saying in the 70s that the whole world will one day look like the USA or Japan. Two very physically different routes into modern metropolitan structures, and they both really are so different from any traditional form.

For decades, China's only electrified suburban railway was a 300km-system in Fushun, an industrial city of a little over a million in Liaoning province. I wrote a little about it: kaptrice.blogspot.com/2025/11/the-...

Voici une carte interactive fascinante partagée cette semaine à Moteur de recherche par notre collaboratrice Annie Levasseur, prof-chercheure à @etsmtl.bsky.social: les échanges et l'intensité carbone des réseaux électriques en temps réel. app.electricitymaps.com/map/live/fif...

It's impressive how contemporary projects' budgeting practices in Canada are made of very thin actual analytical estimates based on quantities and unit prices on top of which there is an entire enormous castle of random percentages of percentages of percentages which are suspiciously multiples of 5.

i would like you all to know more about this world

apta ridership in 2-3 weeks I can't wait!

back of the envelope they are going to be paying $25 in debt service per swipe at the new stations

The difference in the time it takes a streetcar in Amsterdam vs. Toronto to clear an intersection after servicing a nearside stop.

It seems possible to me that they basically are just repeating, like a broken telephone, a message that is everywhere, mostly due to the deliberate perversion of our normal media channels through far-right propaganda, due to the artificial boosting of their messaging online.

"STEM" is insufficient for a modern economy. We need to make it "STEAM" by adding Artifice, to ensure a supply of cunningly-wrought golden birds for the Emperor, that sing by an arrangement of valves.

I have to wonder how these cars all found their way to Fushun and not the broader China Railway after the civil war.

Estimating from recent statements, GO rail ridership likely exceeded Metro-North for the first time in August. It was reported that 2025-08 ridership was 108.5% of 2019 levels, corresponding to about 6 million rail trips, the 2nd in North America. (Yes, including Mexico.)

i want to read this book so bad. actually, i want to read it and write about it in english. china's only(?) 20th century electric urban commuter railway is such an oddball

Finally, a sense of scale of the annoyingly long tunnel. I get why the Spadina Subway station was supposed to be called Lowther

Cool website by @albertguillaumes.cat showing station maps of most European and American underground stations (nice colouring of TfL axiomatics). stations.albertguillaumes.cat

The Bullet Train project found a strong backer in Shima Yasujiro, chairman of the Railway Trunk Line Investigatory Committee of the Showa 10s. He was father of Shima Hideo, who's more famous as the father of mainline EMUs and of the Shinkansen trains.

wondering whether this was with an operator inside like on the TTC side or on the CTSM side in UTO yard ops

The American centrist punditocracy has decided that what the US transit industry needs are endless lectures about the importance of security. These writers misunderstand the problem, and are making things worse. 1/ www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...

Certain political figures are drawn like racist caricatures seemingly at random. Prince Konoe? Kishi? Chiang? yes. Matsuoka? Xie Wendong (a northeastern bandit turned KMT general)? no

This is an opportunity for Canada to unburden itself from the gigantic American automobile trend. Half of the current surge in traffic congestion is driven by unreasonable vehicle size.

The standard—and not totally incorrect—narrative is that the US basically abandoned transit after WWII, but there was a real revival underway in the 1970s that stalled out by the mid-1980s as the political winds shifted. Things have improved since, but we've never fully recovered that ambition.

The planners of suburban Toronto are faced with the challenge: how do you fit 5000+ persons/km^2 without challenging the basic fabric of car-oriented suburbanisation? This is how they do it.

What a heavenly title

Until 1919 Ontario at least was all in on electric regional railways, on the premise of consolidating the various radials, heavily upgrading them, and linking them with new urban rights of way. If not for surprise political upheaval in the 1919 election such a system could well exist!

The culture of railway suburbs never developed in Toronto. The Belt Line of 1890 was a financial failure, and all subsequent suburban development was of the radials, which were fragile because of their cheapness and disappeared in the 20s-30s.

To be honest it just feels really weird to see Mongolian appear in manga lol

The courtyard urbanism account is such an odd vision of the world. A kind of euroboo posting that I just can't understand

You need to be reading the 90s manga about a half-Mongolian urchin who gets adopted by Ishiwara Kanji (???) and endeavours to recover his fragmented past by seeking out Leon Trotsky (?????)

western park chung-hee stanning but just the part where shady cliques of foreign army officers control the country

The foreboding 80s ad run by socialist-aligned railway union Kokuro prophesies: As in England, as in France... As in Japan. The 83 deficit lines are wiped from the map with a dramatic effect.

ratelimited on World Bank Open Data. the world was at my fingertips and i took it for granted

And this is true also for regional service on most lines that survived the cuts of the postwar years. Daily trains between Bologna and Imola (one direction) 1938 = 11 1975 = 21 1998 = 31 ( w/ 1 hourly-ish clockface IR regional express) 2025 = 58 (with 2 hourly clockface fast and 1-2 hourly locals)

We don't realize how radically different (and overall better) intercity rail travel is today in many European countries compared to before WWII, which is generally considered the peak of the railway era. trains per day, Milano-Roma (one direction) 1938 = 18 tomorrow = 91 five times more

Along with the Netherlands! Apparently Shima Hideo was influenced by the Mat'35 and Mat'36 plying Rotterdam-Amsterdam.

Part of this is driven by more significant "forcing" in the form of accumulated population pressures but it remains true that Canadian housing stock growth rates are not especially low.

Canada has one of the highest housing growth rates in the developed world, Spain has one of the lowest. pedestrianobservations.com/2023/03/21/n...

I have no idea how truthful the LIRR data is. it doesn't really seem to correlate with the linked-trip data given on the MTA data portal and the linked-trip numbers are much closer to those of the MNRR. i could believe Jamaica transfers add a lot but the curve is so strangely level

In order to solve its housing crisis Germany should embrace its Turkish citizens and allow this style of building in Germany

i'd love to see a Sentetsu express timetable from 1945 after all the double-trackings were completed

not too sure what's going on here but in Colfax, Denver block after block of detached houses seem to have been replaced by townhouse strips

All of a sudden, I want to know more about tariff and fare harmonisation + co-operative services between the South Manchuria and Manchoukuo National railways and the Chōsen Government Railway

Somehow, there have been 2 entirely different Japanese-run double-track standard gauge railways with sister express services named Hikari and Nozomi. entirely by coincidence

what's this, you say? a crisis of global overproduction in the '30s, you say?

These elevator retrofits would not comply with the design guidelines of many NA transit agencies. Left: The elevator is in the stairs' surge zone, and the elevators's landing area overlaps with the clear zone of the faregates. Right: the elevators open directly into the platform's edge.

Prior to the Interstate Highway System the world of expressways is really weird. You have -a handful of private ventures in high-motorisation USA -the <500km Italian network -the Reichsautobahn, largest network by far -like 20km in Manchuria The main promoters were fascists chasing ultramodernity