Featuring California’s iconic under train sprinklers

All that is new is old again. I was trawling and noticed the BR-LUL study on crossrail from the late 80s recommended crossrail 2 on virtually the same core alignment that Springbett and Levy have suggested in critique of the extant proposal. www.railwaysarchive.co.uk/documents/Do...

these axes being unserved would seem sub-optimal

now thats an anecdote with a punch, from Gillian Tett www.ft.com/content/c0ae...

Europeans encountering the physical plant of our railroads always makes me chuckle. Yeah they absolutely suck, and you’ve got no idea how bad it can get. Thankfully it let the class 1 railroads to pay a bunch of money out to shareholders though ☠️

Why does the Newcastle electrified network get so little ridership?

Can we get the cost guard to reduce the minimum bridge height? Maybe that gets light rail to Ballard at a lower cost than a tunnel

For an unknown period of time, 22,000 gallons of jet fuel spilled into the Piscataway Creek, which feeds into the Potomac River, at Joint Base Andrews. The Defense Department took months to notify Maryland. @notus.com

The idea that Will Stancil's one bedroom apartment means he "lives in better conditions than most 30-40 year old Americans" is not borne out by Census data. In 2024, 57.9% of Americans age 30-34 and 65.8% of Americans age 35-39 owned their homes. Roughly 85% of owned homes are single family houses.

Why does the Newcastle electrified network get so little ridership?

It did look familiar Right: the Italian standard direction road sign for the station

You want to see some full insanity? This post claims that saying you live in a one bedroom apartment is boasting about your living conditions.

My periodic reminder that 73% of all jobs in the 4 County milwaukee area are in Super-Milwaukee (milwaukee city limits plus 5 miles). The large majority of jobs are in the city and it's adjacent suburbs close to the city limits.

Notably metro’s train operators do not drive the trains nowadays. Their responsibility is safely closing the doors.

Learning about the existence of “Crossrail Aberdeen” [running the trains they already have on a half-hourly schedule from Inverurie and running some of those through Aberdeen to Montrose]

When I am prime despot of canada my slopulist promise is to build a “Crossrail” in every Aberdeen sized metropolis across the land

A convenient aspect of the Aegean is that you are basically always in sight of land

Very cool set of visualizations here of station passenger flows in Great Britain. github.com/anisotropi4/...

Because Albany will prioritize anything above housing. They wanted high affordability requirements – they got them. But development was still profitable, so the building trades looked for their pound of flesh too, and state legislators were all too happy to give it to them.

Albany’s number one goal is to load housing with costs. It doesn’t matter what those costs are. Affordability requirements, wage requirements for operational staff, wage requirements for construction, Scaffold Law insurance – these are all such different things benefiting such different…

re. the Globe piece on Calla Walsh, I said during the Markey/Kennedy race that it was weird that the internet left was portraying Markey—the ur establishment New England liberal—as some sort of insurgent populist and people who truly believed that were bound to be disappointed

Who would win -- a new Acela or every diesel locomotive in the yard coupled together for some reason?

This is the type of take you expect from an American. Toronto is the seventh largest metropolitan area in North America. Aside from CDMX the other five are all cities in the USA (nyc, la, Chicago, Dallas, Houston) which have enormous internal diversity. Then there‘s London.

I feel like most people in Software don't realize what other people do.

Very cool set of visualizations here of station passenger flows in Great Britain. github.com/anisotropi4/...

A Politico item this evening calls Fair Fares "half-a-loaf" compared to free buses. But expanded, accessible Fair Fares is far better than Mamdani's proposal, because it makes *subways* affordable for those who need it, and doesn't push lower income NYers to slow, less reliable transit

Ridership on the Bay Area's Caltrain also continues rising in the wake of the route's electrification, with passenger counts up 36% compared to 2025! The route has taken more than 13.8M passengers over the last twelve months, the highest since COVID

Q1 2026 transit data is in today, & all major US rail networks are growing! SF is seeing a real boom, with ridership up 19% on Muni and 15% on BART SEPTA (Philly, 11%) and PATH (NY/NJ, +6.8%) are also seeing strong growth, while MTS (San Diego, +0.5%) is the slowest🧵

Reporting from the Real America of a ten minute walk radius outside my own front door

In an effort to get outside of my own bubble and explore the real America, I wrote a story about ageing affluent white millennial parents living in dense urban centres: www.economist.com/united-state...

1. There is no point HS2 has not been lead by Crossrail veterans of some sort (same EWR). 2. Crossrail SPV's was a successful relative to others because they inherited a plan from BR days. Take that away and they would have ended up like HS2 or Crossrail 2.

Me whenever I see a country with a functional railroad system convert a mainline to a tram and then have it dwaddle through the middle of town at one of the ends

Actually thought this was a fairly good summary of the long distance procurement.

Rail Passengers President & CEO Jim Mathews dives into Amtrak's long-distance fleet replacement RFP Read more: https://twp.ai/E5ADQ3

Almost 1/12 LIRR riders board at JAM. The revolution is happening under the LIRR’s nose.

In 1965, 1:4 LIRR passengers (20,000 in the peak direction) and 11tph went to Atlantic Terminal.

Just to emphasize how bad of a hole the Trump Administration is in right now, gas price approval this morning literally plummeted so far we had to fix the Y axis of this chart.

yes right that's all we want

One to three extra stories with a small, wheelchair-accessible elevator – this is what we’re fighting for

JFK Terminal 4 is really too long and wherever I am flying from the plane always lands at gate B999

Norway’s regulator has approved Vy Buss’s plan to run a route in Stavanger without a driver. The private operator has been piloting the autonomous bus with a safety supervisor on board; later this month, it is set to become fully driverless. www.electrive.com/2026/05/04/a...

The examples of intercity rail with security checks are Spain (with its notoriously underutilized HSR network) and Brightline (which is about to go bankrupt due to its capital debt burden, in part from building airport terminal-style stations to accommodate airport-style security)

Oh, this gets better. Shumate appears only to have tweeted that because Bloomberg Law’s Ben Penn had just reported on it.

Airport security is high because you can turn a plane into a missile that kills thousands. No comparable risk exists in train travel. In fact any would be assassin would be able to drive anywhere.

Pollen is absolutely off the Richter Scale today

Hoping to live in one of these soon. Great job by Alex and the DC council.

That would be so cool if it were true

I’ll believe rich people will leave NYC when I see it.

One resident proposed some pretty reasonable ideas to manage crowds and make it safer and more predictable for everyone involved:

These South American systems are really not a good model for NYC (or, frankly, even for South America, which really needs more metros). We should be looking to more surgical and less space-intensive models like in Central Europe.