F-Line to Dudley
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Siemens also released VIA Rail's first pilot unit into the wild within the last week or two. . .
The third one in the triangular pattern right below the windows is an experimental narrow-focus HID beam for long-distance viewing. They trialed it on their mid-2000's F40PH rebuilds, liked it, and decided to apply fleet-wide. Their GE Genesis fleet has now got the same thing. Apparently nobody else does this anywhere except for VIA. I dunno...do their trackside deer not adequately scatter at the sight of normal-intensity train headlights like our deer???VIA doesn't skimp on headlights.
Winnipeg-Churchill only runs twice a week, usually with the oldest falling-apartest pieces of shit on VIA's roster leaking interior heat into the tundra. TOR-MTL Corridor is where they want to blind every creature a mile up track. Maybe if they ran fast enough to actually sneak up on someone the perk would help them, but the Corridor doesn't even sniff 80+ MPH.Considering one of their lines goes to "the polar bear capital of the world" maybe its not deer theyre trying to spot
Bores 3 & 4 reserved probably the likelier outcome for the relief valve than trying to rehab the B&P. The B&P takes on a lot of water leakage, so the cost in waterproofing and refinishing the surfaces for all the accrued water damage is manifold. It might legit be easier to just pour +2 new bores in the soft fill next to the first 2 so long as the original project relocated all utilities out of the way beforehand.And they’ve preserved the option of 3rd and 4th bore on the new alignment (the original design was 4 single track tunnels, but they’ve only funded 1&2 for now)
I think that we won't know specifics until we see the new proposed text of the bill, which as yet doesn't appear to have made it to congress.gov, but these things tend to include specific dollar amounts for specific projects, not just "here's $66 billion, do with it what you will". Either way, I hope and expect that the bulk of the funding goes towards NEC improvements, Gateway, and SOGR (the latest Amtrak asset report says they have about $34B in national backlog)$66B in the compromise infrastructure bill for Amtrak. '
I can imagine about $50B worth of projects in states with traditions of taking federal $ and supporting state service
($48B are listed below). Where will the other $16B go? (guesses in next post)
Update: sadly, the $66B is not Amtrak only (as the $80B was) but includes freight spending. So we don’t know what share is passenger.
It would be nice if the freight $ (such as congestion mitigation around Chicago or help to CSX ) was made contingent on supporting better Amtrak service