A veteran Amtrak employee once said to me that if you can’t be flexible, you’d better not work for the railroad. It’s very true and, in fact, the more I do this, the more I run into examples of changes being made to a train’s schedule or routing or equipment because of some event that…
Oh, please! Not another crisis! Well, probably not, but the potential is there for an end, albeit temporary, to a lot of passenger rail service in the country. It all goes back to 2008 and a suburb of Los Angeles when a Metrolink commuter train ran through a stop signal and collided with a…
Travel by train around the United States and, if you’re paying attention, you’ll soon notice that Amtrak engineers blow the whistle quite a lot. And if you’re really paying attention, you’ll notice that there are several different whistle patterns—for example, two short toots when the train is about to move forward; three toots when it’s…
One of the remarkable things about trains and train travel is the fact that modern railroads are still using technology that’s 150 or so years old. Certainly, there have been refinements like computers in the locomotive cabs and the complex system of signals that keep trains from running into each other. But essentially, trains today…