September results for Amtrak’s new Borealis service between Chicago and Minneapolis/St Paul are out, representing its first full summer holiday season. Monthly patronage has taken a sharp downward drop for the first time, from 22,300 the previous month to 18,800 – almost back to the same rate from its initial…
Through a mixture of necessity, hope for the future, and in some cases pure accident, Australia has ended up with more than its share of long railway platforms. The story of these platforms – when, how, and most importantly why they came to be as long as they are – is the story of rail in Australia.
I recently applied to TfNSW for the entry and exit data for the 94 stations on the regional NSW network for the five calendar years 2019-2023. The data gives us some interesting insights, including an estimate of interstate patronage by station.
Hot Rails presents the largest and most comprehensive survey ever made of rail’s market share against air travel, with 219 datapoints covering 133 unique city pairs across five continents. It shows rail can be a significant player even at longer travel times, becoming dominant for trips four hours or less.
It recently came to my attention that many of the older Hot Rails posts, including all of the original Sydney-Canberra concept alignment sections, were no longer loading properly, either showing just a header image and title but with otherwise blank content, or returning an error message. The bug seems to…
In September 1975, nearly a decade before the CSIRO’s famous white paper that eventually became the Very Fast Train Joint Venture, the South Australian Railways quietly released the findings of “Project Peregrine” – a proposal to upgrade the rail corridor between Adelaide and Tailem Bend to a modern, mixed-use fast-freight…
A recent article by Cosmos Magazine contained an eye-catching statistic: in the twelve months to June 2023, The Overland carried over 23,500 passengers on its 11-hour run between Adelaide and Melbourne. This may not sound that impressive in and of itself, but it’s a big increase on the pre-pandemic low…
A reassessment of the appropriate study area, and of the likely modal shift, gives a dramatically different result for the economic viability of an Adelaide Hills rail bypass – it’s one of the most important infrastructure projects in Australia.
The named passenger train is a phenomenon that is curiously unique in the transportation world. For road transport, many of the great highways still bear glamorous names, but not generally the journeys made on them. Earlier, in the age of ocean liners, it was the vessels themselves that bore the…
