Train porn

For some reason, that vid has gone viral on FB.

Queensland Rail in Australia has a narrow-gauge (3' 6") tramway in the middle of Denison Street in Rockhampton; quite busy even today. All sorts of freight and the diesel tilt train run on it.

This video shows "QR150" special excursion train with 4-6-2 #1079 as power, and not crawling along at 5 mph by any stretch.

dowlingm wrote: »

The M8s above are also designed for 25kV 60Hz east of New Haven CT, but given fleet demands of existing east of New Haven services Metro North and CTDOT have not bothered certifying that capability for service as yet.

There's also the matter of certifying Metro-North crews on Amtrak, since ownership changes northwest of New Haven from the state to Amtrak and Amtrak currently has the contract for "Shore Line East" commuter service between New Haven and New London. Furthermore, the signalling northeast of New Haven is more "modernised", and Metro-North may have to upgrade the M8s to use ACSES (aka "Advanced Civil Speed Enforcement System").

There's also a rumour that the M8's third rail contact shoes are "flippable" so they can use the over-running third rail of the Long Island Rail Road in order to run into New York Pennsylvania Station; not that that station has any capacity for any additional trains, however (it does not), and the notion would be a "political football" that some city politicians have been pushing, i.e. for commuter service to the East Bronx and certain parts of Westchester County. The answer to the question of "why not use the overhead wires all the way into Penn" would be that those wires still are on 25 Hertz frequency versus 60 Hertz, and then the third rail contact shoes would need to fold up vertically as those on Amtrak's P32AC-DM "Genesis II" do in Metro-North territory en route to Albany-Rensselaer, New York...then again, Amtrak was supposed to have converted all of the Northeast Corridor under its ownership to 25 kilovolts 60 Hertz in the 1980s as well.

Denver, Colorado, USA: New Hyundai Rotem EMUs for the RTD's new "FasTracks" (should CIE sue?) East Rail Line arrive at Denver International Airport. Similar to Philadelphia's "Silverliner V" cars for SEPTA Regional Rail, but with no steps nor trapdoors as low platforms would necessitate; all platforms on FasTracks are high.

This post has been deleted.

Didn't know where to put this one, since it's a "fan" workup.

Back in the early 1970s, a rather confusing map of the New York City Subway was designed by Massimo Vignelli. The unique (and confusing) feature was the separation of alternate services into different lines on the same map, when it was all the same railway line; it was quite unpopular.

Someone created an unofficial map of the London Underground in the same style as the Vignelli map; I'm using links because it's a bit too high-res to post.

Fast steam on 1,067 mm (3' 6") gauge: South African Railways in 1991, featuring 4-8-4 types pulling freight trains. First one is class 26 no. 3450 "Red Devil" on the line from Kimberley to De Aar; second one is featured briefly, less-striking black-liveried class 25NC no. 3485; this class was originally built as class 25 condensing locos (to try to reclaim water lost from steam exhaust) but eventually rebuilt as non-condensing.

BR training video with instructions on driving what looks to me to be a 114-class DMU, or at least are numbered for that class.