Amsterdam used to have a line to Amstelveen that ran trams and metros on the same track. The main disadvantage is the different platform heights, so you got very long platforms, half at tram height and half at metro height.
I think they stopped it. As far as I know, Amsterdam's tram, metro and train lines are entirely separate again. They may still have some connections, but if so, those aren't used for regular service.
As for the through problem, the main problem here was that many cities were already big before trains were introduced, and most didn't want to demolish large chunks of the city to make space for trains to the center (although American cities infamously later demolished their city centers to make space for cars). Amsterdam was on a big waterfront, however; the original 15th century port that wasn't being used anymore. The port moved east, and a new island would host the new central station right in the heart of the city. Although the city did lose its view of the waterfront.
Edinburgh drained a lake to make space for the train station. And of course some cities did demolish houses to make space for trains.
AlecSchueler · 5h ago
There's still at least one stop like that in The Hague, at Leidschenveen.
One long platform with two heights to accommodate metro line E and trams 3 and 4.
kposehn · 1d ago
> The low density of Charlotte means a transport network like Munich’s is not viable, but the city could take its pre-existing light rail network and join it up to the extensive network of railroad lines around the city that are currently used only for moving freight.
This is not a feasible option due to the vast difference in crashworthiness standards between US freight rail and other system types such as light rail. The FRA actually prohibits allowing these two types on the same network of tracks at the same time. However, they could use a line along the right-of-way were it big enough to accommodate another set of tracks.
bobthepanda · 22h ago
This actually changed fairly recently in 2018 and European rolling stock, including tram trains are allowed under alternative compliance regulations.
Older American regulations favor pure buff strength. European regulations tend to emphasize making collisions impossible by using signalling and automatic emergency stop braking, and then crumple zones and other safety technologies. And the US has ended up adopting similar signalling regulations anyways with PTC, so now it is perfectly fine to allow European rolling stock. We already emphasize safety technologies over buff strength in US car regulations.
Is there a reason you couldn't build new light rail trains to a higher level of crashworthiness than they are currently? I don't know the full details, but that's how tram-trains in Sheffield, UK were allowed access to the main railway network.
kposehn · 1d ago
Unfortunately no. The main difference is mass - US trains are vastly heavier than anything in the UK so by the time you make a tram crashworthy it isn't a tram any longer.
That said, I believe the FRA did allow lighter designs such as the Siemens FLIRT for commuter lines so the rules are definitely less onerous.
bobthepanda · 17h ago
After a couple train crashes the FRA mandated PTC signalling everywhere, and in a world in which trains come to an automatic stop unless explicitly authorized to operate in the next segment, the old buff strength rules are not as important.
Also, the old buff strength rules were not great at keeping people alive. 25 people died in the Chatsworth train collision that led to the PTC mandate, which compares poorly to a similar crash between two trains in Germany which killed 12. There is a reason why buff strength has not been the criteria for automobiles for decades.
It’s done in various places. NJ Riverline is an example. There are a bunch of others.
The bigger problem is the freights just have no interest in sharing the tracks with passenger trains, and requiring heavier and more expensive passenger trains is a convenient way to price the project to death.
MisterTea · 1d ago
How does this work for say, the New York and Atlantic Railway which runs freight trains on the same tracks as the Long Island Rail Road? There are stations where a freight train passes through while a passenger train is behind it.
senkora · 1d ago
The LIRR is heavy rail rather than light rail.
I don’t know the regulations but that’s probably why.
kposehn · 1d ago
You're correct. LIRR trains are built to a much heavier standard and thus are allowed on the same tracks as freight rail.
bombcar · 23h ago
Does the locomotive weigh half a million pounds and have no passengers? Then it’s heavy rail.
bell-cot · 1d ago
In quite a few cases, old rail right-of-ways near cities are large enough for an extra track or few. Because, back in the heyday of American railroads, they either had another track or few, or they expected to.
The biggest issue is often bridges. Retaining the land that additional track(s) were on is fairly cheap. Building and maintaining rail bridges is not.
And building the light rail bridges for a transit system is not cheap. It's just less horribly expensive than building bridges which you could run strings of 220-ton freight locomotives over.
jazzyjackson · 1d ago
Funny reason there used to be double tracks almost everywhere that is now single tracked: while the government granted the property to the railroads, they still excised a tax over the portion of that land used by the railroads, so in the 70s when companies were going bankrupt left and right they tore up their own infrastructure to reduce the tax burden. Hell of a fuckup.
bell-cot · 23h ago
Not exactly...
To really be usable - by revenue-generating trains - track has to receive regular maintenance. Which costs money. If your RR is desperately short on both revenue-generating trains and money, then it's kinda obvious that you cut the no-longer-necessary expenses.
And railroad rails are steel, generally weighing 100+ pounds per yard. Scrap steel sold for far fewer dollars per ton in the '70's - but you get about 200 tons per mile of unused track that you tear up.
xxmarkuski · 1d ago
> This caps capacity and reliability.
Karlsruhe: The local operators have severe quality issues, in part due to this concept. There are like four points in the city where issues impact the whole network. The rolling stock is very bad compared to the other regional trains running in Baden-Württemberg (no/bad ac, flaky internet, no sockets, bad seating). The trains have way too little capacity, I’ve seen incidents, where they run three coaches (which they don’t do often, they are too long to enter the city), where people could not get in anymore. Some of the stations in the surrounding area are absolutely mental (Durmersheim for example), you have to walk over rails where ICEs and cargo goes through. Some trains are split or merged when leaving or entering the city, but it always causes delays. When trains can’t use the heavy metal rails and thus not leave the city due to ICEs getting priority, a lot of inner city traffic can be affected. The cooperation between the different infrastructure operators is also a source of problems.
Do not take Karlsruhe uncritically as an example where this model works well, yeah sure average numbers make it look good, but the reliability is complete ass. KVV always manages to surprise me on how bad it gets.
littlecranky67 · 18h ago
Do not forget the number of accidents with cars as the tram trains mingle with car traffic in the more remote villages. Sure, technically the tracks are separated from streets, but every so often cars cross anyways or park etc. Those delays propagate to inner-city schedules.
iggldiggl · 5h ago
> Sure, technically the tracks are separated from streets, but every so often cars cross anyways or park etc. Those delays propagate to inner-city schedules.
I don't follow your point. It's not like the inner-city tram lines are all perfectly segregated from road traffic and no accidents ever natively happen inside the city limits.
iggldiggl · 5h ago
> Some of the stations in the surrounding area are absolutely mental (Durmersheim for example), you have to walk over rails where ICEs and cargo goes through.
That's not the fault of the tram-train system, though - without the tram-trains, you'd still have the same platform access situation if you wanted to take the heavy rail regional train instead.
The article mentions the old chestnut „but due to preference given to automobiles“ without further explaining what that actually means. Since there’s no need to. We’re all very well aware how to fill out the blanks in our minds: cars are bad, car manufacturers are evil, they did this to us, only government intervention can save us.
yet, what this historiography conveniently omits is that it was the glorious government intervention that strangled the often privately owned interurban/tram/train companies out of business due to massive amounts of roads being built under public works programs that were all too common from the 1920s-1940s.
As the article mentions later:
automobile doomed the interurban whose private, tax-paying tracks could never compete with the highways that a generous government provided for the motorist.
that provision had many names, one was “New Deal”
I don’t have a solution but two observations:
1) somehow in Asia never happened what happened in the West, that is, private transportation companies are still private, they prosper, and the societies excel at mobility.
2) Never ever destroy built infrastructure. Always plan for the possibility for a comeback. Post-war, many cities removed tram tracks. But even a rusty tram track is cheaper to repair 70 years later than, paying upfront for the dismantling and 70 years later for a complete new construction.
bobthepanda · 17h ago
The New Deal built roads but they weren't particularly good quality ones, certainly not the mega-highways that became the Interstate system. Compare that to, say, Japan where the Shuto Expressway mostly has a speed limit of 60km/h (37mph).
Really what killed the rail system was the concept of free highway travel. Private companies will never be able to compete with free, government subsidized travel. It so thoroughly killed private companies that they couldn't even afford to really downsize and salvage what was left of their passenger operations. By comparison you have to pay for highway travel in Japan and China and Korea.
mauvehaus · 1d ago
There are real costs to retaining disused tram tracks. In Boston, the MBTA Green line E branch tracks were left in place for decades after service was discontinued, no doubt increasing costs every time they had to pave around them or do utility maintenance below them.
In Somerville, the Somerville Community Path was a disused heavy rail right-of-way when I first visited in 2002 or 2003. Ripping up the tracks and putting in the community path improved walkability to a Red Line station (Davis) and creating a nice space for recreational walking and cycling.
There are real trade offs to leaving disused infrastructure in place. Not losing a continuous right-of-way is a huge upside, but there are definitely downsides too.
enaaem · 17h ago
In Asia rail companies are also real estate investors. They invest in property around the stations and capture a lot more of the value that a rail line brings to the neighbourhood. I believe America had a similar thing with rail towns.
Where I am from in Europe, the rise in property value thanks to rail lines is captured by lucky property owners. That is why as a free market guy I support subsidising rail and other public transport with taxes, if we don't have the Asian system.
FirmwareBurner · 15h ago
>Where I am from in Europe, the rise in property value thanks to rail lines is captured by lucky property owners.
Sure, "lucky". Lucky as in, I'm well connected and I hear in advance from the politicians where the transit lines will be so I make sure to buy properties/land in those areas, so later I turn out to be really lucky when the government projects just happen to cross over my private land/property.
Funny how that kind of luck only turns out to favor the already wealthy and connected, 100% of the time, and never the poor. How do you call that type of luck?
nocoiner · 1d ago
I really like your point #2. A little bit of me dies every time I see a rail-to-trail project. Granted, many (most? all?) of those lines have approximately a 0% chance of ever being economic again, but there’s also rail-centered redevelopment that’s being permanently foreclosed.
bell-cot · 1d ago
Over the longer haul, 99% of the potential infrastructure value of the "destroyed" rail line is in the unified right of way ownership. Rails rust (or are sold for scrap, legally or not), ties rot, ballast (gravel) becomes choked with dirt, brush, and trees, and bridges and viaducts crumble. So long as the rail-to-trail project doesn't erect a too-high legal barrier to eventual higher-value uses, it's actually a best case scenario.
nocoiner · 1d ago
Excellent point and well stated.
IndiaInnovation · 15h ago
Those private Asian companies make profit outside normal railway operations as well by running shops and building housing etc... literally milking as much as they can from their passengers.
toast0 · 1d ago
Tram tracks are a triping and cycling hazard. Leaving unused, presumably unmaintained tracks in your city for 70 years just in case has a cost.
Keeping unused right of ways open is challenging too. Adjacent properties will tend to encroach, and depending on specifics and local rules, may be able to claim the encroached property through adverse possession.
xg15 · 1d ago
> while others, such as Cologne, have simply added platforms at their main stations to enable suburban trains to run through.
We did?
Cologne's tram system is weird. Over the last century, they merged the tram, subway and selected private railways into a single network. The result is sort of a tram network on steroids, that also runs underground and serves longer distances to two neighboring cities. But it's still separate from the national train network or even "real" suburban trains (S-Bahn).
(Edit: Just learned the term "interurban" for that...)
That's unlike Berlin or Vienna, where you sometimes have subway and S-Bahn side by side in the same station, but on different tracks. I think that's closer to what they mean with "through-running"?
bobthepanda · 17h ago
Through running simply means you do not terminate trains at a "main station" which is how traditional rail often worked; instead, a train goes from suburb to city to suburb.
croisillon · 1d ago
i can’t think of any side by side subway and s-bahn in vienna?
xg15 · 1d ago
Was thinking of Quartier Belvedere, but seems to be subterranean S-Bahn only.
no, Mitte is similar to Praterstern, you need a couple minutes between s and u platforms
xg15 · 1d ago
Ah, then I was misremembering from my last trip and will take that back.
croisillon · 1d ago
no worries, i was genuinely curious if i had missed something
Aphataeros · 1d ago
Two stations have the Metro and Trains on the same elevation, running parallel to each other: Hütteldorf & Heilligenstadt both ends of the U4, but they are physically separated and you have to leave the metro to enter the train system.
dillz · 1d ago
Handelskai, too. (U6 <-> S-Bahn)
Animats · 1d ago
London? London has 13 major railroad stations and they're all dead ends.[1] Crossrail, with expensive tunnels, now provides some east-west through services.
There's a fan-out at London Bridge to three more stations, but everything dead-ends within 2km or so. You can't continue west or north and get out of London on any of those tracks.
lmm · 19h ago
No, trains through London Bridge and Blackfriars continue North via a tunnel through City Thameslink, Farringdon, St Pancras and join the Midland Main Line or East Coast Mainline.
zimpenfish · 17h ago
> You can't continue west or north and get out of London on any of those tracks.
I literally posted a train going through London Bridge and north out of London!
lpribis · 1d ago
Yeah the only through-running trains through the actual city centre are the Elizabeth line and Thameslink. If you count slightly outside the city centre, you could also consider the West London Line (southern and overground), and the other overground from Croydon to Islington to be throu-running. But they slightly miss the city centre.
desas · 1d ago
> Terminating a train and turning it around takes a lot of space, space that is usually unavailable in a city center.
This doesn't happen in London in my experience. Trains don't turn around, instead every train is double-ended. The driver gets out of the cab at the terminus, walks to the other end of the train and gets in the other cab. They can do it faster than the passengers disembark.
frosted-flakes · 22h ago
That's what turning around a train means. The point is that a train at a terminal station is "occupying" a disproportionately long section of track, and as a result you need a multi-tracking and a ridiculous number of platforms to allow storage of trains to handle enough trains... while a through-running station can achieve the same capacity with just two tracks and 2-4 platforms.
schoen · 17h ago
Huh, I never thought of that as the reason for the small number of long-distance platforms in, for example, Berlin Hauptbahnhof (all through-running) compared to some other big-city stations that are terminal.
Animats · 21h ago
There are several solutions to turning around at a terminal. Sometimes there's a turnaround loop. Grand Central has two, one on each level. Older systems would detach the engine, rotate it on a turntable, and reattach it at the other end of the train. Double-ended trains are far more common today, since control from either end was solved long ago.
A few points I want to add: The Stadtbahn (called Tram-Metro in this Article) is usually just as fast in the outlying areas as in the inner areas and rarely street running, just doing it with less infrastructure. It's just that rail tracks are even faster.
There are quite a few newly built S-Bahn Tunnels in cities under a Million in Germany, in Frankfurt, Stuttgart and Leipzig (you could quibble about citie vs metro area population).
The major downside of Tram-Trains compared to S-Bahns, Rapid Transit or just through running away from the city center is that they slow way down in the city center, much more than the other options. This makes it a bad fit for the sprawly, north american cities without a strong center which have much more demand for non city center destinations and a much more expansive center compared to european cities with tram-trains.
The big benefit of Tram-Trains is the flexibility. Over a region, some sections can implement their own new through running section for the Network (Heilbronn), be almost a metro (the Kombilösung and some parts of S11) or provide S-Bahn style service (e.g. Freudenstadt for a mediocre Regio S-Bahn).
But it's a master of none: Too slow and cramped for high-quality regional services, too few doors for rapid passenger exchange, too demanding and expensive (electrification and vehicles) for connecting small rural lines, legally limited in capacity (75m) for very busy services.
They can be great, but it really depends on local circumstances.
Before converting commuter rail to Tram-Trains, most American cities should first implement a frequent (at least 2tph), all-day, regular service with more urban stations for commuter rail and perform true ticket integration between mainline rail and their other urban transport (the ticket integration is very important!). This also applies to many european cities, such as in France, Spain, Belgium, ... .
lmm · 19h ago
This is a more nuanced summary than you often see; honestly tram trains have always seemed like an extremely overhyped solution, only one step down from out-and-out gadgetbahns. Yes there are a handful of cities in which they apparently work ok. But they're far from the magic bullet certain kinds of transport fan want to portray them as. Often what your city needs is just a regular tram, or a regular train, or maybe even just integrated ticketing so that people can easily change from the train to the bus.
sschueller · 14h ago
We have such a train in Zürich as well. It's called the Forchbahn [1]. It switches from 600v to 1200v half way through it's trip. There is also the Uetliberg Bahn (but that can't be considered a Tram) which has an offset pantograph[3] in order to travel all the way into the city as one is AC and the other is DC. [2]
Metz in France has a tram like bus which travels through the city, partially on roads closed for normal traffic. The deal was, that the operator had to plan the routes to reach various. important points, like hospitals, schools, universities and large employers.
If you visit Metz, its easy to book a motel at the outskirts near an end stop of the train. Parking your car is free if you ride the train, the ticket serves as the exit ticket for the parking area too.
Sheffield in the UK has tram trains - it was the first such implementation in the UK, and runs on national rail lines as part of the journey to Rotherham.
trgn · 1d ago
Brussels is a great example of a train briefly turning into a subway. There's pretty much never a fare check either, so it's essentially a free north south subway line at very high frequency.
It doesn't because it doesn't use any mainline rail track. Imagine if the T-Third went onto the Caltrain tracks at Bayshore and continued down the peninsula instead of terminating at Sunnydale; that would be a tram-train.
It would also be more or less impossible under current US regulations, but there's always hoping that that could be fixed.
Animats · 1d ago
It would reduce both capacity and speed. That would put a slow, low-capacity tram on the same track as a fast train line with large trains.
Tram trains are mostly meant to give lightly used train lines a new lease of life with a substantially more convenient urban alignment, since for historical reasons legacy rail lines tend to skirt around downtowns and avoid where most of the jobs and people are.
AnimalMuppet · 1d ago
That is not just a capacity and speed issue, it is also a safety issue. You don't put "light rail" and "heavy rail" on the same track, because a collision will be catastrophic to the light rail.
bobthepanda · 17h ago
You can in Europe (and now in the US since 2018) because realistically, everybody is screwed no matter what kind of high speed collision happens, and in both regulatory frameworks it is substantially safer to simply have signalling and automatic emergency stops to prevent collisions in the first place (ETCS in Europe and PTC in the United States), and then to outfit train cars with better safety technologies like anticlimbers and crumple zones.
We stopped requiring buff strength in automobiles as the only thing a long time ago because it turns out that mostly just resulted in the cars surviving and the people inside them dying. Try throwing a steel box full of eggs and see what happens to the eggs.
standardUser · 1d ago
> A final model of light rail worth mentioning is interurbans. ...these systems were sometimes staggeringly expansive: at one point, it was possible to travel from Wisconsin to New York State exclusively by interurban.
I think an easy win for tram/tramtrain systems would be to have capacity to move cargo, either in rollcages like grocery shops use, or on pallets with dollies from a peripheral location, to city center locations and eliminate at least some light goods vehicles. The problem is, it would probably be a very inefficient use of labour to have humans do all the last few hundred yards pushing.
rjsw · 18h ago
One thing missing from the article is that Manchester also had some disused railway line routes which could have new track laid on them relatively easily.
Scoundreller · 1d ago
> Tram-trains manage speeds about the same as the wholly tunneled Paris Metro.
Uhhh, it’s not.
E.g.
> Line 8 is 22.057 km (13.706 mi) long, including 2.8 km (1.7 mi) of open-air tracks in the southeastern suburbs.
Maybe they just meant comparing it to the tunnelled sections but I also don’t see why that would really impact speeds. It’s the traffic/grade separation that gets you the speed advantage.
also the Paris Metro is kinda slow because of station density, so you may save a lot of walking but have a lot of station dwell time.
Go during the day and pick any two arbitrary points in Paris and you’ll usually find cycling faster than transit on Google Maps.
Peteragain · 1d ago
In Melbourne we loved our Tram Trams that run down the middle of the street and hold up the traffic. The W class trams were all fazed out and replaced with "light rail". Bigger Faster Better. Not. Melbourne has a good mix of tram and train - yes you take athe train to the city (a through route via the underground loop) and get on a tram for the last km. Small frequent trams are better for this and require lighter track. I think there was a recent HN article to this effect.
stephen_g · 10m ago
Trams holding up traffic? Yes, the injustice of trams that can carry 100 to over 200 people (depending on class), delaying a handful of cars carrying (on average at peak times) 1.15 people each from getting through each intersection...
euroderf · 1d ago
Some combination of interurbans and golf cart cars and electric scooters and electric skateboards would make a marvelous urban transportation milieu.
I think they stopped it. As far as I know, Amsterdam's tram, metro and train lines are entirely separate again. They may still have some connections, but if so, those aren't used for regular service.
As for the through problem, the main problem here was that many cities were already big before trains were introduced, and most didn't want to demolish large chunks of the city to make space for trains to the center (although American cities infamously later demolished their city centers to make space for cars). Amsterdam was on a big waterfront, however; the original 15th century port that wasn't being used anymore. The port moved east, and a new island would host the new central station right in the heart of the city. Although the city did lose its view of the waterfront.
Edinburgh drained a lake to make space for the train station. And of course some cities did demolish houses to make space for trains.
One long platform with two heights to accommodate metro line E and trams 3 and 4.
This is not a feasible option due to the vast difference in crashworthiness standards between US freight rail and other system types such as light rail. The FRA actually prohibits allowing these two types on the same network of tracks at the same time. However, they could use a line along the right-of-way were it big enough to accommodate another set of tracks.
Older American regulations favor pure buff strength. European regulations tend to emphasize making collisions impossible by using signalling and automatic emergency stop braking, and then crumple zones and other safety technologies. And the US has ended up adopting similar signalling regulations anyways with PTC, so now it is perfectly fine to allow European rolling stock. We already emphasize safety technologies over buff strength in US car regulations.
https://railroads.dot.gov/regulations/federal-register-docum...
That said, I believe the FRA did allow lighter designs such as the Siemens FLIRT for commuter lines so the rules are definitely less onerous.
Also, the old buff strength rules were not great at keeping people alive. 25 people died in the Chatsworth train collision that led to the PTC mandate, which compares poorly to a similar crash between two trains in Germany which killed 12. There is a reason why buff strength has not been the criteria for automobiles for decades.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Chatsworth_train_collisio...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_Aibling_rail_accident
The bigger problem is the freights just have no interest in sharing the tracks with passenger trains, and requiring heavier and more expensive passenger trains is a convenient way to price the project to death.
I don’t know the regulations but that’s probably why.
The biggest issue is often bridges. Retaining the land that additional track(s) were on is fairly cheap. Building and maintaining rail bridges is not.
And building the light rail bridges for a transit system is not cheap. It's just less horribly expensive than building bridges which you could run strings of 220-ton freight locomotives over.
To really be usable - by revenue-generating trains - track has to receive regular maintenance. Which costs money. If your RR is desperately short on both revenue-generating trains and money, then it's kinda obvious that you cut the no-longer-necessary expenses.
And railroad rails are steel, generally weighing 100+ pounds per yard. Scrap steel sold for far fewer dollars per ton in the '70's - but you get about 200 tons per mile of unused track that you tear up.
Karlsruhe: The local operators have severe quality issues, in part due to this concept. There are like four points in the city where issues impact the whole network. The rolling stock is very bad compared to the other regional trains running in Baden-Württemberg (no/bad ac, flaky internet, no sockets, bad seating). The trains have way too little capacity, I’ve seen incidents, where they run three coaches (which they don’t do often, they are too long to enter the city), where people could not get in anymore. Some of the stations in the surrounding area are absolutely mental (Durmersheim for example), you have to walk over rails where ICEs and cargo goes through. Some trains are split or merged when leaving or entering the city, but it always causes delays. When trains can’t use the heavy metal rails and thus not leave the city due to ICEs getting priority, a lot of inner city traffic can be affected. The cooperation between the different infrastructure operators is also a source of problems.
Do not take Karlsruhe uncritically as an example where this model works well, yeah sure average numbers make it look good, but the reliability is complete ass. KVV always manages to surprise me on how bad it gets.
I don't follow your point. It's not like the inner-city tram lines are all perfectly segregated from road traffic and no accidents ever natively happen inside the city limits.
That's not the fault of the tram-train system, though - without the tram-trains, you'd still have the same platform access situation if you wanted to take the heavy rail regional train instead.
yet, what this historiography conveniently omits is that it was the glorious government intervention that strangled the often privately owned interurban/tram/train companies out of business due to massive amounts of roads being built under public works programs that were all too common from the 1920s-1940s.
As the article mentions later:
automobile doomed the interurban whose private, tax-paying tracks could never compete with the highways that a generous government provided for the motorist.
that provision had many names, one was “New Deal”
I don’t have a solution but two observations:
1) somehow in Asia never happened what happened in the West, that is, private transportation companies are still private, they prosper, and the societies excel at mobility.
2) Never ever destroy built infrastructure. Always plan for the possibility for a comeback. Post-war, many cities removed tram tracks. But even a rusty tram track is cheaper to repair 70 years later than, paying upfront for the dismantling and 70 years later for a complete new construction.
Really what killed the rail system was the concept of free highway travel. Private companies will never be able to compete with free, government subsidized travel. It so thoroughly killed private companies that they couldn't even afford to really downsize and salvage what was left of their passenger operations. By comparison you have to pay for highway travel in Japan and China and Korea.
In Somerville, the Somerville Community Path was a disused heavy rail right-of-way when I first visited in 2002 or 2003. Ripping up the tracks and putting in the community path improved walkability to a Red Line station (Davis) and creating a nice space for recreational walking and cycling.
There are real trade offs to leaving disused infrastructure in place. Not losing a continuous right-of-way is a huge upside, but there are definitely downsides too.
Where I am from in Europe, the rise in property value thanks to rail lines is captured by lucky property owners. That is why as a free market guy I support subsidising rail and other public transport with taxes, if we don't have the Asian system.
Sure, "lucky". Lucky as in, I'm well connected and I hear in advance from the politicians where the transit lines will be so I make sure to buy properties/land in those areas, so later I turn out to be really lucky when the government projects just happen to cross over my private land/property.
Funny how that kind of luck only turns out to favor the already wealthy and connected, 100% of the time, and never the poor. How do you call that type of luck?
Keeping unused right of ways open is challenging too. Adjacent properties will tend to encroach, and depending on specifics and local rules, may be able to claim the encroached property through adverse possession.
We did?
Cologne's tram system is weird. Over the last century, they merged the tram, subway and selected private railways into a single network. The result is sort of a tram network on steroids, that also runs underground and serves longer distances to two neighboring cities. But it's still separate from the national train network or even "real" suburban trains (S-Bahn).
(Edit: Just learned the term "interurban" for that...)
That's unlike Berlin or Vienna, where you sometimes have subway and S-Bahn side by side in the same station, but on different tracks. I think that's closer to what they mean with "through-running"?
Maybe Wien Mitte though?
https://homepage.univie.ac.at/horst.prillinger/ubahn/m/large...
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Major_railway_stations_...
e.g. today's 18:24 from Horsham to Peterbrough going through London Bridge at 19:31, Blackfriars at 19:37 and then St Pancras (for a triple!) at 19:46 https://www.thetrainline.com/live/departures/london-blackfri...
I literally posted a train going through London Bridge and north out of London!
This doesn't happen in London in my experience. Trains don't turn around, instead every train is double-ended. The driver gets out of the cab at the terminus, walks to the other end of the train and gets in the other cab. They can do it faster than the passengers disembark.
A few points I want to add: The Stadtbahn (called Tram-Metro in this Article) is usually just as fast in the outlying areas as in the inner areas and rarely street running, just doing it with less infrastructure. It's just that rail tracks are even faster.
There are quite a few newly built S-Bahn Tunnels in cities under a Million in Germany, in Frankfurt, Stuttgart and Leipzig (you could quibble about citie vs metro area population).
The major downside of Tram-Trains compared to S-Bahns, Rapid Transit or just through running away from the city center is that they slow way down in the city center, much more than the other options. This makes it a bad fit for the sprawly, north american cities without a strong center which have much more demand for non city center destinations and a much more expansive center compared to european cities with tram-trains.
The big benefit of Tram-Trains is the flexibility. Over a region, some sections can implement their own new through running section for the Network (Heilbronn), be almost a metro (the Kombilösung and some parts of S11) or provide S-Bahn style service (e.g. Freudenstadt for a mediocre Regio S-Bahn).
But it's a master of none: Too slow and cramped for high-quality regional services, too few doors for rapid passenger exchange, too demanding and expensive (electrification and vehicles) for connecting small rural lines, legally limited in capacity (75m) for very busy services.
They can be great, but it really depends on local circumstances.
Before converting commuter rail to Tram-Trains, most American cities should first implement a frequent (at least 2tph), all-day, regular service with more urban stations for commuter rail and perform true ticket integration between mainline rail and their other urban transport (the ticket integration is very important!). This also applies to many european cities, such as in France, Spain, Belgium, ... .
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forch_railway
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sihltal_Z%C3%BCrich_Uetliberg_...
[3] https://youtu.be/T10puRXXBA8?si=trhIXOhv0ziSNwL-&t=522
If you visit Metz, its easy to book a motel at the outskirts near an end stop of the train. Parking your car is free if you ride the train, the ticket serves as the exit ticket for the parking area too.
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mettis_(bus_%C3%A0_haut_niveau...
Does San Francisco's Muni LRVs somehow not qualify as a tram train network?
https://www.sfmta.com/getting-around/muni/muni-metro-light-r...
It would also be more or less impossible under current US regulations, but there's always hoping that that could be fixed.
Current Caltrain equipment: [1]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUEZ6uuM_EA
We stopped requiring buff strength in automobiles as the only thing a long time ago because it turns out that mostly just resulted in the cars surviving and the people inside them dying. Try throwing a steel box full of eggs and see what happens to the eggs.
I had no idea. A few systems are still in place: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interurban#United_States
Uhhh, it’s not.
E.g.
> Line 8 is 22.057 km (13.706 mi) long, including 2.8 km (1.7 mi) of open-air tracks in the southeastern suburbs.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_M%C3%A9tro_Line_8
Maybe they just meant comparing it to the tunnelled sections but I also don’t see why that would really impact speeds. It’s the traffic/grade separation that gets you the speed advantage.
also the Paris Metro is kinda slow because of station density, so you may save a lot of walking but have a lot of station dwell time.
Go during the day and pick any two arbitrary points in Paris and you’ll usually find cycling faster than transit on Google Maps.