Been thinking a lot about this timetabling concept lately. So many rail operations problems in the Northeast work their way back to the locations we choose to allocate slack in timetables, and (by consequence) the locations where operators end up having low/high schedule reliability

It's fascinating to see the spread between different tram networks' terminal layover allocations. Layover times are a major driver of reliability, especially on higher-variability transit services. But they're also a product of infrastructure!

Fascinating finding. Railways around Tokyo rely on timed overtakes to provide exp and local service on 2 tk lines. These lines tend to have very high reliability (>95% <5m late), but there's apparently a *lot* of on-the-fly adjustment. More than 20% of overtakes do not take place where scheduled!

Visited Paris recently. A few transit thoughts: - The RER is one of the most incredible pieces of infrastructure...anywhere? - On-street trams are slow, even where the track is green and the urbanism is good - The region's efforts to design tram/metro/rail terminals for delay recovery _shows_

BART is planning changes for platform assignments at Daly City that will balance headways and enable more cross platform transfers at Bay Fair and MacArthur. bart.legistar.com/LegislationD...

As manufacturing continues moving southwards and outwards from cities, it's fascinating to watch new clusters emerge. A good example: the string of 5 steel mills north of Memphis. They're low-profile and (relatively) low-employment--but are now the most significant group of plants outside of Chicago

Today is Conrail day! 50 years on, I’d suggest we remember its least credited legacy: the Northeast Corridor. Without the region-wide network planning exercise that created Conrail, the NEC would still be full of freight—as it was until the 70s. Since Conrail, that feat has never been repeated.

This train is one of many that exports New York City's export trash to a network of landfills and incinerators across the eastern United States. As urban landfills reach capacity, arrangements like this one will likely become more common.

Jason Rabinowitz@airlineflyer.net · 5mo ago

Shoutout to this mile long CSX train on the Bronx Oak Point Link, hauling NYC’s finest export: Trash

From my newest (and first!) substack post open.substack.com/pub/adenyaco...

SEPTA Slow Down on the D Lines: Part 1

And the beginning of a blog...

open.substack.com

I may write about this more formally at some point, but the degree to which NS's cut-service-and-hike-rates strategy completely kneecapped their Crescent Corridor partnership with states to decongest I-81 is nuts. After billions in govt investment, train service is now *slower* than it was before.

So, Brendan, Why is the Millennium Line Bad?

Brendan Dawe@dawe.bsky.social · 7mo ago

I should write a full thread some time on all the ways The Millennium Line Is Bad

Earlier this fall, I noticed something odd going on with rail service on Los Angeles's C line. So, I wrote about it, because I could not have asked for a more perfect encapsulation of how schedule design can drive service outcomes. homesignalblog.wordpress.com/2026/01/03/a...

A Study in Schedule Design

From time to time, I enjoy browsing the LA Metro subreddit. A creature of the East Coast, I am forever fascinated by the Los Angeles’s preculiar mix of ambition and ambivalence around transit…

homesignalblog.wordpress.com

All the Toronto streetcar discourse has had me looking at a lot of TTC stringlines, and I must say, it seems there's an incredibly opportunity for quick improvement there with some basic terminal ops fixes. Why was nearly every streetcar *entering service* on this random wednesday late?

A few years ago, I wrote a long piece about why NS wanted to bulldoze part of a neighborhood on Chicago's South Side to expand an intermodal yard. homesignalblog.wordpress.com/2023/07/18/c...

Chicago’s Railroad Problem

In February 2023, two thousand feet of Chicago’s South Normal Boulevard disappeared. The street’s end came at the hands of Norfolk Southern’s 47th Street intermodal terminal, a facility which moves…

homesignalblog.wordpress.com

Reading the UP/NS merger app alongside CP/KCS, you really get a sense for how railroad managements' read of the pax rail environment differs now vs 2021 In 2021, "expansion of psgr svc" made an appearance in the CEO's statement. Now? Just procedural assurances that the merger won't break anything

Such an elemental yet overlooked reality of planning. If you don't: - Design a new route to add value to the network overall - Make changes to the existing network to incorporate the new asset ...you're kneecapping yourself. A key part of transit hist: homesignalblog.wordpress.com/2024/07/12/t...

The Forgotten History of Light Rail

For the last century, the central question of American transit planning has been how best to serve our suburbs. As people moved out of urban cores, bought cars, and began living decentralized lifes…

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Ben S@bensh3.bsky.social · 8mo ago

The forced bus transfers are an underrated part of REM's success rather than inconvenience, and it's instructive to compare to PATCO: although they share similarities in land use and orientation, NJ Transit was never forced to divert its buses going direct to Philly; PATCO ridership never broke 40k

A few weeks ago, PATH announced a series of service expansions that will finally reverse this trend. Though paired with a rather steep fare increase, these changes will finally put weekend PATH service levels above where they were 25 years ago. Huge congrats to all the advicates who made this happen

Uday Schultz@a320lga.bsky.social · last yr.

A lot has happened to PATH in the past 25 years -- 9/11, major construction work, COVID, etc. But consistent across all of these events have been ensuing reductions in off-pk service levels: since 2005, the number of PATH trips crossing the Hudson on Saturdays has fallen by *50%*

This is insane. ICE raided an apartment building in South Shore (a 90%+ Black neighborhood) at 10pm, using chainsaws to gain access and throwing flash bangs. According to witnesses they just handcuffed everyone, with people who weren’t arrested being held for over five hours.

Stephen Jacob Smith@stephenjacobsmith.com · 10mo ago

“‘I was out there crying when I seen the little girl come around the corner, because they was bringing the kids down, too, had them zip tied to each other…He said, “f*** them kids.”’ […] ’They had the Black people in one van, and the immigrants in another van.’” abc7chicago.com/post/ice-chi...

hello from the central valley

I created stringline diagrams for the Sonoma-Marin Area Rail Transit schedule, following up on discussions about why SMART can't run a 30 minute Takt. It's currently running a 32-minute Takt after opening the Novato Downtown and Petaluma North infill stations.

New story about trains and corporate mergers, and why you should never ever stop spending money on the railroads. medium.com/p/c6ab8375d4f0

Who are the Railroads For?

On Mergers, Electrification, and Nationalization

medium.com

Tangential to Stephen's point, but we really need to bring back the art of the high-profile government-sponsored market research report. At the height of Progressive scientific management fever dream-ism, this sort of thing would become a 1,000 page report called "The Grocery Question" or something

Stephen Jacob Smith@stephenjacobsmith.com · 12mo ago

Went to my neighborhood NYC co-op/chair grocery store (nothing special, C-Town) after a few months of almost exclusively going to Wegman’s, and holy crap, everything is like 25-125% more expensive

A lot has happened to PATH in the past 25 years -- 9/11, major construction work, COVID, etc. But consistent across all of these events have been ensuing reductions in off-pk service levels: since 2005, the number of PATH trips crossing the Hudson on Saturdays has fallen by *50%*

You really begin to see the divergence between the US and everywhere else when you compare this map (18% double track, 1950) to Italy, where about 26% of the network was double track in 1956.

Brendan Dawe@dawe.bsky.social · last yr.

I found a map multimodalways.org/docs/railroa...

At a high level, this is a good thing. Railroads suffer massively from the friction inherent to carrier handoffs. Mergers can mitigate that, potentially opening new markets and allowing more effective competition w already continent-spanning trucking companies.

The Wall Street Journal@wsj.com · last yr.

Exclusive: Union Pacific is in talks to acquire its smaller rival Norfolk Southern in what would be a megamerger in the railroad industry.

A few months ago, I paid a visit to Boston and spent some quality time with the MBTA’s bus service. After spending a while digging through T’s (excellent) open data, I had some Thoughts to share about the experience—and bus operations in general. homesignalblog.wordpress.com/2025/06/29/h...

How a Bus Route Falls Apart

All opinions in this post are solely my own, and do not represent the positions of my employer or any organizations of which I am part. About two months ago, I found myself waiting for a 77 bus in …

homesignalblog.wordpress.com

Going to publish a much longer look at bus operations soon, but it is just _incredible_ how significant the trip-level effects on performance are, even on fairly frequent routes. Two examples from the MBTA's network:

For my money, one of the greatest gaps in benchmarking practice surrounds the *tactics* of service management — how different systems respond to incidents, gaps, congestion and so on. Gaining that knowledge just got a good bit easier, thanks to this incredible new tool:

Kurt Raschke@kurtraschke.com · last yr.

A little thing I've been working on recently: real-time stringlines for the London Underground, using data from the Trackernet API: trackernet-stringlines.choochoo.systems

No only there will be zero accountability. There will be zero lessons learned from the errors of this project because we will never know what went wrong. So we will start from zero and make the same mistakes again and again and again...

Nolan Hicks@ndhapple.bsky.social · last yr.

The worst part about a P3 is that it means no one has to actually tell the public how badly things have gone off the rails. More oversight and more frequent updates are crucial to keeping projects on track and management accountable -- www.thestar.com/news/gta/met...

Continuing my series of posts on the railroad industry's immense challenges managing complexity and market alignment, I have (finally) finished some thoughts on the trajectory of railroading's growth engine: intermodal homesignalblog.wordpress.com/2025/05/11/w...

Why Railroading’s Growth Engine Might Be Stalling

Over the past year, American railroads seem to have discovered the value in growth. After over a decade of Wall St-fueled cost-cutting and service reductions, regulatory and financial pressures aro…

homesignalblog.wordpress.com