HN Reader

>> In Germany, Britain, America, and France, the period of explosive growth of railways mainly took place in the mid-to-late nineteenth century.

There's a curious European vs American distinction that the article doesn't address -- many modern, large American cities are younger than that.

Especially southern and western ones that grew up on rail lines.

There, the only thing that would be needed is the political will to fund and build new bypass, outside-the-city freight track to free up the contiguous in-city rights of way.

I was a Londoner for 20 years and Thameslink (north to south through running discussed in the article) always felt special but I'd never looked into its history. To be able to get on a 'proper train' in Brixton and then run right through to Kentish Town or Luton was kindof amazing. And it was very fast, I'd try and incorporate it into journeys where possible. Like, if you were going somewhere and realised you could do it via Thameslink it felt like a bonus.

Crossrail (aka Elizabeth line) was being talked about or built the whole two decades I lived there but opened after I left.

If anyone's interested, there's a massive project in Munich to expand capacity, improve performance, and reduce journey times on the suburban lines that run through the centre:

https://www.2.stammstrecke-muenchen.de/home.html

> To upgrade the S-Bahn system and to reduce the traffic burden on the existing core line, two new tracks will be built parallel to it between the stations of Laim in the west of the city and Leuchtenbergring in the east, covering a total of about 10 kilometres. The core of the new east-west connection is a 7-kilometre tunnel linking Munich's main station Hauptbahnhof with the eastern hub Ostbahnhof.

There’s a little-used alternative to through-running as described in TFA, which is to turn trains around in an underground loop in the city centre and send them out again, usually on the same line they came from. This is done in Sydney (1920s) and Melbourne (1970s).

In the case of Melbourne, the design was chosen because of the extremely lop-sided development of the city, whose centre (“the city”) lies at the head of a bay, with most of the population and population growth to the south and east of the city in the 1970s. This is true to a lesser extent in Sydney, bearing in mind that its city loop was designed before the Harbour Bridge was built.

Melbourne’s current through-running project, the Metro Tunnel, appears in the first table, but it doesn’t belong in the second table of cities which could greatly benefit from future through-running projects. All 16 lines can access the city loop (which has 4 parallel tunnels). Due to capacity constraints, most of the time one of those 16 lines terminates at a main city station, and two others through run with each other. The Metro Tunnel will relieve the city loop, similar to the Munich trunk amplification project described in TFA; once it opens all lines will either through-run or go around a loop.

Locals are used to the City Loop but some visitors find it hard to navigate. Each line runs either clockwise or anticlockwise. For historical reasons two of the four loops still reverse direction in the middle of the day.

It’s true that a further through-running tunnel (Metro Tunnel 2) and conversion of two of the four City Loop tunnels to through-running (City Loop Reconfiguration) appeared on the long-range plans from 2012. But these are not required yet; the city is building three other major rail projects first.

This is being discussed in Prague, but it is going to be very expensive.

The city is very much not-flat, with significant altitude differences, a lot of already existing infrastructure under the surface (three extant lines of metro with fourth one being built, some road tunnels, parking spaces etc.), and a major river must be crossed. Plus, the rocks underneath are fractured and finicky. It isn't a nice big slab of granite, but a mixture of sediments, water and various primordial rocks. Quite hellish to put tunnels into.

That 1943 map of proposed through-running routes for London...

Anyone who lives on the outskirts of London near a big commuter station knows that pain: 15 minutes to get into the centre, and another 25 to get anywhere else.

Just a point: ticketing in cities.

In the UK outside London, a journey via a 'metro' (suburban railway), a tram and a bus could well require the purchase of three separate tickets at a significant premium over sticking to one mode of transport even if less efficient. I would suggest a move to single tickets within urban areas. That would allow multimodal travel - if the tram is in and the train is delayed just hop on the tram.

There is also an element of critical mass - a city needs to get to a stage where it is a reasonable decision to not have a car.

Costs of transport infra per mile:

Heavy rail; 50 million

Light rail: 25 million

Freeway:5-10 million

So why aren't they simply doing dedicated roads for transport?

With AI platooning and supervised self driving, "trains" of busses can run along those lines, but split off and merge in from local service seamlessly.

Commercial traffic (even through traffic) can piggyback on low traffic periods.

In emergencies, they are additional roads for evac or supply.

Roads are much more easily repaired and fail less catastrophically.

Electrification of busses is well underway and should be simpler / cheaper for recharging infrastructure.

Platooned "trains" of busses will conserve energy and likely could go 100 mph or more with proper convergent sensors monitoring and maintenance.

Safety should be equivalent.

I suspect there are political nuances where rail gets its own budget apart from roads, whereas dedicated roads get thrown it with general road funding, and then wouldn't get proper funding.

Auckland has an almost finished through running project in its city centre, which will greatly improve its railway network. It currently has only one terminus in the city, but trains from one side (the west) have to do an awkward dog leg around the city centre, including a reversal.

Brussels got its through running project in 1952, a 6 track tunnel under its city centre between North and South (aka Midi) stations. That was back when disruption and demolishing things were just things that happened, and it is one of the reasons why ‘brusselization’ is a word. By now operates near its max capacity of 96 trains per hour.

One problem I've encountered in Munich is they essentially have a single trunk that runs through the centre. In the case of problems on one line you can often find multiple other lines are also affected. London always seems to have a redundancy in the case of a line being unusable.

I suppose this is more a problem of sharing track than through running, but I just found it funny to see Munich public transport described so positively.

It might be nice on paper, but I think that in the Munich implementation there are quite some issues given that there is only a single track connecting Pasing (basically Munich West) to Munich East. In the last years almost every weekend there is maintenance work on the tracks, which introduces issues and doubles the time you need to move to the center. When a track is suddenly blocked, and this happens ~once a quarter, all the S-Bahn trains are blocked and you'll need a lot of patience to get back home. I wonder how it'd be with a more decentralized system where there are 2/3 ways to reach the edges of the city and not a single track

Through running in Tokyo is next level. You can catch a train from the airport, which then turns into a subway, then later on it becomes a train again.

Way back in the 20th century, Boston's passenger rail service coalesced into two mostly independent systems; a rail network north of the city, servicing the northern suburbs, and the same in the south. The southern system was the northern terminus of the intercity passenger railroad system to New York and beyond. These systems are seperated by about a mile of dense urbanization.

There was discussion during the planning of the "Big Dig" infrastructure project of the 1990s to join these systems via a tunnel, but this was rejected due to the technical complexity, and more importantly, the cost, with the politicial battle around the project as a whole.

We could have had, for example, through service between Lowell and Providence, or between Newburyport and Worcester. Amtrak could have continued the Northeast Corridor into Maine.

I'm surprised by the lack of mention in this article of the on-hold "Crossrail 2" project: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossrail_2

Here's to hoping that Andy Byford can make through running happen at NY Penn.

Imagine if Elon had put all that money to work on mass transit solutions instead of cars for each and every person, along with tunnels for those cars. Of course, you will never make the same riches, but interesting to imagine how different the impact might be.

I stopped reading at "termini".

So that's why Kassel Hauptbahnhof is a terminus station, while the busier station is Kassel-Wilhelmshöhe.

I foresee in the near future, in addition to the archive.is link (which is not needed here thankfully), a summary.is link will be present (which is needed here unfortunately).

It’s an okay article but there’s no real magic to it. It amounts to wordy trivia and you spend your time reading it as I have at your peril. Zero-calorie content is easily forgotten.