Photos of trains in the American West (2017) | Hacker News Reader

Photos of trains in the American West (2017)

cnn.com

86 pointsTomte64 comments

Nice photos. I'm part of a railroading family so some of these look like the calendar photos that came with the annual calendars that employees could or did get.

I'm pretty sure that the caption on the 12th photo is wrong though. It is captioned "Winona, Minnesota" and, being a geoscientist, I'm pretty sure that the photo was taken somewhere else. That part of Minnesota was scraped relatively flat and then eroded by melt-water from the glaciers in the last ice age. It is not covered by high mountain desert vegetation as in that photo but instead has lots of lakes and mixed hardwood forests.

I believe that the photo comes from near Winona, Arizona. The mountains in the background appears to be in the San Francisco Peaks north of Flagstaff.

Another trainspotter took this photo [0] along the same tracks but from a different vantage point. You can see the background is the same though.

[0]https://www.flickr.com/photos/bb9604/27448935498/

You are correct - it was taken from just off the side of the road at the south end of the bridge where Townsend-Winona road crosses the railroad tracks.

You can see everything lines up on the street view, including the two telephone poles.

https://goo.gl/maps/v53oXcHXUpU49mXr7

Great work. I recognized the mountains since we passed through the area and stayed in Flagstaff for several days a few years ago. It is quite beautiful out there.

> It is captioned "Winona, Minnesota" and, being a geoscientist, I'm pretty sure that the photo was taken somewhere else. That part of Minnesota was scraped relatively flat and then eroded by melt-water from the glaciers in the last ice age.

A minor nitpick, Winona, MN is part of the Driftless Area that was not covered by glaciers during the last ice age. It was definitely shaped by glacial meltwaters, though.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driftless_Area

Thank you for this. I did not know that part of Minnesota and Wisconsin have no evidence of glaciation from the last ice age. I imagine then that all the landforms are related to outflow of melt-water from the glaciers as they receded.

I appreciate that information and for anyone else interested in glacial landforms I found a great Story Map to shows in DEM models and in photos what you would expect to see post-glaciation. [1]

[1]https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/8d42e860ad0147bfac7a4f9...

Enjoy, and learn something like I did.

Also worth seeing: two photographers followed the route of the old Milwaukee Road on a diesel speeder in the 1980s. The photos are neat: https://newwww.weedroute.com/

Abandoned Rails is also a great resource: https://www.abandonedrails.com/

Have you seen Buster Keaton’s Railrodder? It is his last project and is filmed across Canada.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Railrodder

Those diesel engines are crazy strong. You feel the earth around you rumble when one of them rolls by.

Yes they are and you are right about the rumble.

About thirty 30 years ago I was on a drilling rig in Louisiana with a geophone array deployed so that I could record the vibrations made by the drill bit as they drilled towards a potential reservoir near a salt dome. We were doing a salt proximity survey using the drill bit energy as the seismic source so that we could hopefully help steer the drill bit through the sediments beside the salt dome without sending it into the salt and possibly intersect the highest point of a reservoir rock at the salt/sediment interface so that production from that gas/oil saturated zone would be maximized since you are farther from the oil/water interface in the wet zone.

Anyway, drill bits 15000 ft in the subsurface are viable energy sources but are very low energy. We were about 5 miles from a train track but every time the trains came down the line you could see them coming when they were miles away from the closest point to the arrays. The energy would start off as a random background noise that steadily increased in amplitude until it swamped everything and was clipped in the sensors and then as the train passed it would steadily decrease until the train was several miles away.

Reminds me of this New Scientist article:

WHAT is 27 kilometres long, cost £700 million to build and can tell you precisely when trains are leaving Geneva station? https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg14820060-300-the-part...

(spoiler: the Large Electron Positron Collider at CERN)

Great article. Thanks for that link. It is amazing to see how sensitive some of our instruments are to outside energy. I conducted gravity surveys years ago and part of the data processing always involved resolving the effects of nearby terrain since nearby density differences could contribute to an anomaly.

There are more practical, everyday application for that fact as well.

When I lived next to a train track, I built a seismograph to detect oncoming trains, and had a white noise machine that would ramp up volume as the train approached to prevent the train from waking anyone up.

That's pretty awesome. There probably is a market for this since I have seen several posts on city subreddits over the years where someone is asking why trains have to blow horns, why they are noisy, why didn't anyone tell them there was a track nearby, etc.

I think you could probably sell something like this. Good luck!

For reference, in the photograph of the train in Winona, the units are said to be the ES44DC which produce 4,400 horse power, or 3.3MW, and there's four of them for a total of 17,600hp or 13.2MW.

I used to live in Campbell, CA in a second floor apartment directly overlooking three railroad tracks: two for the light rail and one for the Union Pacific freight trains carrying loads from the Permanente Quarry.

My dad worked for Union Pacific when I was a kid, so it was super fun to see their trains go by. The light rail trains would sneak up on you, but you could hear the diesel trains coming up from miles away.

There's a train station in Carlsbad, California where the Amtrak blows right through the station at top speed. The station is for the commuter rail, which shares the same track as Amtrak. But Amtrak flies through at about 79mph. If you're standing on the platform waiting for the commuter rail... that Amtrak gets your blood pumping. Your intelligent monkey-brain knows you're safe, but your primitive lizard brain wants to run for it!

I love trains. When I went to the US I took the chance to ride a couple and I loved the beautiful landscapes.

It's a bit sad that the whole country is designed for cars and trains are so limited.

I'll be driving across the American West this week, and it made me wonder -- is there anything like flightradar24, for but trains? (I searched this in Google and got a 5 year old reddit post that only had resources for the UK).

It would be neat, if I found a photogenic location, to be able to see if a train was coming along soon.

Is that website also hijacking your browser’s history?

I believe so. The back button did not work for me

For as much as the Americans like to complain in here and on reddit about their train infrastructure, imo it is still one of the best in the world. Yes, the big tragedy it's that is focused on freight transport instead of also taking into consideration public transport, but the good thing is that you still have most of the actual tracks in place and functional.

Over here in Europe most of them are gone, with very exceptions (like Switzerland). This reddit post [1] comparing the French railway network in 1910 to what was still available in 2014 is just depressing.

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/4be0sc/train_netwo...

The US rail network does what it is designed to do very well - move absolutely insane amounts of freight (container/truck and bulk) relatively quickly over insanely long distances.

Unless you live in or near a deep-water ocean port, almost everything you have went on a train at some point if you're in the US.

> the big tragedy it's that is focused on freight transport

I don't see the tragedy in that. Tracks in the US are privately owned and freight makes them more money than passenger rail. Don't think we'd gain anything by artifically changing that. Even in Europe planes are usually faster and cheaper than rail when traveling between countries.

I'm not sure why this would be considered a controversial statement. A lot of short to medium distance in Europe is very good/convenient by rail, e.g. Eurostar from London to Brussels or Paris--even if not necessarily cheaper than flying. But while I've taken night trains between countries, it was more for the experience and not to save either time or money.

The tragedy is that people who want to use the railways are put below freight in priority - whereas other countries such as Russia and India are capable of mixing both.

I’m not sure I’d call it a tragedy, at least not when talking about trains across the American West or Midwest. That’s an absolutely massive space, and outside a few cities, it’s pretty sparse.

It IS absolutely a tragedy that we don’t have particularly good rail transit from major city to major city. A proper high speed line from DC->NYC->Boston. SD->LA->SF. And NYC to Chicago, maybe. Probably others, but those seem like they’d be doable and get some airplanes out of the sky and cars off the interstate.

Northeast Corridor works pretty well as it is--and is very popular, albeit mostly to and from NYC as opposed to the entire length. The controversy around California HSR is well-known. And NYC to Chicago has to go through a continental divide so it's not clear how competitive that could be with flying--which it has to be if it's going to be popular with business travelers.

What continental divide does it cross? Chicago is on Lake Michigan, which drains into the Atlantic. New York is on the Atlantic.

Basically some combination of the Eastern and St. Lawrence divides--mostly the Appalachians. [1] (Would have to look up the exact current route.) It's basically why the Erie Canal was built. [2] The Saint Lawrence Seaway goes into the Atlantic north of the St. Lawrence divide.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Continental_Divide [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erie_Canal

I do not consider the St. Lawrence divide to be a "continental" divide, nor do I know of anyone who considers it to be so. It's just a watershed divide, and those are a dime a dozen.

I can see that some people would consider the Eastern divide to be a continental divide, though I do not.

So I gave you a reference. But you're smarter. And a "watershed divide" still suggests a higher height of land that still needs to be passed through whether or not it passes your personal definition of a continental divide.

Sure. But I never questioned whether they had to cross a watershed divide. Of course they had to, because Lake Michigan doesn't drain into New York Harbor.

The New York Central Railroad followed (more or less) the path of the Erie Canal. They advertised themselves as "The Water Level Route", because they didn't have a major mountain crossing between New York and Chicago (unlike, say, the Pennsylvania Railroad).

It's not major--obviously the Erie Canal more or less followed the path of least resistance so it's not surprising the railroad did as well. But it's certainly not flat which would presumably make it difficult to put modern high speed rail along a similar route that was competitive with flying.

High speed rail can take the same grades as regular rail, so far as I know. And on the Water Level Route, there is no grade that gives any kind of problem to regular rail. So, it may not be flat, but it's not non-flat enough to be any kind of an obstacle.

Now, if you wanted to say that going up the Hudson clear to Albany before turning west - essentially, taking two sides of a right triangle instead of the hypotenuse - added too much distance for a serious high speed rail line, I could maybe listen to that. If you said that following the Hudson forced you into too many curves, which limited the speed, I could maybe listen to that. But the grades? No way. Not a problem.

The Acela from NYC to DC is "particularly good." I rode it, and it's already popular.

The others... well, check on status of the "high-speed rail" from SF to LA, which was going to be only twice as fast as driving, at most. If it ever gets built.

And that's if you don't factor in getting to and from the train stations, since unlike Europe, most people in CA aren't a tram ride away from downtown.

My main issue with the Acela is it’s only partially high-speed. It only hits top speed of 150mph on a short stretch between Boston and NY. And due to turns on this stretch, it only averages ~70mph. The rest of the line is capped at 135mph. Over the whole DC-Boston route, it saves about an hour over regular rail, but it could/should be even faster.

One of the big wins of Acela was it got the route north of New Haven electrified which saves a good often 30 minutes off the pre-Acela regional train run because an engine switch is no longer necessary even for the non-Acela runs. Would have been nice for Acela to be higher speed overall--it's usually not that practical for a Boston to DC run especially given that both cities have pretty convenient transit links to their airports.

But I suspect the cost delta compared to Acela as realized would have been huge given how built up most of the corridor is. And it's still pretty competitive with flying unless you have an early meeting and can't/don't want to go down the night before from BOS/RTE to NYP.

Yeah, I'd add that in both NY and DC, the train station is a much shorter distance between where you're likely to be and where you probably want to go. Penn Station and Union Station are pretty convenient.

Reagan/National is pretty good for the Metro as well. Presumably the airport->Manhattan situation still kinda sucks though I haven't personally experienced it recently.

Oddly enough, I was staying in NYC in a friend's place near Gracie Mansion, and La Guardia was amazingly convenient.

It has kinda that Mad Men vibe, too.

> This reddit post [1] comparing the French railway network in 1910 to what was still available in 2014 is just depressing.

Well don't be depressed because that second map is obviously and totally wrong.

It's even mentioned in the comments of the reddit link if you scroll down enough. The maps should actually be pretty much the same.

If you were to make the same comparison in the US it would be very similar.

A lot of railroads were abandoned or turned into trails. Those that remained were stripped as much as possible to fire sell assets in desperate attempts to improve the balance sheets (de-electrified to sell the copper, reduced tracks from 4 to 2 or 2 to 1 to sell the rails, etc.)

At least part of it is that in some US jurisdictions railroads have to pay property tax on their assets, which is not something that (usually) publicly owned roads and airports deal with. This is a massive perverse incentive to run everything as skimpy as possible to reduce the value of land.

If you’re into railroad photography, O. Winston Link is the dean of American railroad photography.

https://www.google.com/search?q=winston+link&client=safari&h...

Steam Steel and Stars is an amazing book.

https://books.google.com/books/about/Steam_Steel_and_Stars.h...

The train passing on a man-made land bridge cutting across a huge lake caught my eye, as it seems very invasive and unusual to divide a large portion of a lake like that. I just had to take a look at Google Earth, but it wasn't "Horse Thief Lake, Pennington County, South Dakota" like the description says.

The caption for that photo says, 'Since then Lewis has photographed trains in spectacular US locations -- but he does extensive research before he goes out with his camera: "Doing research beforehand is important to understand what the railway operations are like," he says.'

Oops.

The Great Salt Lake in Utah is split into two lakes by a railroad causeway, creating two very different ecologies with much higher salinity in the northern lake. https://www.amusingplanet.com/2014/08/the-great-salt-lakes-r...

It's Horsethief Lake in Washington. It's actually a very small lake by the side of the Columbia river.

https://goo.gl/maps/iQragwczG8NJxKfq7

Beautiful pictures

Nice photo of the now defunct Montana Rail Link. I always loved that livery.

Photos of trains on comically unelectrified tracks

Electrifying yards could be worthwhile, but total US fuel usage for trains is about 3.5 billion gallons [346] out of about 46 billion gallons/yr [995].

[346] https://www.bts.gov/content/class-i-rail-freight-fuel-consum...

[995] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/diesel-fuel/use-of-diese...

So ~7.5%? Seems worthwhile to me.

High-end estimates are $5m per mile, at 140,000 miles it would be $700 billion, throw in a bit more for some new locos (probably could switch existing somehow), cool trillion.

Could be better spent money than other things we do.

The far more practical method would be for trains to haul thier own batteries. A couple freight cars full of lithium would provide substantial range without electrifying the entire track. And trains have amazing potential for regeneration during braking, if one can find a way to do it practically.

Solar panels on top of the cars?

The amount of energy provided by the solar panels would be a rounding error compared to the total needed to move the train. Almost certainly not worth it.

Yeah you'd almost certainly be better installing electromagnets in yards to help get the train up to speed somehow ...

But a few cars of batteries wouldn't? Feels like that's not that much either but I haven't run the numbers.

Some very rough back of the envelope calculations, with apologies in advance for imperial units:

CSX says a "typical train" might be hauling 3000 tons of freight 500 miles, using about 3,000 gallons of diesel [1]. Batteries are about two orders of magnitude lower volumetric energy density, so 3,000 gallons of diesel has the same energy as about 300,000 gallons of batteries. Roughly 7.5 gallons per cubic foot, so that's 40,000 cubic feet. But the diesel engine only converts about a third of the energy in the diesel into usable form, while the batteries will be close to 100%, so we actually only need a third as many batteries. I'll round up to 15,000 cubic feet.

A standard boxcar is about 6,000 cubic feet interior volume [2], so that would be 2.5 boxcars full of batteries.

So battery cars might be feasible.

[1] https://www.csx.com/index.cfm/about-us/the-csx-advantage/fue...

[2] https://www.csx.com/index.cfm/customers/resources/equipment/...

This can work for a lightweight railcar, with a lot of sun, but is out of the question for a freight train.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byron_Bay_Train

Or we could just go back to electrification, like much of the Milwaukee Road had prior to the 1970s, instead of feeling the perpetual techie desire for new vaporware tech.

Large American freights don’t much brake if they can avoid it.

You’d more get a benefit from using the power coasting down the Rockies to provide juice to climb it - electricification.

Some of the trains in the photograph use up to ~17MWs, to get 129MWh of batteries installed on the ground in the worlds largest battery array at the time, cost $90 million dollars and while a train could certainly pull it, it's a non-trivial addition. That battery array couldn't move the train for even a fraction of some journeys required by train engines, so I think it's a non-starter economically for these cross-country journeys.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hornsdale_Power_Reserve

Not for cross-country journeys yet (at least not alone), but battery powered locomotives are picking up steam...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/alanohnsman/2022/03/01/the-new-...

Apparently they largely have regenerative breaking already but nowhere to store the energy so dump it through resistors to vent it as heat, if they had big battery arrays the savings could be significant.

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