The Chicago-Iowa Cty route is included in the Midwest Regional Rail Initiative’s plan, which is among the candidate projects. The MRRI’s vision calls for “high speeds” of 90 to 110 mph on the route, compared to up to 220 mph for higher-trafficed routes.

(Via)

Amtrak’s car supply is barely sufficient to cover its existing routes’ normal loads, let alone handle big holidays, so any state looking to add rail service had to come up with cars and locomotives, too, largely on its own.

Until today. Amtrak President and CEO Joseph Boardman issued a statement outlining “an aggressive game plan to modernize, renew, and grow America’s passenger railroad,” including the purchase of new cars and locomotives.

Amtrak’s press release, available here, doesn’t go into specifics, but various sources told Bloomberg plans are to buy  ”more than 100 locomotives and ‘several hundred’ passenger cars.”

Last year’s feasibility studies for Chicago-Quad Cities, Chicago-Iowa City, and Chicago-Dubuque (all PDF) both note “the current car supply situation at Amtrak is extremely tight and it is likely that equipment for this service would have to be generated from our storage inventory and scheduled for heavy repair in a car shop, thus requiring significant initial rehabilitation expenditures and time.”

That means rebuilding wreck-damaged cars stored at Amtrak’s systemwide shop in Beech Grove, outside Indianapolis. (A guess: rebuilding would still be quicker than designing, testing, and constructing new cars, but the most recent plan doesn’t call for the Iowa City trains to roll before 2014).

The studies call for two or three coaches and a food-service car for each of two daily Chicago-Iowa City trains. An estimate last fall put rolling stock costs at $59 million.

Another item from Boardman: the Chicago-Oakland, Calif., California Zephyr is one of five long-distance routes identified for “an in-depth evaluation of the poorest performing long-distance routes to identify and implement changes where possible to improve key measures such as customer service, ridership, and financial performance.”

The CZ runs across southern Iowa on the old Burlington Route, now BNSF, with stops at Burlington, Mount Pleasant, Ottumwa, Osceola, and Creston.

Must be some kind of genetic imprinting through generations of home-for-the-holidays trips, but trains and Christmas seem to go together, a fact some railroads take advantage of.

One of those is the Canadian Pacific Railway, which first dispatched its Holiday Train 10 years ago (that’s the train at LaCrosse, Wisc., in 2004). Decorated from locomotive to caboose (yes! it has a caboose!) with thousands of lights, it appeals to home-decorating fanatics as well as train nuts. The train includes a box car that serves as a stage for noted Canadian talent (train fan Neil Young has yet to appear on the train but one can hope), and serves as a fundraiser for food banks in each community in which it stops.

The Holiday Train’s only Iowa stops will be in  Mason  City and Marquette, where it will stop at the Riverfront Marina at 9:45 p.m. Dec. 10. 

According to CP: “This is a free event. In return, non-perishable food items or a cash donation in support of the local food charity are requested…Guests are encouraged to arrive early to enjoy numerous festivities prior to the arrival of the train. Warm beverages and snacks will be sold to keep the crowd warm.  All proceeds will benefit the Clayton County Food Shelf.”

The Holiday Train also has a FaceBook page.

The world is much closer to running out of oil than official estimates admit, according to a whistleblower at the International Energy Agency who claims it has been deliberately underplaying a looming shortage for fear of triggering panic buying.

The senior official claims the US has played an influential role in encouraging the watchdog to underplay the rate of decline from existing oil fields while overplaying the chances of finding new reserves.

The allegations raise serious questions about the accuracy of the organisation’s latest World Energy Outlook on oil demand and supply to be published tomorrow – which is used by the British and many other governments to help guide their wider energy and climate change policies.

The effort was launched by family members of the 50 people who died when Continental Flight 3407 crashed near Buffalo, N.Y. (One person on the ground also died). Skiles compared the cockpit atmosphere during that flight’s final moments (the low-hours crew responed improperly to icing, and the first officer was recorded saying she’d never flown in such conditions) and that aboard 1549, headed by the now-legendary Capt. Sully Sullenberger:

“We were doing our jobs. We are trained professional pilots,” said Skiles, 49. “…That’s where the experience requirement comes in. Having been there before — not particularly with that incident, but with smaller things. Having a little bit of experience in aviation, that’s just another reason to keep your calm. In situations like that, it’s difficult to do. But it’s a little bit easier to do if you’ve had similar circumstances in the past.”

“What we’re saying is you should have your similar circumstances without 50 to 100 paying passengers behind you…..you used to have five years or more in the industry before you could even look at getting a job at a regional airline, like flying into Greenville-Spartanburg. But because they’re not really desirable jobs anymore — they pay, literally, fast-food wages — you cannot get trained, professional pilots for those wages anymore.”

“

After an unintended extended hiatus, I’m reviving this heap with a purpose. Because things that move are more interesting than things which are fixed, what we’ll have here is everything and anything having to do with how we move ourselves and our stuff.

Yeah, there will be the important but often boring “transportation policy” matters: infrastructure, gas taxes, user fees, pavement. (But with your help we’ll try to remove as much of the boring as possible, because anything that effects you is usually at least somewhat interesting. At least to you).
But this site will also I hope have lots of cool (and useful) stuff: riverboats, neat old (and new) cars, getting there by air, shortcuts and blue highways, scenery, train whistles in the night, etc., etc.

The great Iowa writer Richard Bissell (Dubuque boy) maybe wrote it best:

I’m afflicted with the hobo philosophy; Weary Willie and Dusty Rhodes are fellow travelers. My wife is thinking of Bridgeport. But I’m thinking of getting to Bridgeport, of moving in the direction of Bridgeport, of the act of going. I’m thinking of the road and the cars and trucks and the tollbooths, stoplights, rooftops, diners, railroad tracks, church steeples, factories, people with flat tires, truck stops, coffee, gas pumps, road maps, perhaps rain or snow and the windshield wiper going Swish Swish Clank Clank.
This is very much a work in (barely) progress and will take a bit of time to gain momentumj, but I hope you’ll be along for at least some of the ride.

*about this blog’s title

Don’t take it too seriously. We’re all idiots here – and I mean that in the good, Johnny Damon  sense. (And I mean that in the good, Jesus-in-the-Fenway-centerfield Johnny Damon sense, not the shorn, Evil Empire Johnny Damon  sense).

Time Check neighborhood

Members of Castle Rock Community Church of New Orleans at work in Lisa Kuzela’s house in the Time Check neighborhood. The house had about 5 feet of water in its first floor.

Pastor John Gerhardt of Castle Rock Community hauls a load of debris from Lisa Kuzela’s house in the Time Check neighborhood. The church sent 10 people to Cedar Rapids and Iowa City for three days of demolition and recovery work. Gerhardt’s wife Wendy Gerhardt, nee Rhatigan, was born and raised in Cedar Rapids. Castle Rock’s trip north came after a church group from Cedar Rapids cancelled its planned trip to New Orleans for relief work.

John Gerhardt: “We can look at people with all sincerity and say, ‘We can get through this.’ It causes some stress, but you can get through it.”

Gerhardt’s neighborhood had about 6feet of floodwater, about the same as Kuzela’s area of Time Check. He said about half the residents have sinced returned.

“There’s a sprint at the beginning, to get all your stuff out of your house. But then it becomes a marathon.”

Lisa Kuzela snaps a photo of the church crew at work.

Little Bohema neighborhood

If you’re fortunate enough to have been there, you know why the Little Bohemia was one of America’s great corner taverns. If you’re not, you may be too late.

There was substantial debate over the question: Did the neighborhood get its name from the Little Bo, or vice versa? It was a reputed hangout of Grant Wood and Marvin Cone, which sounds reasonable because Cone actually painted it.