Commuter rail line delayed indefinitely

[professorscott]

Then supposedly all you need is to get the railroads to let you run the trains [[they do own the tracks).

"all you need" is right, but this has been a monumental problem. SEMCOG has been dealing with the three, that's right, count 'em, three railroads that own the relevant sections of track, and getting that agreement is what has taken almost all of the time spent on the project; and in fact, I believe if you were to check with SEMCOG, what the railroads in fact have agreed to is to allow a truly minimal number of trains, far less than what anyone wanted, and in fact not enough to make for a successful demonstration project IMVHO.

So even if the trains were to run, which they aren't, you would only have a few trains a day, which is not enough to attract large numbers of people [[again, just IMVHO), so at the end of it the fed sez "see, we were right, nobody does want to ride that" and it shuts down after a few years.

Go big or go home. If we can't run eight to twelve trains a day - and that's a bare minimum for a good regional line - then we should spend our money on something else, like more buses or some light rail.

[detourdetroit]

Two words: CON CON

[Hermod]

"all you need" is right, but this has been a monumental problem. SEMCOG has been dealing with the three, that's right, count 'em, three railroads that own the relevant sections of track, and getting that agreement is what has taken almost all of the time spent on the project; and in fact, I believe if you were to check with SEMCOG, what the railroads in fact have agreed to is to allow a truly minimal number of trains, far less than what anyone wanted, and in fact not enough to make for a successful demonstration project IMVHO.

So even if the trains were to run, which they aren't, you would only have a few trains a day, which is not enough to attract large numbers of people [[again, just IMVHO), so at the end of it the fed sez "see, we were right, nobody does want to ride that" and it shuts down after a few years.

Go big or go home. If we can't run eight to twelve trains a day - and that's a bare minimum for a good regional line - then we should spend our money on something else, like more buses or some light rail.

One of the basic axioms of railroad dispatching is that only one train can occupy a section of track at one time. If you have the tracks full of passengers trains, you can not use them for freight trains. Freight trains pay the bills.