The problem of what to do with waste from New York City is just a little too real for the residents of Parrish, Alabama. A train full of human waste from NYC—dubbed the “poop train” by the Associated Press—has become stranded outside their town, blanketing the area with the rancid smell of sewage. [Update: The train…
An Amtrak passenger train collided with a CSX freight train on Sunday in South Carolina, killing two and injuring at least 70 more, according to news reports. The collision occurred at around 2:45 a.m. local time, and the Amtrak was traveling southbound from New York to Miami. This is the company’s third lethal…
Billing the project as an experiment in ‘slow TV’, Australia’s SBS television network ran The Ghan: Australia’s Greatest Train Journey for 17 hours straight last Sunday. While some described the programming as ‘like watching paint dry’, other fanatics couldn’t put down the remote. A 3-hour highlights package of the…
The internet is great because it speeds up the spread of information like never before. Unfortunately, it also allows for the spread of very bad and stupid information. The latest crock of shit to come across Idiot Twitter is unsubstantiated rumors that Antifa sabotaged an Amtrak passenger train, causing it to derail…
The scene Monday along Interstate 5 in Washington was stunning: train cars dangling over the freeway, vehicles underneath crushed to bits, survivors who were given a commemorative lanyard for the ride left screaming and having to kick out windows to escape. A train along Amtrak’s Cascades route, somewhere between the…
Amtrak passenger train 501 derailed onto Interstate 5 this morning, according to CNBC. First responders are reportedly treating the incident as a “mass casualty incident,” though there is no official announcement regarding injuries. The derailed train is blocking the southbound lanes of the interstate. Update: At…
I really don’t understand how some people end up in politics. Sometimes you see decisions made that are so idiotic, so destructive, and just so wrong that is makes you wonder how the people behind them could even get elected to clean a toilet. This time, I’m specifically baffled by the mayor of the French city of…
John Candy was only 43 when he died of a heart attack in 1994 on the set of a truly terrible movie called Wagons East!. I was young, but I remember his death being met with something like unsurprised shock. Candy had, after all, been quite overweight for years; he also drank and smoked. I can think of many actors,…
Before you jet off to the comment section to remark about how it must be a slow news day around here, I just want to drop this in as a reminder that maybe—just maybe—someone’s had a worse day than you. Commuters in Metro Detroit faced an unexpected detour Monday when a train blocked a railroad crossing for nine hours.…
After spotting an elderly woman having a hard time crossing the tracks with an oncoming train, a New Jersey man hops out of his car and pulls her to safety with mere seconds to spare.
On June 9th, 1910, the CPR 694 freight train derailed after hitting a boulder on the track near Mink Harbor, Canada. It fell into Lake Superior and wasn’t seen again. Until now.
In my adolescence, I based many of my conceptualisations of Japan on three sometimes questionable sources: my Japanese language lessons programme, Japanese TV, and, yes, anime/manga. And they were all completely dead-on about how awful commuting by train in Tokyo really is.
Japanese train-travel company Seibu Railway hopes to make a major design leap in time for their 100th anniversary; a new line of fast commuter trains that “blend into the landscape.”
Japanese train doors shut rather quickly, but they usually warn you with a a jingle. That jingle is a lot like a yellow light. It should be understood to mean, “the train is leaving, don’t bother,” but many people instead think of it as “run, run, run! Squeeze, squeeze, squeeze!” This is one of the few times where the…
There’s a lot of things in life we’re so used to, it’s hard to imagine that they’re not just some law of nature, like gravity or running water over the toothpaste on your toothbrush to ‘set’ it. One of these fundamentals is the fact that the rear of cars have red lights on them. But why, exactly, is that? Why red,…
In China, the national high-speed rail system is fast, efficient, and transports twice as many daily passengers than the country's domestic airlines — the opposite of what happens here. Chinese airlines are complaining and provide a good lesson for U.S. operators: It's easier to embrace rail than fight it.
Charles T. Harvey finished building the West Side and Yonkers Patent Railway elevated line up Greenwich Street in 1867. Here's how he tested it out.
America is a car country. We always have been, and we probably always will be. But as much as we all love driving, we have to recognize that there are some downsides to not having a first-rate rail system like Europe or Japan.