Maglev Train Seen Making Washington-to-Baltimore Trip at 311 MPH

Re:Maglev Train Seen Making Washington-to-Baltimore Trip at ... by _delirium on Wednesday October 22, 2014 @09:43AM (#8492637)

I'm not sure I'd really call Amtrak a railroad in the conventional sense of the term. With a few exceptions [1] they neither own nor lease trackage, and merely have legal access to trackage on fairly low-priority terms (the track controllers give them something like "best-effort" access, with no teeth in what constitutes a good effort). They're mostly a weird conglomeration of the former passenger services of a bunch of railroads, which were glued together and dumped on the government in the '70s in order to keep them on life support, but with no mandate to do much of anything but run the former services glued together on top of the trackage that was retained by the former operators.

[1] The exceptions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amtrak#Tracks_owned_or_leased_...

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Re:Maglev Train Seen Making Washington-to-Baltimore Trip at ... by biscuitt on Wednesday October 22, 2014 @10:31AM (#8492856)

I mean they own the majority of the track on the Northeast Corrider line including both the tunnel under the hudson river and the east river tunnel in Manhattan. This is their most heavily used line, and they have priority through those tunnels over LIRR, NJ Transit, and MetroNorth.

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Re:Maglev Train Seen Making Washington-to-Baltimore Trip at ... by _delirium on Wednesday October 22, 2014 @11:15AM (#8493063)

That's the main exception, yes, and that one has much better operation compared to the rest of the lines.

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