Getting there on time
During a recent conversation with a family friend, the question came up. What about a career working on the passenger train? Now I have given this a lot of thought over the years. Not because I wanted to do it but because I, too, wondered. It seems that we still have trains in parts of the country. However the opportunities to get paid for traveling back and forth to the same bit of countryside occurs less and less. No need. The number of riders is down and the number of employees needed to make sure the service is comfortable is also down. The railroads have rationalized this scientifically. The question is always there. Why, if the mileage has not changed and the trains are more mechanically robust, why do trains not run on time. Because therein lies the issue. If you get on board your train at departure time you would expect to get back at something that matched reality. I cannot answer this on behalf of the rail companies but all of the videos I have watched show the trains arrive consistently after that I’m showing on the schedule. Even in cases where the tracks are not shared between freight and passengers. So what has gone wrong. The tracks are still being maintained and the idea of a certain amount of time for a certain distance has never really gone away. What has happened to passenger service. It does no good to compare rails and trails. Even if you walked on an old railbed you could say that you should arrive at the time you expect. The trains have no compunction to follow this rule of thumb. I speak from years of experience in that I often traveled across a section of the country. Rail travel was economical. And we usually arrived within an hour or two of the time we expect it. I cannot imagine what it would be like to live on a continent where the trains run on time. That does exist apparently. Not just a folk myth. But here in North America we seem to have put the idea of keeping to our schedule into the realms of fantasy. I must try to learn more about this odd rule of physics.
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