Technology for Luddites
Belgian art collective Time Circus built their first prototype of a giant Land Ship that will travel through Europe. Like a modern-day galley, the land ship will be propelled by the muscle power of the participating travelers. The journey is understood as a 21st century pilgrimage and will take an estimated 10 years. [Read more…]
The latest issue (PDF, page 4/5) of California Rail News talks about our article on high-speed trains, and adds some interesting information:
The French National Railway (SNCF) has started a fleet of buses to replace international express trains. iDBUS, a brand allied with its low-cost iDTGV now occupies the Paris-Amsterdam, Paris-Brussels, Paris-London, Lyon-Milano and Lyon-Barcelona routes, offering 9 to 45 euro trips to those who have been priced off Thalys, Eurostar and trains now selling for up to 180 euro.
About 25 percent of the traffic is former overnight train trips, and the rest daytime runs with fares only a few euros cheaper than trains. Concurrently, the international expresses that used to serve Prague from Zurich, München, Frankfurt and Stuttgart also vanished, replaced by Nürnberg-Prague buses in Deutsche Bahn colors labeled IC Bus.
California Rail News editor Richard Tolmach also sent us a news article that does not bode well for the future of high speed rail travel in France:
France’s economic conditions mean passengers aren’t willing to pay up the money for the most expensive high speed rail routes.
Recording a net loss of 180 million euros in 2013 and effectively reversing the 376 million euro profit of the previous year is down to the 1.4 billion euro writedown of the high speed long distance train network value.
SNCF said that TGV “is not sufficiently profitable to cover the carrying amount of its fleet and its renewal.”
– See more at: http://www.totalrail.org/2014/02/17/frances-high-speed-rail-network-loses-2-billion-value/#sthash.IjguUGdE.dpuf
France’s economic conditions mean passengers aren’t willing to pay up the money for the most expensive high speed rail routes. Recording a net loss of 180 million euros in 2013 and effectively reversing the 376 million euro profit of the previous year is down to the 1.4 billion euro writedown of the high speed long distance train network value. SNCF said that TGV “is not sufficiently profitable to cover the carrying amount of its fleet and its renewal”.
Previously: High Speed Trains are Killing the European Railway Network.
“America’s 20th largest bus service — hauling 120,000 riders a day — is profitable and also illegal. It’s not really a bus service at all, but a willy-nilly aggregation of 350 licensed and 500 unlicensed privately-owned ‘dollar vans’ that roam the streets of Brooklyn and Queens, picking up passengers from street corners where city buses are either missing or inconvenient.” Read more. Via Makeshift.
“In Bolivia’s jungles and steep cliffs the Yungas people do not walk. They fly. On ropes. Like birds. Faster than astronauts. These ‘birds’ are known as cocaleros, or coca harvesters. They use ropes to swing across the narrow valleys, suspended from ancient rusting pulleys.” Watch the video. Jerry, thanks for the link. Previously: Aerial ropeways: automatic cargo transport for a bargain.
“For a hundred years, from the early 1800s to the early 1900s, Europe and America had cities of at least a million people that ran on a massive, sophisticated network of carriages and streetcars. By 1880, according to historian John H. White, Jr., US cities had 415 horse-drawn railways running, with 18,000 cars on 3,000 miles of track, carrying 1.2 billion passengers a year. Most of these lines continued decades into the age of electricity and coal, simply because the horses worked better than any other option.” Read: Horse-drawn public tranportation. Thanks, Johan. Previously: Bring back the horses.
They have the worst weather in the world, but they also have the hottest looking open top trams (streetcars). Welcome onboard the 1930s Blackpool Balloon cars in the UK. Alan Robson has around 1,300 pictures of the vehicles, some of them below. Text and first picture from Wikipedia.
