What amuses me is this reads like is written by an amazed american getting wowed by some things the rest of the world already has had for decades. Whats sad is Americans have this exceptionalism mentality where if an old tech like steam and diesel caused them to rule out rail… they never reconsider even if the tech advances.
Americans discover what the rest of the world has known for a hundred years: that electric trains are just plain better
In my city they built a new shiny east-west electric line that fails every week, and they took out the old north-south diesel line for upgrades (but not electrification), which was way more reliable.
Granted, I’m sure the reliability and power source are not correlated here, just my city transit commission (of late) is corrupt as fuck, so anything new sucks.
The north-south upgrades were supposed to be done two years ago… I yearn for the day…
To the posters commenting on how amazing it is Americans are wowed by the obvious: there’s an entire electric train network called BART throughout the land surrounding this small peninsula run of Caltrain. And it’s been running since the 60s so it’s not really new to us. It’s also noisy as shit because the wheels are dumb. But it’s still fast.
