>>132644 -- Okaaayyy... that's just freaky. This 628 is part of a rolling-road train called the Sylt Shuttle plus. It is unhitched in, I think, Niebüll and continues from there to Bredstedt and even Hamburg.

The usual way to travel on the Sylt Shuttle is to drive your car onto an autorack and then sit there and wait until it's time to drive off at the other end. The trains are hauled by two https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DB_Class_218 diesel locomotives. The Sylt Shuttle plus adds the railbus.

Pic shows view from the https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylt-Shuttle over the Wadden Sea.

>>132650
Even more freaky is the reason for doing this: Over the past years, DB and RDC have been fighting over track usage rights on the line to Sylt to operate the highly profitable autorack trains.
Normally, if two companies want to run equal trains, the available slots are divided equally as well.
Now DB came up with this brilliant idea: By coupling a DMU at the end, uncoupling it on the mainland in Niebüll and letting it run further to Bredstedt, DB's line it technically 20 kilometers longer and as the regulatory body prioritizes longer lines, this gives the DB more slots.
With all the shunting, the so-called Sylt Shuttle Plus takes about 20 minutes longer than the normal regional trains, so they run practically empty.

RDC meanwhile only got a handful of slots, though they currently lack rolling stock anyway.

It is as well that the railway net is not an RPG or DB would almost certainly get flattened into the ground with the banhammer.

>>132652

>Not owning your own rail

Euro freight. Not even once.

>>132654
To be fair owning the actual infrastructure isn't always great. Conrail spent most of it's existence removing redundant rail lines that served absolutely no purpose in the deindustrialized Northeast.

>>132655
Conrail is a terrible example since it started out as a government owned corporation.

>>132656
I wasn't making a point for or against public or private ownership of railways. I was simply stating that the operators owning their own railways can result in areas being served by redundant corridors.

>>132654 -- It is mostly the smaller European railcos that own track nowadays. Mainlines are the property of companies like Network Rail in the UK, Banedanmark in Denmark, SNCF Réseau in France and DB Netz in Germany. Train operators then pay for access to the rail, hopefully fairly enough that everyone is similarly happy/unhappy.

>>132657
Then the railroad gets rid of it. Conrail was a terrible example because it was 5 or 6 failed east coast railroads that were all thrown together.

Of course it had duplicate routes, and it did eventually shed them. A European railroad not owning its own track is a by-product of state ownership for so long and then the fantastic late 20th century idea to privatize railroads. Except only sort of. You'll privatize the profits, and keep the maintenance and property publicly owned and have the people subsidize those losses. Everybody wins, except the common man.

>>132661
conrail's not exactly an example of optimal planning either, plenty of cases of "we know this line is profitable, but we can't afford to maintain it, and we don't want a competitor to have it, so start the bulldozers and pull it all up".

You should talk to our resident railroad hobo Dirtykid. He's been living on the rails for years now. Usually we're not too fond of it, but he's one of the few who respect the rules of the railroad

Hello I'm the hobo

>>132610
I have a friend who's been on the same train for 3 days now.

so they have a commute do they?

>>132627
Cancel they finally got off. Usnea is a dog.

Sorry about that utterly craptastic intro sentence. My brain says it is bad-ordered.

Troublesome...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/04/03/two-feared-dead-after-amtrak-train-derails-in-philadelpia/ -- The armchair RAIB on freerepublic opines it was something like a digger/backhoe connected to or working with a ballast regulator.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/04/03/nine-injured-in-train-crash/ -- A smaller incident happened in the UK when a train entering a platform pranged one already standing at that platform.

>yfw the comments on every FB article posts are littered with nerds arguing whether it was a backhoe or or some other piece of track equipment

Ballast Cleaner?
I read & saw the animation it was a Backhoe that the train hit
its a tractor with a digger on the rear & a scoop on the front

>>132605 -- And, incidentally, called a tractor-digger in the UK and some other places.

http://www.railwayage.com/index.php/news/two-killed-in-wreck-of-amtrak-palmetto.html -- Less inane that some other stuff.

>>132608
The accident happened on old reliable Pennsy-era cab signalling territory. Couldn't imagine that it failed without alerting dispatchers to a problem. Could the abnormally high winds (the workers were there cleaning up wind damage) have managed to force a swinging mechanical arm into the way of the approaching train?

>>132611

Shouldn't there have been a TW issued because of the work going on to slow things down around that area?

>>132614
That's not how track authorities or planned work operate.

It's too late for me to get into all the operating details, but a slow order and roadway worker protection are two very different things.

http://en.rocketnews24.com/2016/04/05/cool-cat-delighting-animal-lovers-as-he-regularly-rides-the-train-in-tokyo-%e3%80%90photos%e3%80%91/ -- Regular rider on te Seibu Ikebukuro line.

Two clips in one, boy, two clips in one. And the Firozabad crash made the NYC crash look like a SAREX (Search And Rescue EXercise).

>>132587

The NYC footage appears to be from when a J train hit an M train on the Williamsburg Bridge in 1995.

>>132493 -- That someone wasn't me. (mumblegrumble...) To be expected, though, that folk would want the longest possible ride. Wonder if the rider will repeat the feat for each Hokkaido station added.

The Rocketeers go to Hokkaido to see both trains and anime stars.

http://en.rocketnews24.com/2016/03/29/the-shinkansen-now-goes-all-the-way-to-hokkaido-and-heres-its-newest-northernmost-station/

A Shinkansen passes a freight train, blurring the previously clear cut separation.

Maybe if Japan's economy wasn't at the bottom of a garbage heap, they would've dared to construct a second tunnel.

>>132559 And leave one of them basically empty save a handful of trains per day? Would've been wasteful to say the least.

Fifty freights and twenty-six passenger trains a day is hardly a handful of either for a nearly fifty-four kilometre long undersea tunnel in a high-risk area.

>>132561
No way that would justify the absurd cost though. "Let's duplicate this tunnel, for untold billions, just in case..." Better spent, if anything, on getting that Sakhalin link in for direct containers from Eurasia.

That one is even less likely to happen, not just to gauge break but more so due to strained and frayed relations.

>>132561
Japanese freight trains are pretty short though, that 50 trains is probably the equivalent of one of two 'Murican freights.

>>132576 -- IIRC, their freights are often 20-40 cars long. Guess the upper limit depends on block length, since (to my best knowledge) there is no dark territory anywhere in Japan.

Well... I think there are several branch lines that use a staff or another token, but a US freight train would be far too long to fit on some of those. Yes, I'm looking at you, Kishū.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schafberg_Railway
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schafbergbahn

The line is steep, with an incline of 1:3.92 (25.5%). No wonder it is a rack railway.