Free Republic

Historian John Diers, author of the new book "St. Paul Union Depot," will be among the train enthusiasts who will welcome visitors to the Union Depot on Saturday, May 11. The newly refurbished Lowertown depot, which is expected to provide Amtrak passenger service by the end of the year, is celebrating Amtrak's "National Train Day" with free family activities from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Diers, who will deliver a presentation, will have copies of his book for sale. The Radio Disney road crew, a vintage bluegrass railroad band led by Cannonball Paul, storeowner Choo Choo Bob and the St....

Sen. Diane Feinstein’s husband Richard Blum won a construction contract for California’s high-speed rail project, reports the California Political Review. Author Laer Pearce says Perini-Zachary-Parsons, a construction group partially owned by Blum’s investment firm, Blum Capital, and their investors, bagged the nearly billion dollar contract:

American Rail Traffic Growth Has Nearly Ground To A Halt Cullen Roche, Pragmatic CapitalismApr. 28, 2013, 1:28 PMAfter a big first quarter rail traffic has come out of the gate extremely soft in Q2. The average pace of year over year expansion in intermodal traffic was a very healthy 5.3% in Q1, but has averaged just 0.08% so far in the first 4 weeks of the second quarter. This is a trend that has been developing since early March as the pace of expansion has averaged just 2.11% since the first week of March. Overall, that brings the 12 week...

Canadian authorities announced Monday they have broken up an Al Qaeda-linked terror plot to attack a passenger train as it crossed over a bridge in the Toronto area. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police said Monday that two suspects have been arrested on terrorism charges. Chiheb Esseghaier and Raed Jaser, who live in greater Montreal and Toronto -- were conspiring to carry out an Al Qaeda-supported attack against Via Rail, but posed no immediate threat to the public. "It was definitely in the planning stage but not imminent," RCMP chief superintendent Jennifer Strachan told reporters at a news conference. Read more:...

Metro Transit officials confirm there is a major investigation underway at its light rail Hiawatha maintenance shop. 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS has learned the investigation started in December and is still in progress. Metro Transit says it does involve staff at the maintenance facility, but would not specify which employees were under investigation. Sources tell 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS it does involve managers as well as hourly employees. Those same sources say part of the allegations that lead to the investigation include the exchange of pills and firearms for coveted overtime shifts at the maintenance facility.

the California High-Speed Rail System will saddle taxpayers with losses between $124 million to $373 million a year. Exaggerated ridership estimates and slower-than-promised trip speeds make the California bullet train project a big financial loser for taxpayers... ... The [California High-Speed Rail Authority’s] financing assertions are virtual fantasy

Crews have controlled a crude oil spill after a Canadian Pacific train derailed in Minnesota. Authorities say the 94-car train was headed south Wednesday when it lost air pressure and went into an emergency braking mode and 14 tankers derailed. Three either leaked or spilled oil. Minnesota Pollution Control Agency spokesman Dan Olson says an estimated 76,000 litres, has spilled or leaked. The agency says the spill is under control. Olson says because the ground is frozen, there's no threat to water.

A TransCanada Corp. executive says opponents to the Keystone XL pipeline should consider one consequence of delays in building the oil pipeline — an increase in dirtier and more dangerous rail transport. Alex Pourbaix, president of energy and oil pipelines at the Calgary-based pipeline and utility company, says although rail has an important role to play in moving oilsands crude to market, there are downsides to consider. "For every mile you move a barrel of oil by rail, you emit three times the (greenhouse gases) that you do by moving it by pipeline and you have an order of magnitude...

Crescent Point Energy Corp., an intermediate producer with capacity to move half of its total oil production by rail, said Thursday it hopes to add a “rail option” later this year to transport newly acquired output in Utah. Using railway cars to get around bottlenecks in pipelines is now considered a price protection strategy akin to forward selling oil, the company said on a conference call with analysts following release of its fourth quarter 2012 results. “In 2012 we improved operational flexibility by adding 50,000 barrels per day of rail capacity,” said president and chief executive Scott Saxberg on the...

The Rail Traffic Chart That Should Eliminate Any Of Your Worries About The US Economy Joe WeisenthalMarch 7, 2013 Rail = the real economy. This is good. Highest 12 week moving average in rail traffic since 2011. twitter.com/cullenroche/st… — Cullen Roche (@cullenroche) March 7, 2013

Pipeline giant Kinder Morgan has entered a joint venture to build the “first major crude by rail destination facility” in the Houston area — a 210,000 barrel-per-day project expected to come on line in the first quarter of 2014. Kinder Morgan Energy Partners and Watco Co. LLC have struck a long-term agreement with Mercuria Energy Trading Co. to build the project at Greens Point Industrial Park on the Houston Shipping Channel. The KW Express venture will open the way for Mercuria to source crude from various locations, including the Bakken shale area, Western Canada, Cushing, Okla., and West Texas. The...

Newsmax Sequester Forces Biden to Take Amtrak Friday, March 1, 2013 10:04 AM By: Sandy Fitzgerald Joe Biden’s military flights back home to Delaware will be grounded starting this weekend, as the vice president plans to start taking Amtrak trains to help cut the costs involved in using military transport for the short trip. Biden said he initiated the change in travel plans, Fox News reports, saying the change is the one part of the sequester that works to his benefit. According to published reports, it costs the government tens of thousands of dollars every time Biden takes Air Force...

Random checks happen at stations across country. Passengers catching the 9:30 a.m. Amtrak train from Austin to Dallas were met with an unexpected surprise when they got to the station. Transportation Security Administration agents, Austin police officers, and the Department of Homeland Security were all waiting for them. ... Random security checks are voluntary ... The random check takes about 10-15 minutes and happens hundreds of times a day at bus, train, and subway stations across the country.

Two ventures aiming to break the logjam facing Western Canadian producers seeking new markets for their crude oil face crucial tests in January. Vancouver-based Generating for Seven Generations, or G7G, is expecting to know whether it will get C$40 million in financing to study the feasibility of its plan to build a rail line from Alberta to Alaska to connect with the Valdez Marine Terminal, while a coalition of railroads and producers is scheduled to decide whether it will conduct an experimental shipment of 2 million barrels of crude this summer through the Hudson Bay port at Churchill, Manitoba, to...

Phillips 66 has begun shipping crude by rail from North Dakota to a refinery in New Jersey in an effort estimated at more than $1 billion. The company said this week it had signed a five-year deal with Global Partners to move oil produced in the Bakken shale play to its Bayway refinery. The Bayway refinery, the largest on the east coast, is already receiving crude through the deal, which will move 91 million barrels of oil over the contract term, or about 50,000 barrels a day, Phillips 66 spokesman Dennis Nuss said. The refinery is expected to receive crude...

A Central California man died after posting a suicide note on Facebook and then driving his car onto railroad tracks about an hour later, as friends and family frantically tried to get in touch with him. Antjuan Miguel Colvin, 21, was struck by a train going about 75 mph in Hughson on Christmas night and pronounced dead at the scene, Stanislaus County sheriff's Sgt. Anthony Bejaran told the Modesto Bee (http://bit.ly/Vbowd4 ).

The woman walked behind the man along the platform, mumbling to herself, witnesses told the police, before shoving him into the path of a northbound No. 7 train just after 8 p.m. It is the second time this month that a man has been killed after being pushed onto the subway tracks.

there was no grand celebration this month as Silicon Valley marked 25 years of light rail... The near-empty trolleys that often shuttle by at barely faster than jogging speeds serve as a constant reminder that the car is still king in Silicon Valley -- and that the Valley Transportation Authority's trains are among the least successful in the nation by any metric.

Stormy weather blamed for 75-foot-wide mudslideStormy weather is being blamed for a major mudslide in Washington state that took out a freight train. Longshoreman John Hill was working near the slope Monday when he heard the ground moving, so he picked up his camera. After hours of hearing rumblings from the rain-soaked bank above the tracks, Hill started rolling. "I can't believe this is actually happening,” said Hill, as he recorded it on his cell phone. The 75-foot-wide slide slammed into a moving Burlington Northern Santa Fe freight train near the port of Everett, derailing and crunching cars on the...

RAIL INDICATORS: The Economy Continues To Soften Cullen Roche, Pragmatic CapitalismDec. 16, 2012, 10:39 AM More weakness in this week’s rail traffic report. The AAR reported a -0.3% reading in intermodal. This is the second consecutive negative weekly reading. This brings the 12 week moving average down to 1.3%. That’s about in-line with the consensus Q4 GDP predictions and indicative of an economy that is growing, but just slightly. Here’s more via AAR: “The Association of American Railroads (AAR) today reported declines in weekly rail traffic for the week ending December 8, 2012, with U.S. railroads originating 292,206 carloads, down...