It’s fine. My Mom flies Portsmouth NH to Punta Gorda a few times a year going back and forth to Maine. FAR more convenient than RSW for her, and Allegiant and Frontier are pretty much exactly the same. She loves not having to make a connection, and even with paying for all the extras it’s pretty cheap. Enough so that…

I am horribly American, every time I have eaten at a starred restaurant my thoughts were “ya, that tasted pretty good, but it cost too damned much for the amount of food”. I’ll take more quantity and a tad less pretention.

As food is my major reason for travel, I’ve been to about 25-30 Michelin starred restaurants for work or pleasure.

Neutral: I’m so tired of the bloggers here that constantly bemoan the folks who successfully make a nice life and living for themselves. It most always comes from Shilling and Orlove. I’m sorry that the majority of us who come here, hoping to READ ABOUT CARS, are mostly successful folk who don’t live in either NYC or…

I’m dead serious, how does it affect my life or anyone else’s life if some billionaire uses the laws we have in place to save some money on taxes?

Why does that matter?

On Thursday, it offered one of its weakest excuses yet. Toyota didn’t sign a pledge to stop making fossil-fuel-powered cars by 2040 because it said that parts of the world aren’t ready

COTD

I’m OK with being called an idiot. I was an idiot. I’m also nearly 11 years sober, which doesn’t invalidate my misdeeds but at least shows that I did, in fact, address my alcoholism.

I was shocked that the train portion between Philly and Pittsburgh itself is something like 7-1/2 hours and goes only once a day. That’s a crazy bottleneck, plus Pittsburgh doesn’t have the advantage of being an airline hub like DTW does. 

Boston to DC is considerably shorter by flight, but Boston to NYC or NYC to DC can work really well for the right situation, as you identified.

Those places don’t have catenary that is 100+ years old, some of the NE Corridor infrastructure dates to the original Pennsylvania Railroad. Amtrak is upgrading as fast as they can, but is *expensive*, and of course it is also hard to maintain service while doing it.

This has everything to do with the corridor being owned in parts by different authorities down the line. Amtrak doesn’t maintain all of the overhead infrastructure. This doc that shows all the capital projects on the Corridor and who’s responsible for each project, including some overhead line modernization, shows how…

With full due respect to your qualifications (which take a great deal of work, time, and intake of operational knowledge and rules) Conductor != HSR engineer. I’ll grant that conductors hear things pretty directly from folks in maintenance of way, but there’s an equal amount of heresay and info that gets lost in the…

Yeah, it’s unfortunate---Lorne discovered an excellent Trump impressionist after we were all sick of Trump impressions. It’d be like if they’d brought in Tina Fey to play Sarah Palin in 2017.

And there we have it. Places such as France, the UK, and Japan also have snow, ice, and (WTF) “wet falling leaves” yet somehow can have high-speed catenary-based rail a level of magnitude better than ours.  But here in the USA we have to develop every regulation and specification from scratch (and usually for blended…

The tracks are the furthest thing from “ancient.” The rails between Boston and DC are new and perhaps the most thoroughly maintained in the US.

“Nor’easter crashed a docked boat into a bridge in Florida”

1. There’s a jellyfish that’s literally immortal

Not to mention they are selling every one they build.   At least at the present moment.