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The ironic term “profound revelation” is borrowed from a Woodstock-era drug-humour book called A Child’s Garden of Grass, but its use here is not meant as any kind of drug reference.  Rather, it applies well to a certain progression of thought: when, in the midst of research, one discovers or figures out a particularly interesting fact, and thinks “holy cow! look what I found!” — and then, upon further research, realises that just about anybody with marginally closer proximity to the subject matter would look upon this so-called discovery and say, “well, duh.”

One of the most fascinating (to me) items in the history of East Lansing, Michigan, is that it not only had a streetcar line that served the Agricultural College from Lansing, but that the line was later upgraded to an interurban service that reached all the way to Owosso.  Growing up riding CATA buses, I had no idea that this other form of public transportation had existed, some fifty-plus years earlier.  That is until, as a teenager in the mid-’80s, I saw the tracks myself — hidden beneath the pavement of M.A.C. Avenue, briefly exposed during a repaving project.

Befuddled by this inexplicable, long-buried infrastructure, and as yet unaware of the streetcar, I promptly forgot about it.  But several years later, as I started my research on city history, I came upon Chace Newman‘s 1915 map of the city and immediately noted the railroad tracks running past the college grounds and straight up M.A.C. Avenue.  I put two and two together and realised what those rusty rails had been.

I wanted to know more, but at the time my resources were more limited.  J.D. Towar informs us that the interurban reached Owosso and was popular for excursions to Pine Lake, which we now call Lake Lansing.  Newman’s map only extends to the 1915 city limits, and even then the subdivision of Avon Dale — not yet incorporated into the city — is obscured by the map legend.  The interurban line ran along the south side of Burcham Drive, but cannot be seen on the map as it reaches Hagadorn Road.

So I left it at that.  The vague “headed out past Pine Lake to Owosso” would have to suffice.

Late last year, I noticed an interesting marking on the OpenStreetMap wiki atlas: a dotted line denoted “Interurban Pathway.”  “Holy cow!” I exclaimed, or words to that effect.  “That must be the old interurban right-of-way!”  As that map shows, the railway continued straight along Burcham Drive, past Park Lake Road, and went on without bend at least as far as Okemos Road.  With new-found excitement, I started to track down further information on the line, slowly piecing together its route through old maps and vague references in newspapers and history books.  As recently as two days ago I sent an e-mail to someone at the city, ingenuously asking, “I think maybe that thing, near your thing, might possibly be part of an old interurban right-of-way… do you know anything about this?”

Little did I realise that this obscure (to me) “Interurban Pathway” on OpenStreetMap was in fact a rails-to-trails project of Meridian Charter Township, and was paved with a twelve-foot-wide strip of asphalt in 2007.

Well, duh.  Maybe if I still lived near East Lansing I’d have half a clue these things were happening.  Turns out, this summer the township and the county road commission will extend the pathway along the interurban right-of-way by another mile or so, out to Marsh Road.  I wonder if they’ll find any remnants of the old railbed.

On Friday morning, 30 November 2007, Amtrak’s Pere Marquette arriving at Chicago from Grand Rapids crashed while passing through Norfolk Southern’s 47th Street freight yard on the south side of town. Preliminary reports suggest that the engineer was speeding in a reduced-speed block and was unable to stop in time when the tail end of an double-stack wellcar train appeared in his path.

This story has so many aspects I want to address, it’s hard to know where to begin.

I’m sure heads will roll for this incident. Probably the engineer, who had only three months of certification. Possibly even some of the other people in the locomotive cab, if they provided distraction or are found to have sat idly by without commenting on the excessive speed of the train.

Yet I think it illustrates more the trouble today with the American passenger rail system. There are dozens of different signal aspects an engineer has to learn, many of them completely different from one railroad to another. The Federal Railroad Administration should have long ago mandated a nationwide unified signaling system — and allocated some federal funds to put it into effect. Meanwhile, our passenger trains are sharing the rails with freight trains. Traffic conflicts will easily delay a passenger train, while the wear and tear of heavy freight trains makes it impossible to run passenger trains at a decent speed along those same tracks.

We should have had a high-speed passenger rail system in this country long ago, and not just the half-assed experiment of the Acela trains on the east coast. I could go on and on about everything that is wrong with the American rail system, but I would rather go into the other thing that bugs me about this story: the bad press coverage.

I wish I could find the article I read a couple of weeks ago, I think in the Chicago Reader, about reporters parroting the version of the story told by officials in press conferences, never bothering to think for themselves or take the time to make a few phone calls and ask a few questions and determine whether maybe, just maybe, the officials are telling the story in a way that puts themselves in the best possible light.

For one thing, many sources reported that there were five people in the locomotive cab at the time of the crash, including a fresh relief crew that had just come on board at Hammond, Indiana. If so, the press failed to mention, this apparently would have been a violation of FRA rules. However, railfans on the Yahoo IlliniRail discussion group noted, among plenty of other complaints about poor press coverage, that there were only three in the cab (a rail foreman, the engineer, and a student engineer) and the relief crew was seated elsewhere in the train.

More significant to me, the local papers were told by the NTSB about a police security camera at the yard that had recorded the crash, but said that the video had not been released to the press. As late as Monday their online sites were echoing this official line, but by mid-afternoon there was breaking news: the video had been posted on the Internet. This was suddenly the hottest topic for the evening news, and every local TV station (and now, both the Sun-Times and Tribune web sites) carried clips of the wreck.

Even today, the latest article on the Tribune web site (dated December 4, by transportation reporter Jon Hilkevitch) says, “A Chicago police surveillance video of the crash… made its way onto the Internet on Monday.”

I found the video online, by going to YouTube and typing “Amtrak crash.” Guess what, folks — according to the posting itself, the video was posted on December 1st! Saturday! A day after the crash itself!

“Sorry,” the news outlets must be saying to us. “Weekend. Sleeping.”

One thing no one has yet seen fit to mention is that the time stamp on the video, assuming it’s accurate, shows the crash happened at 11:25 AM CT. According to Amtrak’s schedule, the Pere Marquette was due at Chicago Union Station at 10:30 — so the train was running more than an hour late. (Yes, the numbers show only 55 minutes, but 47th Street is nearly six miles south of CUS. With the intervening yards and slow zones, there’s no way a train could get there in five minutes.) By the way, the Pere Marquette is a less than four hour trip. By my accounting that means the route took more than 25% longer than it was supposed to.

I’m hoping this will be addressed by the NTSB’s investigation; after all, their vice chairman was quoted as saying, “We will be looking at what the engineer was doing and what he was thinking and … [we’ll] try to get an idea of his mental state at the time he went through the signal.”

Maybe the engineer was thinking, “Last run of the week, time to go home, but I’m late late late… gotta go, gotta go.”

Still, why anyone would cruise into that “box canyon” of moving freight cars, with sight distance severely reduced by the walls of steel on either side, at forty miles per hour, is beyond me. Let the heads roll.

But don’t expect to hear the whole story in the news.

The Chicago Transit Authority is up to its old tricks, and on Sunday it will cancel umpteen bus routes if it doesn’t receive the state funding it wants. The death spiral continues, and this latest development is a serious nose-dive. But some of the CTA’s rhetoric begs closer scrutiny…

This chart now appears in every train car and bus on the system, along with a “please write your representative” plea. Note that fine print. The numbers for the CTA were taken from the 2006 budget, while all the other entries are from the respective cities’ 2005 budgets. The actual value for the CTA in 2005 is more like 59 percent. Still at the low end, but no longer dramatically so.

Meanwhile, as an example of how the other numbers may be fudged, the value for San Francisco is overstated — it’s actually the figure for the MUNI alone, and does not include the BART, which is significantly lower. The MUNI gets a lot of local funding (though still not nearly as much as the CTA does in municipal funds) in part because of the cable car system, which is hugely expensive relative to the passenger miles travelled and which is an intentional loss leader due to its tourism value. Anyway, the CTA alone spends more money in a year than do the MUNI and BART combined.

It would be more accurate to compare the CTA to a similar system in terms of the population in the service area, and Philadelphia’s SEPTA comes close (3.3 million potential passengers, versus 3.7 million for CTA). In this situation, CTA comes out looking not so bad — the operating cost per service area capita is almost identical — while the operating cost per passenger mile is better: 53 cents per mile for CTA, 61 cents per mile for SEPTA.

Yet this omits one major factor: deferred maintenance. None of the many figures in the National Transit Database report mention how much was spent on maintaining the system, nor compare that against the total capital value of the system itself. And if this report from the NTSB is any indication, upkeep — and management of same — has been sorely lacking for a very long time. Not spending money to fix a system that is rapidly declining into decrepitude is a fine way to keep operating costs down, at least in the short term.

After all, deferring maintenance on the rusted-out rail clips and plates in the Blue Line subway was essentially free — until the 2006 derailment caused over a million dollars in equipment, track, and signal damage.

(Follow-up for May 2008… The derailment continues to escalate costs: the first of more than 100 resulting lawsuits has been settled out of court, to the tune of $1.25 million.)

I started riding the CTA again a few weeks ago on a regular basis after a three-month hiatus, and service is worse than ever. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. I just wasn’t prepared for how bad it can get — twelve-minute train intervals during rush hour, for example.

I rode a Loop train yesterday for the first time in weeks. Since my last visit to this part of the ‘L’, the CTA has made a seemingly minor, but in my opinion significant, change. The Purple Line (Evanston express) now runs counterclockwise around the Loop.

Why? My first guess was that it makes things harder to screw up for the controllers in Tower 18, at the northwest corner of the Loop, since no trains that enter the Loop have to turn now. However, according to Graham Garfield it was supposedly done at the start of three-track operations due to the overhaul of the Belmont and Fullerton stations “to make it easier for customers to board either route and exit the Loop at the first opportunity.”

Actually, I believe that the exact opposite is true.  Previously, a rider within the Loop could choose the line that exited the Loop more quickly.  For example, a rider at Washington/Wells could hop on a Purple train and immediately leave the Loop.  With both Brown and Purple trains moving in the same direction, that option is gone.  They must ride all the way around.  This adds nearly ten minutes to the trip, and I think it will increase the crowding on trains in the Loop, as passengers have to stay on board longer to get to their destinations.

The thing that irks me most about this change, though, is the wasted effort. The signs in all the Loop stations had to be changed, all the Purple signs moved to the outboard platforms. Schedule boards and pamphlets had to be reprinted. Worst, the system maps in every train and station throughout the entire CTA system had to be reprinted and replaced to reflect the new routing. We’re talking hundreds upon hundreds of signs, and untold man-hours to complete.

The CTA is continually screaming about funding, how they will have to eliminate runs and defer maintenance if they don’t get millions from the state and federal governments. Yet they have plenty of cash to create the new Pink Line and generate signage and schedules, and then — barely a year later — replace all those signs and schedules for a project whose benefits seem dubious at best. (And by the way, if this is a temporary change for the Belmont and Fullerton construction project, the signs might get moved back yet again in a couple of years.)

What no one at the CTA seems to understand is this: to threaten service cuts is to enter a self-fulfilling death spiral. A customer, standing on a train platform or at a bus stop, waiting for a ride that seems like it will never come, will remember that the CTA said they might cut service. They’ll think to themselves, “maybe I’m the one getting screwed by those cuts,” regardless of whether or not the cuts were ever enacted. They’ll start walking, or hop a cab, and the CTA will lose out on that fare. Worse, the next time they’re considering their transportation options, the CTA will fall just a little bit lower on the viability scale. And so it goes.

The CTA loses at least 25 cents a day from me because they don’t run enough buses during the evening rush hour, because I can look up the street and know that if I don’t see a bus on the horizon, I’ll be able to complete my 3/4-mile-long walk from the train before one catches up to me. A quarter doesn’t sound like much, until you consider that I’m not alone in doing this. There’s no way of knowing how much money the CTA loses by cutting service — or even merely threatening to — even as ridership potential increases. But it’s surely going to take a major overhaul of the system, and its public image, before the people of Chicago consider it to be anything more than a (barely) necessary evil.

McCormick Place is a massive complex, so gigantically out of scale with the human element that it looks like a set piece from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. Some portion of it is continually under construction, and the long walk from the parking lots to the exhibition halls always involves skirting dusty areas cordoned off with yellow warning tape, and running narrow gauntlets bottlenecked by temporary plywood partition walls.

Once inside — and I highly recommend buying tickets online in advance to avoid another horrific bottleneck — the Chicago Auto Show is a crazy scene of giant corporate logos, flashing lights, and overpowering colours. It’s a blast, and a good entertainment value for $10. (Get there early, or go on a weekday. It gets crowded.)

In general, I don’t care all that much about the concept cars. They are usually complete pipe dreams and will never see production. For that reason, I prefer to focus at the auto show on the vehicles that I might actually have an opportunity to purchase some day.

Jeep had a dramatic-looking obstacle course that its vehicles were crawling around… steep inclines, water crossings, rock fields, and the like. It was eye-catching, and drew a crowd, but at second glance all the Jeeps were driven by trained employees, and the course was tightly controlled with plastic guardrails… which explains why the woman pushing the floor squeegee around at the bottom of the big hill wasn’t fearing for her life. And of course all the obstacles were designed expressly with the limitations of the Jeeps in mind, so there was never any chance of exceeding approach or departure angles, or drawing water, or getting hung up on a high center. All in all, it might as well have been one of those amusement park rides for four-year-olds where all the cars are tethered to a pull chain.

Toyota brought along a custom FJ Cruiser, this one with a cloth rolltop and a shortened cab for a small open bed at the rear, plus some suspension upgrades. It showed off the FJ’s potential for being souped up for off-road activities, but that stubby bed didn’t look useful for much of anything. (At least the shorter cab reduces the size of the C-pillar, which in the factory model is a big fat blind spot in both rear quarters.) About the only interesting part was the nice front-end bull bar with integral winch, and that was an aftermarket package by ARB that can be added to any stock FJ. The custom job was done up in “Heritage Orange” (more on this later), but this is not an available factory colour. Unfortunately, Toyota is otherwise standing pat on its existing paint, and we’re stuck with the same 5 colours as when the FJ was introduced last year. I guess I’ll have to wait at least one more year before they decide to resurrect the classic Rustic Green of my 1978 FJ40, thereby making it imperative that I will buy a new FJ.

Honda has figured out that its Element, now in its fifth model year, is more popular among the thirty- and forty-something age groups, rather than the hip-hop and surf kids it was originally targeting. For this reason it has toned down its two-tone grey plastic trimwork to a much more conservative and traditional level. The interior remains highly utilitarian with a hose-out plastic floor and rear jump seats that hinge to the sides. A new colour, Root Beer Metallic, looks sharp. I’m liking this vehicle more and more.

To be honest, the most interesting exhibit was… the U.S. Army. They brought an M2 Bradley equipped with the M242 Bushmaster chain gun, and were letting folks crawl around inside. (The ten-year-olds sitting in the rear seats made the thing look spacious.) Some of the armored division soldiers were wearing chrome spurs in tribute to the cavalry, which of course no longer uses horses except for ceremonial parades. That was cool. You could get your name stamped on a dog tag, play on a team for a first-person shooter game (lot of friendly fire going on there), and stand next to a Cobra helicopter flown by their demonstration team. Pretty cool.

Overall, there just wasn’t much new to see this year. The one recurring theme: orange.

Not exactly orange-orange, though. More of a light orange. A hue that Dodge, nearly four decades ago, called “Go Mango.” In lieu of last year’s concept Challenger, which was the usual teaser pipe dream, they brought an original 1970 Challenger R/T convertible with the 440 Six-Pack, one of only 99 ever built, gleaming in Go Mango. (This shot makes it appear more yellow than it is in reality.) It sat on a flatbed, tantalizingly out of reach.

Then there was that Toyota FJ custom job. The exact same colour, which they called “Heritage Orange.” Then came the variants, all about the same shade, but many in a metallic version. There was a Hummer H2. A Nissan 350Z. No matter where you turned, another car was cropping up in this light orange colour.

Did all the automakers get together and agree on this one? Or did the paint manufacturer screw up and make too much, causing a surplus of orange paint they’d have to sell on the cheap?