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johnthefireman wrote:

george matthews wrote:Even if it were extended into South Sudan I doubt if there would be enough traffic to justify it.

I wouldn't underestimate the potential freight traffic to and from South Sudan.

In nearby Uganda, a line which has been out of service since 1993 is to be refurbished Yes, very interesting that they have chosen to refurbish the old metre gauge rather than take the standard gauge up to Gulu and beyond. Last time I looked at that line was around 1997 when I travelled by road thr...

I think the 'map' should be treated with scepticism. Unless there is a plan to build the lines it is fantasy such as one used to draw in the classroom when otherwise bored. The most important next step will be to build lines to Kampala and Kisumu. There is probably some potential for traffic on thes...

Yes, it was Syracuse. It's expensive to build a rail station in an existing city, which is why new stations are seldom built inside cities. But Syracuse previously had a station conveniently in the city and now doesn't. My experiences of Saudi are not pleasurable to remember. I am glad that they are...

I have travelled thousands of miles on the narrow gauge railways in Africa. Yes, I am glad they existed, as being better than road transport, but I wish the people who made the decisions - thinking of keeping the costs low - to avoid Standard gauge had built standard gauge instead.

I am sure there is no future for "Metre gauge railways". They were a feature of an increasingly distant past. A few still continue but most have been discontinued. I have made a lot of use of the metre gauge system in East Africa, and have found them quite useful, but the trend even there ...

Nowadays planning of new railways sometimes puts stations well outside the urban areas - I am thinking of the new rail line in Kenya, where the Nairobi station is no longer inside the city - which actually grew up around the original rail station Very true. The same is true of the new station in Mo...

It's not unknown for an engineer to disable the deadman or alerter, finding it an intrusive nuisance. The investigation will probably discover the underlying cause, but the news media may have lost interest by then. I think to disable that system should be an offence requiring dismissal at least. T...

Service to Fallujah has been restored. The current state of things in Iraq is not likely to see the whole system return to service - at least not soon. It would only be safe to offer a passenger service if there was a reasonable state of peace. In fact there is no peace in all the Arab states from ...

I thought they were virtually universal today; maybe there's more to this than meets the eye. Whether Fox News will do any follow-up is another matter. It was a surprise that the train could function without a person in the cab. It is reasonable to assume there was either no dead man's hand apparat...

I guess these trains don't have "deadman" pedals.

Another fuel source may be excess Nuclear power. At the moment they use pumped storage to store it, making Hydrogen may become more cost effective. I don't want to encourage nuclear energy, as long as its exhaust products cannot be eliminated. But there are plenty of alternatives. The recent inform...

The cost of that event must show that it would be worth spending whatever it would cost to have a device that detected whether there is a human in the cab, and disable the motion controls if the cab is empty. I am sure it wouldn't cost the possible millions of the crash and damage to the locomotives...

As with many modern problems, the ultimate solution is multi-faceted. The basic requirement is the political will to overcome the outsized influence of the petroleum lobby. It is encouraging to show that alternatives to oil derived systems are feasible and have been implemented. Potentially this sy...

since hydrogen as fuel is created with lots of electricity, it would only be saving and clean if that energy is created from solar/wind or hydro. if it is created by power from normal electric grid, it really would not accomplish anything. True-ish. But hydrogen is an important product of non-carbo...