Wiscon: trains home

[redbird]

We didn't take Amtrak, we flew: Madison-Detroit-Newark on Northwest. Nonetheless, we rode on three or four different kinds of train on Monday.

In the process, we spent several hours in the Detroit airport, and didn't get even a halfway decent meal because they kept handing out the delay in 20-minute chunks, which isn't long enough to do much of anything with (and first we thought we were on time, and couldn't spare the eight minutes it would take them to cook a calzone and some chicken fingers, instead of a few slices of pizza).

The first train took us from our arrival to our departure gate, within the Northwest terminal. I'd ridden it before, but this time we had three minutes or so to wait for the train. Long enough for me to notice that what they've built, for intra-terminal transport, is a cable car system. It has a total of three stops, and two trains, but it is in fact a cable car, though without a slope. I wonder if anyone else has built a new cable car system in the past few decades.

The rest were less novel: a monorail from the Newark airport to the railroad station, thence NJ Transit (which I think is overhead electric) to Penn Station New York, where we ducked out to the Tick-Tock Diner for a late supper, then took the subway (third rail electric) home.

[This post prompted by elynne being enthusiastic about trains in her journal.]

Comments

[ckd]

There are actually quite a few cable-car systems around. Several of the Las Vegas inter-casino shuttles (Excalibur-Luxor, for example) are such, and the Birmingham (UK) air-rail link shuttle is a cable car that replaced a maglev system.

[zsero.livejournal.com]

You know, I had noticed that the two trains are coordinated (i.e. train A arrives and leaves station 1 at the same moment that train B arrives and leaves station 3, and they both arrive and leave station 2 at the same time). I had unthinkingly assumed that this was coordinated by computer; it never occured to me that a cable was the most logical explanation for that behaviour.