[rescue] Airport Security and Rescues...

[Carl R. Friend]

    On Thu, 27 Mar 2008, Mike Hebel wrote:

    And here I am contributing to some serious thread drift!

> It depends entirely on how fast a train that is.  A reliable and fast
> non-stop train from East<->Midwest or West<->Midwest would be quite
> acceptable.  The trick is that it has to be fast, safe, and non-stop.

    It depends, too, on what the timing is.  I recall back in the 1990s
that it would have been better for me, in a business setting, if I had
a meeting in Chicago the next day to take the train rather than going
home, sleeping a quarter-dozen hours, getting up, driving back into
Boston, and catching a red-eye to the Windy City.  With the train, I
could depart at about two in the afternoon and get into Chicago at
about nine in the morning.  Of course, that option isn't available
now since Amtrak rejigged the schedules in the late '90s.

>>>    It would have been nice to be able to nap, though, or read, instead
>>> of looking at Connecticut. :7)

    You still get to look at Connecticut from the train -- for an
interminable length of time that's way out of line for the size
of the ruddy little state.  But that's because the roadbed hasn't
seen any meaningful work since the Roosevelt administration (the
first one).  Yeah, they put up catenary but didn't *properly* redo
the underpinnings to handle the (moderately) high speeds that the
Acela (It's an acronym really: "Amtrak Customers Expect Late Arrivals".)
can take advantage of.


>> And while you can buy an inverter for the car, the train already
>> provides power jacks (both of which, car and train, are superior to
>> planes that way, at least the planes I've been on).
>
> I did not know this.  I'm kind of surprised.

    The power on "conventional" diesel-electric trains is rock-solid;
the power on the Northeast Corridor trains *stinks*.

+------------------------------------------------+---------------------+
| Carl Richard Friend (UNIX Sysadmin)            | West Boylston       |
| Minicomputer Collector / Enthusiast            | Massachusetts, USA  |
| mailto:crfriend at rcn.com                        +---------------------+
| http://users.rcn.com/crfriend/museum           | ICBM: 42:22N 71:47W |
+------------------------------------------------+---------------------+