Welcome to Reconnections’ Friday Reads:
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- • What was Europe’s largest tram network (JayForemanVideo)
- • Who’s behind bid to get London’s best bike lane ripped up? (Guardian)
- • London has been putting on weight (Forbes)
- • Rogue NYC Subway Museum celebrates dingy subway (NYTimes)
- • HQ2 perfect chance to upgrade DC region commuter rail (Vox)
- • SF plans Marina subway extension (StreetsBlog)
- • US Transit Atlas ranks best & worst transit cities (CityLab)
- • Japan railway keeps station for lone passenger (Mirror)
- • Australia’s new luxury train (Traveller)
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The story about the station in Japan kept open for one passenger had a parallel in Scotland:
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news/the-daily-commuter-who-has-a-railway-station-all-to-himself-m6hh98q0tkn
10 years later, there was another attempt to close Breich station, but it was decided to keep it open and upgrade it instead.
Re Mr Gilligan’s article about the new anti-bike lane lobby group. One of the sponsors is the British Motorcycling Federation – but (so far as I can ascertain so far) they didn’t consult their members before doing this, and reaction from their members on twitter (yes – I know – a minefield) has been entirely against BMF aligning with this group.
I thought Europe largest tram network was Belgium? It used to possible to go North to South and East to West purely by tram….
@SH(LR) ‘largest’ in it’s day, not since.
@SHLR – surely you couldn’t reach the German frontier from the coast – the eastern network was separated from the rest by some significant gaps? [A pity because connecting to Aachen would have opened up some even more entertaining through tram journeys].
SHLR / Graham / etc
And there was I, thinking that St Petersburg’s tram network was the largest!
( Or is it simply the largest – now? )
The US article on “Transit” routes does not look outside the USA for examples – sigh.
@Graham H
The map here suggests you could get from the coast both to Liege, and to the Dutch border near Maastricht, which I think would qualify as west to east, but no, you couldn’t quite reach the German frontier.
https://hl303.be/la-sncv/
I used to have a printed copy of that map, but it seems to have disappeared. I thought it touched the Luxemburg border as well…
@ Greg Tingey I think you will find the largest tram system in the world is currently Melbourne, Australia. I was surprised at this but it is true. St Petersburg is second and Berlin third. I think the fourth largest network is a regional one in Silesia centred on Wroclaw aka Breslau as was. Berlin has plans to reintroduce trams back into West Berlin and if they can find the funding Berlin may yet become number 1
Richard B
There are at least two tramroutes & ( I think) five services actually back into “West” Berlin now & one or two other obvious places where they could go, with some road-digging & a lot of money …
Specifically routes M13 & 50 from Schönhauser Allee bis Wedding Vichow-Klinikum & routes M5, M8 & M10 from U-bahn Naturkundemuseum bis Moabit Lüneburger Straße
@SH(LR)
The map shows isolated SNCV lines reaching (or very nearly so) both the German and Luxembourg frontiers, but no continuous route from either of them to the coast.
@RonnieMB – The Breich (Times Paywall) article was from 2003. There is a Scottish station with an hourly service being closed ‘temporarily’ tomorrow.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_railway_station
@Aleks: I know the article was archival – Breich has a long history of clinging to being open, despite low patronage, and it was specifically kept open on one occasion for a single regular passenger. It recently survived another attempted closure and got a new footbridge this year … now they’ve built it, will they come???
@timbeau – the SNCV route from Bastogne met the Luxemburg vicinal at Martelange, although the tracks weren’t joined. Nor was the Bastogne route linked to the rest of the SNCV network but petered out at Marche – a pity. Apparently during the German occupation, when the Belgians boycotted the national rail network, people used the SNCV network instead; vicinal speeds were surprisingly high – for example, Bastogne-Martelange took exactly an hour for 27 km.
RichardB. The Silesian tram network you are thinking of is centred on Katowice, not Wroclaw, and somewhat reduced in recent years. St Peterburg trams now barely penetrate the city centre as they are transformed into Metro feeders, but at least are now getting some investment after some years neglect.
Mirror JR story was a rehash from a couple of years ago when CCTV did the feature.
Kami-Shirataki Station was a railway station on the Sekihoku Main Line in Engaru, Hokkaido, Japan, operated by Hokkaido Railway Company. Opened in October 1932, the station closed in March 2016.
The station closed immediately after the girl graduated school. The Japanese trainspotter community got wind of it and large numbers descended on the station for the last few weeks. Lots of pictures were taken of both the station and the girl, who apparently was pretty distressed by it all (lots of slightly socially awkward middle aged men taking pictures of and asking for autographs from a 17-year old girl). JR Hokkaido put out a general plea not to harass her.