I always thought that trains in highway medians looked cool,

Terrible idea. All that wasted space could be used for general purpose lanes and alleviate freeway congestion.

I figure if the median space is already there, and you have no other suitable or open right of way for a new train line, then sure it might be a good idea. I'd rather they fill it with trains than more lanes which on their own may not always fix congestion. Of course, if this is some dinky two lane highway that really needs at least one more lane, or shoulders, then that may be more pressing.

>>1088631
Great idea *IF* the railroad actually owns the right of way. Maintenance is super easy too. There's no need to hi-rail to the work site and there are no crossings to mess with. It could be a problem for certain dimensional loads and double stacks, though.

>>1088644
> "alleviate freeway congestion"
Terrible bait.
>>1088631
Fine for mainline rail, main line and as bypass or passing tracks to longer distance services. Don't put stations in the middle of highways.

>>1088631
I'm a bit conflicted on them since on one hand during rush hour you can get a small sense of smugness as you pass by rows and rows of gridlock but on the other seems a bit wasteful space wise, might be more efficient putting in an extra lane solely for express buses/BRT

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>>1088631
imo its not terrible, but not an ideal solution either. One of the main problems i see is the stations, which are mostly very unattractive (noise, pollution etc)

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>>1088631
Sure its a free transit corridor but unfortunately any stations along that section are pretty much in a no mans land away from any potential riders. In hindsight the decision to build this section of Line 1 along the highway instead of along Dufferin Street 1 block over was really stupid.

>>1088631
If that's where you can build a reasonably direct railway relatively cheaply, then yes.

But though it's a good idea, it's not always the best option - that depends on the demand, the size and shape of the area served, and the amount of money available. Sometimes putting the railway into tunnel gives much better results - it can be more direct and have stations in more convenient locations. And sometimes bus based rapid transit is the best way to take advantage of the freeway.

>>1088631
In the median seems silly, I'd rather put the tracks on one of the sides. It's easier to steal lanes from the other direction during construction work if you don't have to pass over the rails. For a newly constructed railroad that wants to use an undeveloped and properly zoned median, I say it's better to just shift some car lanes into it and free up space on one of the sides.

>>1088887
But, if in the future the line needs to branch off to either side of the road, and the track's on the opposite side of where it needs to go, now you need to cross the entire highway as opposed to just half of it. Not a super common problem, but it is one in favor of sticking it in the middle.

Highways have Hills sometimes pretty steep ones in railroad terms.

>>1088952
I've been thinking about that. Surely you can solve the slip issue by giving the wheels a bit of bite. You obviously wouldn't want sharp ridges or it would damage the track, but giving the wheel a huge number of flattened spots would give more contact area and an "edge", alternating. About 118 facets or so should do, right?

>>1088986
Lol that would make the ride terrible...

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Hello, it is Helsinki again.

We are planning this on grand scale (grand in our scake, anyway).

It is called "boulevardization", that is, turning the congested, mostly 2+1 lane inconming motorways into more street-like construction inside ringroad 1 (there is also ringroad 3 - 2 is mostly imaginary), meaning reduced speed, no more heavy ramps, maybe even demolish/downgrade some. This, to allow housing into wasteland that is now motorway noise and pollution area. (Also, maybe possibly implement a congestion fee - unpopular, but recurring topic.)

Yes, people have remarked that where is the noise and pollution supposed to go, if the amount of cars is assumed to remain roughly the same.

But, the point here is that the 4 northernly "boulevards" are supposed to receive tramways in middle of them - all the way to ring road 1 level and maybe little beyond, to stop at some suitable burb to serve as terminus. We are talking about 40-50 km of motorway / "motor traffic way" (Finns understand) converted to class of "street" and 30-40 km of light rail, though the cars would still need to comply to 3 m between tracks and 15 m curve radius rule, unless major improvements are carried in the existing tram network.

This scale is quite grand for Helsinki, as if fully implemented, it would affect every incoming motorway to Helsinki and the pricetag for full implementation would be 1-2 Milliard €.

Boulevard of Laajasalo is the first phase (should start in year or two), as it was quite a pointless stub of a motorway in the first place; we'll see the experiences on that. This is the hadrest acid test for the boulevards there could be, I think, as Laajasaloans very much love their SUVs and the very underused motorway they start their morning commute with ;)

I'm stoned, hope I didn't butcher English too badly this time.

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>>1088952
Please post "I dare you to drive a traint ion that" - hills.

>>1088986
Maybe the sleekest emus canclimb the hills that occur on some road that truly earn their freeway class - as you seem to want to use all the country's freeways as potential intercity railway right of way :)

But if freight is to be allowed - racks, baby.

I think OP thought more in terms of Commuter railways, the more frequent service ones, possibly part of the city "metro" system, as the pic the post was from Chicago L.

Wasn't that line rerouted, not cancelled due low ridership due position in middle of motorways and lon distances to stations. Or was that some other line...

>>1088631
Actual "heavy rail" that transport not only passenger, but cargo? No, that's a terrible idea

A grade separated tram or LRT could work tho. Cars wouldn't need to worry about trams on the roadway, and tram could enjoy better and more predictable headway

>>1088644
They had curbs and landbank reserve.

It kinda different from country to country but in my place, there is a bylaw that prohibits roads to expand towards the median

>>1088904
Actually that's an argument in favour of sticking it on the side. Crossing the entire highway is easier than crossing half of it, as it's quite easy to bridge. Whereas if you only want to cross half of it, you have to have a much wider median to accommodate the turnout, and in order to grade separate it a lot of the track will have to be at a different level to the road.


>>1088986
Bad idea, as even small flattened spots would concentrate the stress, damaging the track. And natural deformation gives you a bigger contact area than that anyway.

It's worth remembering that railways in Switzerland can get up to 1 in 11 on adhesion alone, and some tramways are even steeper.

>>1088986
I know that you're referring to a silly one off steam engine that used this concept, but most people won't understand such an obscure joke.

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As a driver and a train rider, I have no problem with them, they're great for everyone. I also think they look cool, they make a freeway look all cyberpunk at night and makes it look more like you're in futuristic big city with cars and trains going every which way on flyover ramps and tunnels going everywhere. I really do love how they look.

They work better with commuter rail though, the travel patterns match up so that you can put stations at all the major exits from downtown to the furthest suburb.

>>1089194
That's actually a very good solution. What people don't seem to realise is that more lanes and faster roads just end up meaning more traffic. Downgrading motorways into street-like roads and adding tramways seems like a good solution to excess motor traffic

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It looks coolest when it's in between a cluster of buildings, like here in Brasilia

The Washington D.C. Metro system heavily utilizes them. It works great there, but it's mostly a commuter rail system. I don't think it'd work as well for heavy rail or light rail. Outside of D.C. a few lines run down highway medians into suburbs with park and ride set ups. A great many people use it. The biggest weakness is a relative lack of feeder transit to the stations, but in some places there's good bus service.

The bigger issue is Metro Rail being a steaming pile of garbage that has a reputation of killing people.

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>>1093645
The thing is, we are in quite unhappy equilibrium phase, where the downtown streets can't accept more cars than our wimpy two lane motorways can deliver.We considered fixing that but Helsinkians backed off, when about every 4th in downtown would have needed to move...

It's very famous case, ironically to support our current unoptimal for the needs metro solution. Something more pre-metro / stadtbahn (would have worked much better, sadly that wasn't invented back then, at least in here. So we built 3.2 wide, 22-something long third rail powered railroad emus and put them underground.

Also metro is the reason why west and east incoming ways currently have no trams never ever status on them, but we'll see as seveal trunk bus routes have been planned there. The policy now is that popular trunk bus routes are considered for light rail conversion - that's what was done did with "jokeri" light rail, as it ran 20 years as a special livery, high frequency, large capacity (two back wheels!) trunk bus route.

And it worked out just as planned, as the area saw some development and people found the service, the service got improved: the original frequency was something ridiculous like 20 min.

But this is enough stoned rambling, cleaned my bong you know. "Karsta" we call it, means "carder" (the veaving tool), but collegually "soot" or (sticky) "residue" (can be used in context of plumbing too, for example) :-)

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>>1093996
Well, that message didn't come out half as horrible as I feared. Some further annotations:

The heritage of Smith-Polvinen plan continues its life in the current East-West "city tunnel" plans. See the pic, which also shows some of the existing tunnel infrastructure in the city center. Competing from the same slot in the development schedule are also two rail tunnels: the "droplet" loop railway and a north-south metro tunnel, which could be either the current heavy design or a metre gauge pre-metro tunnel for the needs of the boulevards.

We call it the "tunnel mafia", the cozy relationship of the municipalities and several large (in our scale) construction companies that through bidding rules always win. You know how it goes, the fact that they can write the bill in Finnish, somehow bumps their "reliability" and "service life expence" so high it always compensates the price. But this also means the the past decades various tunnels have been built at constant speed, people could guess the starting date of the west metro extension years in advance from the projected finish date of the airport "ring rail" extension to the M-line, and pretty much everyone agrees that once west metro second phase starts to get ready, some tunnel project begins in Helsinki. Meanwhile we have spare time and funds to show some love for our neglected trams.

Espoo and Vantaa have some tramway plans too, but things can advance only so quickly, is how I see it. The foamers always complain about the development speed of course, but before M-line in the 70s we didn't have any dedicated suburban rail (fun story but doesn't fit into 2000 chars; it was originally built with partly wooden platforms in envision of metro conversion) and the original bus jokeri line was when we conceptualized the need for organized circumferential lines and trunk routes. You know, as special built infrastructure and branding; in radial lines this sort of thing happens organically.