@NEStalgia Ah, yes. Amtrak. Those are the kinds of luxury trains I had in mind. More or less like the railroad equivalent of the Greyhound bus lines. But all of them probably look far nicer on TV than in real life.
All in all, my outlook on things over there is getting worse and worse. Try harder.
NEStalgia, the ultimate "don't come back to America" solution...
@Tyranexx Ah, that journey home doesn't sound too entertaining. We've got stuff like this happening over here also. For such a small country, the Netherlands has an extremely busy (some would even say overcrowded) railway network. You can get from anywhere to anywhere, but sometimes, the smaller stations and trajectories have their issues, and in places where they cross the main arteries of the railroads, traffic jams and considerable delays can happen. Oh, and come Tuesday, there's going to be a nation-wide strike, because they want to have better wages than they have now...
The result of that will be that the bus lines will get a surplus of about 5 to 6 times their capacity, seeing as trains can obviously hold far more passengers, so people will be stranded on stations for hours on end.
And somehow, these strikers always say they don't do this to hurt the general public, but strangely enough, that's exactly what they always end up doing...
@Morpheel Now where can I find a family like that?
@Knuckles-Fajita Oh, well. Can't exactly say that I've been all that sensible with my money, these last couple of days, so I can't really start pointing fingers at others...
If you meant to indicate railroads being built on limestone bedding as not exactly being sturdy enough to support any kind of high speed track, then you might wanna consider what all the Dutch railways are built on:
clay, mud, peat, sand and dirt (and in some places in the southern part of the country on marl). Everything over here needs to have fortifications underneath its fortifications if they don't want it to sink back into the sea...
@ThanosReXXX Did you know what NEC meant? @NEStalgia used it twice and you didn't mention it. Unless it came up earlier and he explained it. There' really no reason for you to know what it is, I live in the "northeast corridor" and nobody here ever says that. Well maybe when the tides start rising for real they'll talk about it more.
Acela - which I don't think stands for anything, just the name of the "high-speed" train line - was used for a year by my sister after she got married. She lived in Manhattan, worked in DC. She took it almost every weekend, her company picked up the tab. I think the NY - DC section of track is better than the NY - Boston section.
About 300,000 NYer's daily ride the LIRR "train" - not to be confused w/ the 6 million on the "subway" - to work. My wife among them them. There's also "Metro North" upstate and Connecticut and "Jersey Transit". So a lot of people do ride "trains" within cities. Though not nearly as many as subways. But for anything long distance it's on a plane. And I don't envision the country taking "a step backwards" to promote trains over airplanes anytime soon. Heck, I live on a 50 mile long island that only has bridges and tunnels on one end, we can't even get a new bridge or tunnel built, we have to rely on ferries. If all the suburban NY money can't get a bridge to the northeast I don't see high speed rail becoming a big deal. Maybe someday between a few major cities. NY - Chicago, Chicago to St Louis, San Fran to LA should have had one by now. Dallas to Houston would seem like a logical spot but most of those folk would probably rather just drive. But why drive when you can fly.
And somebody needs to say NIMBY. That's a big deal over here too, and those tracks and stations have to go somewhere.
OK my new yardwork tools arrived today, need to go try them out.
Thanos - I finished the season of The Passage. Thanks for the recommendation. I won't say more in case you haven't finished all 10 episodes yourself.
@HobbitGamer Ah, missed your comment earlier, because you didn't tag me.
I'd say things/locations being so spread out would/should be the precise reason why you WOULD want to have a passenger-dedicated (high speed) railroad network. Especially in a country as big as the USA.
I mean, just take into account my earlier comment, about getting from Amsterdam to Paris, in less than 3 hours. Normally, that's about a 10 hour drive if you take the car or a coach/bus, and that's not even takinh into account traffic jams and pit stops...
So, imagine being able to travel from east to west in about 4 - 6 hours, which could easily be done, if you draw a more or less straight line across the American continent. People traveling by car would of course say that it's not just about the destination, but also about the experience of traveling through the various states, but I'd just advise these people to binge watch all the National Lampoon's American Vacation movies. That oughta put 'em off from taking any more week long car trips...
@Morpheel Your parents do seem to travel a lot. And they've got enough cash to hand out laptops, phew...
Job opportunities and quality of living must be solid in your neck of the woods. Either that, or your family belongs to a smaller, but more fortunate group. Either way, guess I'm going to Mexico, instead of to the US, that is:
if I ever decide to return to the American continent...
P.S.
Sinaloa?
@NintendoByNature Already evening over here: 6:35pm.
Woke up today, slowly realizing that I've spent quite a few euros (too much) on Nintendo games and a Pro Controller, over the last few days...
Still enjoying the hell out of them, though, so that kinda softens the blow to my wallet...
@HobbitGamer dude i wish I could take a deep nap. I can honestly say it's been years since I've been able to nap( kids and such). Even when they nap I try to take one myself but my mind starts racing about things I should do around the house so I cant commit to it. Either that or I'll take their nap time as a reason for me to game for a few minutes 😁
@ThanosReXXX nice my man! I actually returned re0 today. It just wasn't as fun as i remember it being back in the day. Same goes for re1. While I'm having more fun than I did with re0 it just doesn't have the same wow factor it used to give me back in the day. Maybe I'm getting old. Thankfully I only lost out on a couple bucks from returning re0 so it wasn't too bad but still, wish I didn't get it
@ThanosReXXX my parents are both retired, but both were successful doctors, and I work on the computer, so I can tag along on their trips.
We also plan and save a lot so it's not like we just go on random trips every other week. That would be rough.
Yeah, Sinaloa is where most of my dads side of the family lives. The place's got kind of a bad rep, but like most of the country, nothing bad happens unless you go looking for it.
@Tyranexx the mall heyday was the 70s and 80s. They were just plain fun. With something for everyone...a kind of dark, dare i say Tokyo-esque atmosphere (a lot of them were built by Japanese companies do the architecture really is very 70s Tokyo.... Geometric shapes, unconventional angles, layers, etc.). I loved it. It also drew youth riff Raff. They thought that was hurting malls, so in the 90s they retooled to make them brighter, more open, "safer".... In the process they ruined what made it great. Moreover the original design of malls was to recreate the city center in suburbia. It was supposed to be a community center with events and such. For a while it was. Then in the late 80s and into the 90s it became a monument of consumerism and was just all indoor strip center. And then it failed. Ml
It's sad, the rest of the world is building new make while we tear ours down and call it "better". It's like living in theodesius' era of the Roman empire.
@ThanosReXXX Oh Amtrak's train sets are quite nice. It's the track in most of the us that isn't. They can't do anything about that, they only own track in certain areas, mostly inherited from the bankruptcy of Penn Central. Including the electric NEC. the rest of the US it's almost so freight rails. Owned by Norfolk southern, Canadian national (mostly owned by bill Gates now), BNSF (mostly owned by Warren buffet/Berkshire), and CSX. They've streamlined they're tracks, peeling back to single tracks in most areas, too. Amtrak leases most of those rails, mostly old, wooden, but fit for hauling 900 cars of 3 week old Chilean broccoli once a week. It's bumpy, slow, and the owner gets first priority, so you're 6 express train just has to wait for the 8mi long broccoli train to go by at 30mps.
Not amtraks fault. They can't just demolish so the buildings and roads built during the rise of the Auto and air business to buy track real estate.
Unfortunately i despise airlines even more than cars. I just want to be a hermit.
digital:
Horizon Chase Turbo
Steam World Dig
Steam World Heist
Worms W.M.D.
Valkyria Chronicles
physical:
ARMS
1-2 Switch (yeah, I know. Just had to have the showcase title, no matter what, and I got it at a €10 discount)
And of course, the Switch Pro Controller.
And later that evening, I also bought 3 discounted Xbox One titles from a web shop, so now I'm truly done and dusted, for the next two, three months to come.
@Morpheel I know, and like most of these specific places, you only hear about it when they're connected to anything bad, and of course, my immediate thought with Sinaloa was "drug cartel".
Don't know about any bad rep about the whole of Mexico, other than some idiot president wanting to build a wall on its border, and there sometimes being some talk about corruption, but other than that, nothing Earth-shatteringly damning about the country as a whole. And my cousin's wife comes from Mexico, so I'm already kinda familiar with the locals...
@NEStalgia Well, you already live in a cramped, greasy, badly ventilated man cave, so hermit will probably suit you just fine...
Concerning the downfall of malls: I guess the zombies won after all then, huh?
It may not be the actual ones from the movies and games, but it would seem to me that the proverbial smart phone zombies did us all in, in the end...
@rjejr No, I didn't know what NEC means, but @NEStalgia likes his acronyms/abbreviations, and he's so used to it by now, that I guess that he kinda assumes that we're all on board with the meaning of whatever it is that is "acronymized"...
Acela just sounds like someone started to say "accelerator", but decided that using only half of the word was decidedly cooler and more catchy...
As for The Passage: no worries, my friend: I've finished the entire 10 episodes long before you even started watching the third one. It was something of a chore to keep my mouth shut, though, waiting for you to finish them as well. It was a good first season, but basically, it was more of a prologue to a series, than an actual series in and of itself. Hope that they gathered enough of a crowd and enough good will from the network they're on, to make a second run of episodes, and here's hoping that's going to be longer than just 10 episodes...
Well, now that you've finished that, I'd say on to The Black List. Season 6 just ended over here, and man was it good. It's one of the few series that I've watched over the years, that seems to go from strength to strength, instead of sort of fizzling out/losing steam after the second season, like so many other shows do.
'The console wars are like boobs: Sony and Microsoft fight over which ones look the nicest and Nintendo's are the most fun to play with.'
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