I'm going to try a new format based on newspaper articles, and I may expand on it in the future. This'll be my last update for a while as I'm going away for ten days, to Germany.
Transportation Times
AMERICAN RAIL GRINDS TO A HALT:
The entire North American Mainline, the largest single rail line on the planet, was brought to a halt as platform expansion at New York City led to a major crash at the railway entrance. Fortunately, all trains involved were mail trains so there were few casualties but the drivers were kill instantly. The crash has been attributed to the movement of signals while trains were waiting at the station. Services ran on and off until the clearance of the trains began.
While the wagons were being removed, services were restarted and trains began to run again. A mail train coming in from Montreal crashed into the wreckage of the first two and proceeded to block up the Montreal branch. The rest of the mainline, however, continued to operate as normal.
As an indirect result of the crash and its ensuing chaos, Montreal-New York trains now also continue to Boson, making the branch a fully-fledged branch of the mainline.
New York station after the crash (I forgot to take one during it
). The first crash happened when a train coming in from the branch slammed into a train entering a platform on the western side. The second crash was slightly further up the branch, only affecting the track leading into it.
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GLOBALTRANS: RAIL BIAS?
Flights between Chicago and NY have been cancelled to 'free up space' for trans-atlantic flights to NY, however it has been rumoured that the real reason is to get more passengers on the railways. Instead, Chicago has flights to Los Angeles, which has until now been disconnected from the network. Meanwhile, trans-atlantic flights have become more popular then ever.
While the lack of Chicago planes will certainly free up space, it is London and Paris that really need the extra flight capacity. The airport constructors, Air Incorporated, have announced that a new, larger airport will be released in the near future.
An overcrowded Heathrow Airport. The planes are the Boeing 377 Stratocruiser, and pretty new to the fleet. NoCab is still on Zeppelins. You can see the new bridges out of Britain in the corner. London, Birmingham and Manchester have grown into eachother, forming a sort of supercity with almost 250,000 inhabitants.
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IN OTHER NEWS:
A new rail line has opened in South America, the first in the entire continent. The GlobalTrans line runs from Buenos Aires to Sao Paulo via Curitiba, using standard track and rails.
And finally, the speed of the Royal Hudson has finally been met by the British Metrovic EM2, also reporting a speed of 90 mp/h. This electric vehicle has been in development for years, with the sole intention of introducing a competitor to the Royal Hudson. This further strengthens the suggestion that some truly high-speed trains are on the horizon, and many projects worldwide are looking into the possibilities provided by diesel. Is that the end of the romantic age of Steam?
GlobalTrans has not reported any intentions of upgrading to the Metoriv, even though the new vehicles are roughly half the price of the Royal Hudsons. We are sure that when GlobalTrans does go electric, it will change the colour of the wagons from the company red and blue, which quite frankly look horrible.
In the above picture an EM2 and a Royal Hudson race each other on a temporary test track near Brussels railway station, each with a slightly reduced number of carriages from the standard. GlobalTrans has recently been considering setting up a 'railway museum', which would contain some of the oldest retired vehicles. This museum is likely to occupy the space taken by this test track.