Starting The Fourth Page: An Update For 2023 Quarter 2
My car is broken, the car repair scheduled a waiting time of half a year for replacement parts of my catalyst since January and now the car won't run anymore after five months have passed. Combined with the Deutschland-Ticket and the possession of a pedelec with appropriate cargo options, the Corpus Christi holiday (which prompts a bridge day on Friday for many employees) was a great opportunity to ride the land. I only took the bike on Sunday and failed with my final destination, but I got far enough and my pedelec recorded 40 kilometers of rides at that day. Thursday saw me in Frankfurt am Main, Saturday took me to Nürnberg/Nuremberg and Sunday took me to Ansbach where I dogded a train because it was too full for bikes and for similar reasons, I returned via Würzburg to Heilbronn. My final destination would've been at the westernmost lake of the Franconian Lakelands created for the hydrological benefit of the non-Danubian parts of Bavaria, their next best train station at Gunzenhausen between Ansbach (regional political capital of Middle Franconia despite the existence of Nuremberg) and Treuchtlingen (the Bavarian equivalent to Crewe) and the western Franconian regional train running into that region start and ends at the same platform as my very own Swabian regional train in Würzburg and you can just hop to the other side. As a common mutual terminus, I'd always be among the first passengers to embark and have an easy time to find space for my bike.
In the meantime, I've actually done all the lakes and a lost backpack has been replaced with an enormous fanny pack. And I've been to Frankfurt and back and saw a train getting to Limburg (Lahn) which is different to Limburg Süd and only connected to each other by busses. The former is the proper station of Limburg, best known as the seat of a diocese and its cathedral and the splendour associated with the former bishop Tebartz-van Elst, the latter is an isolated high-speed railway station that was greenlighted together with its sister station Montabaur on the other side of the state border due to insane federal politics in Germany along the Cologne-Frankurt connection, so that stations in the middle of nowhere are built along the line so that the respective states vote for the line to be built. Even without federalism, France shows that hardly a high-speed railway was built without its fare share of gares de betteraves (sugar beet station) which greatly added to the speed of the TGV on the LGV and yet the LGV Sud Europe Atlantique shows a practical abandonment of this concept where legacy rail lines can be accessed from the LGV so that the TGV can access various downtowns station along the LGV, but won't have too and can pass them by. The idea was that you can to somehow access all these small cities in France to their high-speed rail network and yet keep travel times short in the big picture, so it was very attractive to have some neuralgic stations along the LGV and that would ideally be somehow between two small cities accesses by busses to that station. In case of getting from Frankfurt to Cologne on the D-Ticket (€49 a month, runs everywhere except for IC and ICE trains), it's best to get to Limburg (Lahn) yet in the state of Hesse and interchange to Koblenz in the state of Rhineland-Palatinate before finally interchanging for Cologne. Due east form Limburg(Lahn), you get reasonbly get to Wetzlar, Gießen (home of a U), Marburg (also home of a U) and even Kassel (where Hesse ends).
The Ukraine Is Where Trains Run (Almost) On Time (Even When They Are Hit)
A Russian missile hit a waggon of a passenger train at Kherson station. The train was evacuted, the affected waggon was decoupled and the rest of the train ran nevertheless, arriving its destination almost on time. The train in question is a night train, taking eleven hours for the 700 kilometers from Kherson to Kyiv. It made quite a few rounds and prompted Germany's Tagesschau website to explain how the Ukrainian railways run on time even in the war and why (all in German, sorry). In essence, the railway makes the lifeline that keeps the country together and that it's not too different from the state of affairs of Russia. A non-functioning railway in Eastern Europe would be just as much of a reason to revolt as non-functioning motorways in Germany. Priorities matter.
Bavaria's Quiet Taxpayer Dumphole: Second Munich S-Bahn Trunk Lines Projected To Cost €8.5bn
Stuttgart 21 and Berlin Brandenburg International Airport are both considered to be notorious example of infrastructural projects that are costing more time and money than promised. Well, that's not too surprising, it happens everywhere in the world and is called politics. What's capable of turning into aghast is the fact that it takes a harder time to create a shitstorm than its more prominent sisters. It's not an issue of national or international scale as it's not about high-speed rail or intercontinental aircraft (original parlance of Tagesschau), but just the S-Bahn and yet it's a lot like reforming or recreated the main railway station as in Stuttgart. But the major construction works are done underground and are not that visible: Out of sight, out of mind! Some people officially fear that the costs may run as high as €14bn, whatever the reasons. The thing is, oh wonder, that the Bavarian state government is supposed to have known beforehand about the cost overruns.
Ah yeah, there's a checklist from ten years ago (in German, sorry) by infamous Thilo Sarrazin (ousted from the SPD in 2020 because he succumbed to the far-right fringe with a best-selling book in 2010 translating as "Germany removes itself" and is exactly what it sounds like) who used to be head of the treasury in the state of Berlin after serving some time in Rhineland-Palatinate where he had more influence on the construction departments and is supposed to show how to avoid cost overruns:
Trigger Warning 1: Transit Nerd Takes Quarter Hour To Compare Metropolitan Railways
(What's An S-Bahn #4567 And Why London Overground Shouldn't Count Yet)
Oh yes, baby, you're doing it right. A proper trunk line makes you choose your personal main station to change to the proper last mile from the start!
Trigger Warning 2: Why Malls Fail In The United States But Not In Europe
Thanks to @Petike for contributing in the Urban Planning Thread! I did a whole post here on that issue, so let it be.
Meanwhile In Moscow: Big Circle Line Completed
On 24th February 2022, Russia started its invasion of Ukraine. On 1st March 2023 which is more than a year later, the capital of the same invading nation managed to open the final segments of the Bolshaya Koltsevaya Line, formerly called the Third Interchange Contour. Line 11 (or 11A in the meantime) was mostly known as a stub line in Moscow's south that would have been known as line "2bis" if Moscow had followed Parisian conventions, the only end in the first place before it was outdone by a new bifurcation that became part of the trunk line. It's just the oldest of three stub lines that have been merged into one in the end. The first new stretches were built from Moscow International Business Center to the first stretches of the actual circle and this initial appendix is supposed to be disconnected and extended due northwest to become line 17. In the northeast, the first parts of the circle were built as extensions of line 15 that was cut back in the event of the circle's completetion.
It's hard to say a good word about Russia nowadays, but I think that this great achievement is severely under-reported!
Smaller openings were indeed done in the north, but the gap in the north between the interim line 11 (whose intial appendix will become line 17) and line 15 was only closed with the rest of the ring and the part around Kakhovskaya station (the old southern stub) already saw its merger in late 2021 after two years of rebuilding when ten stations in the southwest were opened. The last segment in the southeast (and the simultaneous closure of the northern gap) equaled an opening of nine stations out of a total of 31. Waiting with closing the northern gap may have made sense to avoid more mess in labeling the lines. You already had a continuous line 11 from the northwest to the southeast (and moving 11A from the former Kakhovskaya Line to the MIBC branch or future line 17) without touching line 15 that would be (and was indeed) cut short once the circle has been closed.
The completion of the big circle line in Moscow shows that Vladimir Putin was indeed successful enough to masquerade his "special military operation" in Ukraine as a not-war for its first year by making the new metro line complete. The question is, will he achieve a similar success in his second year? I really don't know.
1984 Berlin Is Like 2030 Moscow - A Threshold Is Broken And Reform Is Inevitable!
A guy from Russia reformed the Paris metro diagram to please him and applied the same principles onto the evolving Moscow network that has moved beyond its model-like ring-radial as it's been known from news reports if there's been a terrorist attack in there. Every system evolves and Moscow is no exception. I will cite diagrams from 1957, 1995 and 2021 to show.
Now the Moscow system is tipping over the edge. The masterplan for 2030, beyond the now finished circle line 11, envisions further metro lines up to number 18, mostly at the outer edges and the missing gap at line 8 in the middle of Moscow will like remain open for a long time.
The guy wanting reform the Moscow metro calls for hexagons to be employed. 60-degree angles are supposed to provide for pleasing bends. Line 5 remains round, but that's it. Moscow Central Circle Railway would look like a perfect, symmetric hexagon. And Bolshaya Koltsevaya Line won't even try to be symmetric and will show that its course is way more extensive in its west and south than in its north and east. And once again: I don't take credit for this, see it there!
To the left: THIS IS YOUR STARGATE! To the right: A version for inside the train.
My car is broken, the car repair scheduled a waiting time of half a year for replacement parts of my catalyst since January and now the car won't run anymore after five months have passed. Combined with the Deutschland-Ticket and the possession of a pedelec with appropriate cargo options, the Corpus Christi holiday (which prompts a bridge day on Friday for many employees) was a great opportunity to ride the land. I only took the bike on Sunday and failed with my final destination, but I got far enough and my pedelec recorded 40 kilometers of rides at that day. Thursday saw me in Frankfurt am Main, Saturday took me to Nürnberg/Nuremberg and Sunday took me to Ansbach where I dogded a train because it was too full for bikes and for similar reasons, I returned via Würzburg to Heilbronn. My final destination would've been at the westernmost lake of the Franconian Lakelands created for the hydrological benefit of the non-Danubian parts of Bavaria, their next best train station at Gunzenhausen between Ansbach (regional political capital of Middle Franconia despite the existence of Nuremberg) and Treuchtlingen (the Bavarian equivalent to Crewe) and the western Franconian regional train running into that region start and ends at the same platform as my very own Swabian regional train in Würzburg and you can just hop to the other side. As a common mutual terminus, I'd always be among the first passengers to embark and have an easy time to find space for my bike.
In the meantime, I've actually done all the lakes and a lost backpack has been replaced with an enormous fanny pack. And I've been to Frankfurt and back and saw a train getting to Limburg (Lahn) which is different to Limburg Süd and only connected to each other by busses. The former is the proper station of Limburg, best known as the seat of a diocese and its cathedral and the splendour associated with the former bishop Tebartz-van Elst, the latter is an isolated high-speed railway station that was greenlighted together with its sister station Montabaur on the other side of the state border due to insane federal politics in Germany along the Cologne-Frankurt connection, so that stations in the middle of nowhere are built along the line so that the respective states vote for the line to be built. Even without federalism, France shows that hardly a high-speed railway was built without its fare share of gares de betteraves (sugar beet station) which greatly added to the speed of the TGV on the LGV and yet the LGV Sud Europe Atlantique shows a practical abandonment of this concept where legacy rail lines can be accessed from the LGV so that the TGV can access various downtowns station along the LGV, but won't have too and can pass them by. The idea was that you can to somehow access all these small cities in France to their high-speed rail network and yet keep travel times short in the big picture, so it was very attractive to have some neuralgic stations along the LGV and that would ideally be somehow between two small cities accesses by busses to that station. In case of getting from Frankfurt to Cologne on the D-Ticket (€49 a month, runs everywhere except for IC and ICE trains), it's best to get to Limburg (Lahn) yet in the state of Hesse and interchange to Koblenz in the state of Rhineland-Palatinate before finally interchanging for Cologne. Due east form Limburg(Lahn), you get reasonbly get to Wetzlar, Gießen (home of a U), Marburg (also home of a U) and even Kassel (where Hesse ends).
The Ukraine Is Where Trains Run (Almost) On Time (Even When They Are Hit)
A Russian missile hit a waggon of a passenger train at Kherson station. The train was evacuted, the affected waggon was decoupled and the rest of the train ran nevertheless, arriving its destination almost on time. The train in question is a night train, taking eleven hours for the 700 kilometers from Kherson to Kyiv. It made quite a few rounds and prompted Germany's Tagesschau website to explain how the Ukrainian railways run on time even in the war and why (all in German, sorry). In essence, the railway makes the lifeline that keeps the country together and that it's not too different from the state of affairs of Russia. A non-functioning railway in Eastern Europe would be just as much of a reason to revolt as non-functioning motorways in Germany. Priorities matter.
Bavaria's Quiet Taxpayer Dumphole: Second Munich S-Bahn Trunk Lines Projected To Cost €8.5bn
Stuttgart 21 and Berlin Brandenburg International Airport are both considered to be notorious example of infrastructural projects that are costing more time and money than promised. Well, that's not too surprising, it happens everywhere in the world and is called politics. What's capable of turning into aghast is the fact that it takes a harder time to create a shitstorm than its more prominent sisters. It's not an issue of national or international scale as it's not about high-speed rail or intercontinental aircraft (original parlance of Tagesschau), but just the S-Bahn and yet it's a lot like reforming or recreated the main railway station as in Stuttgart. But the major construction works are done underground and are not that visible: Out of sight, out of mind! Some people officially fear that the costs may run as high as €14bn, whatever the reasons. The thing is, oh wonder, that the Bavarian state government is supposed to have known beforehand about the cost overruns.
Ah yeah, there's a checklist from ten years ago (in German, sorry) by infamous Thilo Sarrazin (ousted from the SPD in 2020 because he succumbed to the far-right fringe with a best-selling book in 2010 translating as "Germany removes itself" and is exactly what it sounds like) who used to be head of the treasury in the state of Berlin after serving some time in Rhineland-Palatinate where he had more influence on the construction departments and is supposed to show how to avoid cost overruns:
- Don't mention anything about expected costs and execution of a project until it's been planned so deeply that you can be sufficiently certain.
- Avoid a situation where you're forced to execute a project and have a budget ceiling. Otherwise, redimension the project under the budget ceiling.
- The more mature the planning, the better. If you have communicate costs, respect the following rules of thumb:
- Guesstimates plus 40 percent equal planned costs;
- planned costs plus 30 percent equal the perspective costs;
- perspective costs plus 20 percent equal the expectable, realistic costs.
- In the end, realistic costs outnumber the guesstimates by 120 percent (or a factor of 2.2) and it gets worse with tunneling and complicated terrain.
- Only start a project if the funding for the realistic costs actually stands.
- Don't be cheap on the wrong end. Goods planners cost a lot, but they are worth it and less expensive in the long run.
- As a builder-owner, have staff that is not too few and not too bad.
- Employ controlling for the construction that's independent from the builders and architecture and show interest in what they do.
- Architecture and solutions that haven't been established as best practice should be avoided. Others are supposed to pay the price of learning the hard way.
- Prime contractors rise the costs, so proceed with care. Bundle logical steps so that they are lucid enough to execute and digestable enough for a fair bid of tender.
- Stick to the original planning even if changes seem tempting. They will cost money and time.
- As a builder-owner or any kind of supervisor, show interest in the entire process, sacrifice time and don't believe anybody. Even an election campaign won't see as many lies as a botched construction project.
- Be humble and critical of yourself. There will always be somebody more in the know then you. Talk to them and learn.
Trigger Warning 1: Transit Nerd Takes Quarter Hour To Compare Metropolitan Railways
(What's An S-Bahn #4567 And Why London Overground Shouldn't Count Yet)
Trigger Warning 2: Why Malls Fail In The United States But Not In Europe
Meanwhile In Moscow: Big Circle Line Completed
On 24th February 2022, Russia started its invasion of Ukraine. On 1st March 2023 which is more than a year later, the capital of the same invading nation managed to open the final segments of the Bolshaya Koltsevaya Line, formerly called the Third Interchange Contour. Line 11 (or 11A in the meantime) was mostly known as a stub line in Moscow's south that would have been known as line "2bis" if Moscow had followed Parisian conventions, the only end in the first place before it was outdone by a new bifurcation that became part of the trunk line. It's just the oldest of three stub lines that have been merged into one in the end. The first new stretches were built from Moscow International Business Center to the first stretches of the actual circle and this initial appendix is supposed to be disconnected and extended due northwest to become line 17. In the northeast, the first parts of the circle were built as extensions of line 15 that was cut back in the event of the circle's completetion.
It's hard to say a good word about Russia nowadays, but I think that this great achievement is severely under-reported!
Smaller openings were indeed done in the north, but the gap in the north between the interim line 11 (whose intial appendix will become line 17) and line 15 was only closed with the rest of the ring and the part around Kakhovskaya station (the old southern stub) already saw its merger in late 2021 after two years of rebuilding when ten stations in the southwest were opened. The last segment in the southeast (and the simultaneous closure of the northern gap) equaled an opening of nine stations out of a total of 31. Waiting with closing the northern gap may have made sense to avoid more mess in labeling the lines. You already had a continuous line 11 from the northwest to the southeast (and moving 11A from the former Kakhovskaya Line to the MIBC branch or future line 17) without touching line 15 that would be (and was indeed) cut short once the circle has been closed.
The completion of the big circle line in Moscow shows that Vladimir Putin was indeed successful enough to masquerade his "special military operation" in Ukraine as a not-war for its first year by making the new metro line complete. The question is, will he achieve a similar success in his second year? I really don't know.
1984 Berlin Is Like 2030 Moscow - A Threshold Is Broken And Reform Is Inevitable!
A guy from Russia reformed the Paris metro diagram to please him and applied the same principles onto the evolving Moscow network that has moved beyond its model-like ring-radial as it's been known from news reports if there's been a terrorist attack in there. Every system evolves and Moscow is no exception. I will cite diagrams from 1957, 1995 and 2021 to show.
| Metro Moscow diagram from 1957. Line 4 is suspiciously absent. You see a triangular network with the famous ring around it that deviates from its ring road whenever it needs to access a cul-de-sac railway terminal. It's yet a very simple network were geographically accurate representation still does its job. Schematic designed quickly replaced this but the insides of the ring still looked asymmetrically empty. Koltsevaya Line provided the framework for the network's future development. It's completely acceptable to build and open a new line as long as it's attached to this ring. Creating a diameter can wait and isn't the highest priority e.g. seen at the yellow line 8 with a yet prominent gap that bridged by this Koltsevaya line. |
| Moscow Metro diagram from 1995. This is the design I'm used to from seeing in my German television news when there was indeed one or another attack in the 2000s. The traditional ring line, nine radial lines and one stub line freshly separated from its former maiden line that would become the nucleus of another future ring line. It is still very mono-systemic, but interchanges are already shown very properly. Blown up centre, compressed edges. Just how it was supposed to be. It's a bit like the state of Paris Metro for years after World War II when there were hardly any extensions and hardly any evolution of the entire network before the first lines of the Réseau Express Régional was opened in 1977. |
| An almost current Moscow Metro diagram form 2021 before the recent extension binges at the big circle line. The system has become more complicated. The creation of Butovskaya Line (first L1, now 12) prompted the development of a less extensive, yet more outdoor-proof waggon class 81-740/741 that's also employed on the oldest outdoor metro line 4. The prospect of a world exposition in Moscow that failed resulted in a monorail up north that became line 13. The monorail may be abandoned, but the viaduct could be repurposed for a tramway. Besides the so-called "light metros" running on surface level with appropriate rolling stock, the biggest innovation was the introduction of a so-called Surface Metro which seems like the Muscovite way to say S-Bahn: Line 14 is a rebuilt Moscow Central Circle Railway and 2018 saw the introduction of the Diametral Lines, now lines D1 to D3 running and planned to go up to D5. This diagram shows a level of maturation after the network grew a deciding beard: West Berlin after taking over the S-Bahn, Paris after opening the RER, London after introducing the DLR and the Overground before featuring Crossrail after all. |
| This is a separate diagram for the Surface Metro only as it's planned to run by 2030. On a classic metro diagram, classic railway only existed to show which metro station to disembark for which railway station to go to which airport. This diagram gives the railway node in and around Moscow a face in the first place. There's a lot of white-room in the middle of the diagram, so it reads like an invitation to print it out and take notes. There are five stations where intercity terminals meet the Koltsevaya Line #5 and one isn't even part of the Surface Metro (Kievskaya), so it's prudent to note these five sites with a number 5. You can still look at the map inside the train to see where you want to interchange. If you take a look at stations also served by the new Big Circle (Bolshaya Koltsevaya) Line #11, you'll note that it features nine stations in a row in its northern and eastern course that form a bead chain of stations (save for Lefortovo) where you can interchange to the surface metro and six of them are inside the Central Circle Railway and more or less follow straight lines here. As long as you remember that belt of stations, you'll never miss the big circle. I just drew circles around them, keep it simple stupid. Never missing it, this explains a lot why the course of line 11 became so condensed in the north and east vis-à-vis the southwest. The southwest needed to create a meaningful orbital connection in the first place, the opposite already had it to some degree. Here it's vital that the load from the Surface Metro can be dropped off as broady and directly as possible. |
Now the Moscow system is tipping over the edge. The masterplan for 2030, beyond the now finished circle line 11, envisions further metro lines up to number 18, mostly at the outer edges and the missing gap at line 8 in the middle of Moscow will like remain open for a long time.
The guy wanting reform the Moscow metro calls for hexagons to be employed. 60-degree angles are supposed to provide for pleasing bends. Line 5 remains round, but that's it. Moscow Central Circle Railway would look like a perfect, symmetric hexagon. And Bolshaya Koltsevaya Line won't even try to be symmetric and will show that its course is way more extensive in its west and south than in its north and east. And once again: I don't take credit for this, see it there!
To the left: THIS IS YOUR STARGATE! To the right: A version for inside the train.
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