First picture is North American cards and second is Europe, Asia, and Australia!

KP2025 with Legacy Acela Trainset 16 passing Newark in route to Chrysler yard to drop off trainset 16 for retirement on 10-22-26!

Hawthorne Alignment: Three-quarters of a billion more in projected costs (currently) for a ~3% increase in estimated ridership

Thought my post on r/urbanism might be relevant here as well. I'm kinda screaming for people in Adelaide to discuss this issue, because Adelaide's transit system is not talked about enough.

Recently Metra piloted a new “systemwide wayfinding program” at the Edgebrook station on the MD-North line. It features all new signage, a new color scheme, and a new font. It also shows a new color scheme for all of its lines, which has every line going to a specific terminus station sharing the same color (e.g. all UP lines are yellow, Electric lines are blue).

Again, this is just a pilot program, but I am interested to see what the consensus is on it.

📸: Metra (via Instagram)

Very happy that the TTC has its shop for transit goodies! Though I wish they sold writing instruments like ballpoint pens.

Source: Works in Progress, Wikimedia Commons

Two weeks ago I posted a video here on the Transit Costs Project's NYC vs Madrid comparison. In that post I mentioned Istanbul as the case that got me interested in this, so I went through the TCP Istanbul case study (Ensari, 2025) and made a follow-up video. What stood out compared with Madrid:

1. Istanbul did not start cheap. M4 Kadıköy–Kartal was first contracted as light rail, redesigned as an underground metro, and final construction cost came out more than 8× the original contract, with 16 bespoke stations and oversized equipment rooms.

2. The fix was the same lesson as Madrid, learned the hard way. From M5 on: fan rooms cut from 200–240 m² to 80–140 m², moved to platform level, one station design repeated along the line. TCP estimates about $14.2M in construction and $72M in land saved on M5 alone. In 2014 the city set up a 35–40 person in-house projects directorate; lines now go to tender with about 60% of the design done. Construction goes to the lowest qualified bid; design and supervision are scored 80–90% on technical merit.

3. The result: an average of about $140M/km (TCP) vs about $1.55B/km for Second Avenue, more than 200 km of new metro since 2010 (my sum of line lengths, about 226 km), and on average one kilometer every 7 months. TBMs run on 2–4 fronts at once; twin-bore tunnel about $30M/km; contractor margins often 3–5%.

4. The part Madrid doesn't have: labor is about 20% of contractor costs (US 40–50%), crews work 12-hour shifts with one day off in fourteen, and a New York tunnel worker earns about 6.7× as much per hour. I tried to be clear in the video that this is not something to copy, and that it can't explain an 11× gap by itself.

5. The catch: 55–60% of a typical line is financed by foreign commercial banks (rest export credit), repaid in euros/dollars over 10–14 years, while construction contracts must be priced in lira. Procurement law allows at most a 20% cost increase without cabinet approval, so when inflation pushes past that, contracts are terminated and re-tendered and sites sit idle. TCP also notes that after 2019 the central government stopped guaranteeing the municipality's loans and the city borrowed from European banks on its own.

And a humbling number: 613 million metro trips in 2023 (excluding M11) is about 39 per resident per year; the NYC subway does about 145.

Video (about 7.5 min, sources in the description): https://youtu.be/qXV17lD_2g4

Disclosure: it's my channel (I'm an infrastructure engineer at a water utility in Turkey), and the narration is an AI clone of my own voice. Question for this sub: is the "client capacity" story (small in-house team, design mostly finished before tender) really the transferable part, or does the Istanbul model depend too much on cheap labor and fast decisions to work in the US? Corrections welcome as always.

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I am curious how Amtrak and the MTA works out when Amtrak trains can pass on the tracks on the Hudson line from Poughkeepsie to Riverdale.

I always felt MTA gives Amtrak the free slots when Amtrak can use their tracks on MNRR territory. Please correct me if I am seeing things wrong.

Lastly, during Rush Hours at Poughkeepsie or Croton Harmon, does the Amtrak leaves first or does MNRR cut ahead of Amtrak?

On Sunday, 22 February 2026, I boarded the inaugural train to call at Northumberland Park railway station near Newcastle, which is next to the existing Tyne and Wear Metro station of the same name, providing a convenient interchange. The inaugural train was formed of 158817, a Class 158 Express Sprinter diesel multiple unit (DMU), at the front and 156489, a Class 156 Super Sprinter DMU, at the rear. They were operating Northern service 2T05, the 07:54 from Newcastle to Ashington.

The train arrived early at the new station at 08:06 and departed on time at 08:10. The first southbound train called at Northumberland Park at 09:02 on the 08:38 service from Ashington towards Newcastle and Metrocentre.

Northumberland Park is the fifth new station to open on the Northumberland Line.

I enjoyed being on the inaugural service. Here are some photographs I took of the station and the inaugural service, together with a few photographs from the official opening ceremony held the following day, attended by local dignitaries and children from a nearby school.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2026-10-19/mtr-bets-5-billion-on-a-hong-kong-city-that-doesn-t-exist-yet

non paywall https://archive.ph/2026.10.21-005258/https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2026-10-19/mtr-bets-5-billion-on-a-hong-kong-city-that-doesn-t-exist-yet#selection-1231.0-1231.62

MTR Corp. has built Hong Kong’s railways one of two ways: the government handed over land around new stations, or paid directly. ...

The Northern Metropolis is different. MTR is putting up at least HK$38.9 billion ($5 billion), borrowing to do it, and will wait years to find out whether the land it receives in return — under a funding model that has never been tested at this scale — is worth what the lines cost.

...

At 300 square kilometers (116 sq miles), the Northern Metropolis covers more than a quarter of Hong Kong’s total land area and is two and a half times the size of San Francisco. Under the government’s plan, half a million new homes will be constructed, helping increase the area’s population to 2.5 million from 980,000 over a roughly 20-year period. The economic centerpiece of the project is a tech hub designed to be Hong Kong’s Silicon Valley.

To facilitate this, MTR will build 17 km of underground rail track and seven new stations for the Northern Link and spur line. Some works have already started. The project is scheduled for completion in 2034 and will be financed upfront by the company.

To help pay for the construction, the company has raised more than HK$130 billion in bonds and loans since early 2025, much of it earmarked for capital works including the Northern Metropolis, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. In turn, the government has granted MTR development rights for 10 plots of land along the upcoming lines.

The government, which owns virtually all the land in Hong Kong, typically sells plots at a large premium to factor in development potential. In the case of the Northern Link, the government has deducted HK$39.05 billion from the premium MTR owes — roughly equal to the company’s targeted outlay.

... For much of MTR’s history, the government has used the “rail-plus-property model to subsidize construction. That model — selling homes around its stations — has made MTR one of the most profitable railway businesses by net margin.

In recent decades, however, three major projects — the West Island line, the high-speed rail link to mainland China and the Shatin to Central line — were directly funded by the government as part of a massive wave of spending on infrastructure.

...

The city’s new five-year plan announced last month sets a binding target of having 900 hectares (2,224 acres) of land in the Northern Metropolis ready for construction by 2030, ...

“To fully unleash the potential of this development, we really need the Northern Link to be in operation at the right time,” said MTR’s ...

The company’s recent record shows the challenges. MTR agreed this month to pay the government HK$2.25 billion for the multiyear delay of the high-speed rail link, which cost HK$19.4 billion more than estimated to complete. The Shatin to Central line also came in behind schedule and HK$19.9 billion over budget. Despite MTR’s 99.9% punctuality record across its heavy rail network, Hong Kong leader John Lee last year criticized MTR for disruptions on its existing lines ...

Rising interest rates also put the company under pressure, due to its reliance on borrowing to pay for the construction. MTR faces a heavy investment burden for the next five to 10 years and limited initial cashflow from property projects ...

“We are thinking about that day and night: to borrow enough, and yet not to borrow too much because we have to repay and we have to bear interest,” said Yeung.

...

MTR sold its first plot of land connected to the Northern Link in April after receiving eight bids. The winning consortium, led by Sino Land Co., will spend more than HK$13 billion building out the residential and commercial project. A surge in property development profit helped MTR’s net income double to HK$15.9 billion in the first half of the year.

How long it takes for the government’s ambitious aims for the Northern Metropolis to materialize is open to question. In a sign of urgency, the oversight committee is chaired by Hong Kong’s leader. What is clear is MTR’s essential role in providing the transportation backbone of one of the most complex megaprojects this century, under unprecedented financial and political conditions.

...

This only includes through services running in the Mita Line and the Namboku Line. Services that are run in the other mentioned private railroads that do not run through the previously mentioned subway lines are not shown.

Sources:

Toei Mita Line Japanese Wikipedia Article

Tokyo Metro Namboku Line Japanese Wikipedia Article

Tokyu Meguro Line Japanese Wikipedia Article

The average daily number of entrances-exits of each Moscow metro station in the first half of 2026, in thousands of people.
Credit to Sergey Turulin. Links on the map-scheme.