David Levinson tweeted a photo of a car that wedged itself at the crossovers on the north side of 12th Street in downtown Saint Paul. It must have driven down there from the intersection of University and Park/MLK on the north side of the capitol. That must have screwed things up for a while.
I noticed that you can just barely see through the silvered windows on doors to the cabs of the Siemens cars. Here's a shot with my cameraphone pressed up against the glass:
IMAG0189 by
Mulad, on Flickr
I stood at the door for a while on an eastbound train and saw a few things -- first, I was surprised that there are speed zones of 40, 45, and even 50 mph (in the trench under the Minnesota Commercial Railroad tracks by Menards and the old Midway Amtrak station). Those zones mostly seemed too short to be of any use (I think the train ended up getting stopped at lights before all of those faster zones). It's hard for a train to get up to 50 mph in the quarter-mile or so between Cleveland Ave/Transfer Road and Prior Ave, and then slow down again either to stop at the signal or drop down to the lower speeds on either side.
Second, the signal timing is just...
bad. I think my eastbound train got caught a few times because other westbound trains may have been winning in the race to trip/extend signals. There were also a few intersections where the lights for cars were set up in strange ways. At least two intersections had the old-style signal phasing from before there were tracks down the middle of University, including the one at Fry Street, one block west of Snelling -- To our right, the left turn arrow was illuminated along with the green balls for the through lanes, and the left arrow was blocking the train from moving.
That shouldn't happen. Maaaybe there's a good reason for that phasing, but as far as I'm concerned, the eastbound and westbound left turn lanes should share the same signal phase, allowing the trains to always go through whenever the through lanes have green lights (minus a bit of pad time since the trains can't slow down as fast as cars).
Also, looking down the line through the cab, I found it pretty confusing to see the blinking lights of the pedestrian crossings (each one appears to have holes in the side to let light from the signal come through, so the operators know that they're working). From a distance, those resemble the blinking vertical bars which tell operators to slow down. Given the stopping distances involved, I'm not sure my eyesight would be good enough for me to work as a train operator. Of course, the silvered glass didn't help.
We did get held up at one point because a fire truck came out of the station just west of Vandalia. I wonder how emergency vehicles affect the signal cycles.
Anyway, despite a slow pace of getting out of downtown Saint Paul on my earlier westbound ride, the train went pretty fast after getting to roughly Western on University, and I was actually a bit surprised when we pulled up to Snelling. The train went through the UMN campus area without needing to stop at signals, which was nice.
The view from the Washington Avenue Bridge has always been cool, and it was again today.
The bells for crossings at Target Field suck. It isn't just that there's one set of bells either -- there are four sets, as far as I can tell, which virtually guarantees that at least one set of the four will always be making noise, plus the e-bells of the trains themselves and some toots of the horn here and there.