Friday Reads – 5 September 2025

The value of common design on the Elizabeth line: Video (IStuctE)

Hidden history Newcastle Central station: Video (LNER)

Lisbon Gloria funicular crash: 15 dead as ‘never seen’ tragedy strikes (Economic Times)

The New Acela Liberty High Speed Train: America’s Next Chapter in Rail – A Review (Transit Guy)

Privatizing Profits from Use of Public Land: A Robotaxi Story (Overhead Wire)

A tale of two stations, Amsterdam & Stuttgart (Rail Engineer)

Building a Railway on the World’s Longest Floating Bridge: Video (Blueprint)

Pump it up! The UK’s most glorious garages – in pictures (Guardian)

4 comments

  1. That article about the Lisbon funicular has a couple of errors. Lisbon does not have three funicular cars – it has eight. They necessaily work in pairs and there are four lines (although many writers seem to be unaware of the Graca line, that opened only last year)

  2. The Funicular crash was absolutely horrendous, as a dad I almost cried reading about the 3 year old boy being pulled from the arms of his dead father. The trauma is heartbreaking.

    Something about the incident really doesn’t add up; funicular cables don’t just snap, and if they do there are surely supposed to be safety systems that kick in. I’m not going to speculate further other than to say that I suspect much more will be uncovered about the cause in the coming months and years.

  3. Apparently the cars of this funicular had individual electric motors rather than the power source acting directly on the cable, which strikes me as a really bad idea.

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