Dane.Kouttron
[06.20.23] TRTR-2023 Bikes, Trains, Neutrons
Research Reactor Conference 2023 Photogrammetry is a recently evolving technique of taking I swear there were more than ~4 people at the talk. |
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Quick Overview There Thoughts about Amtrak   I took the Northeast Regional from Boston South station to college park MD. College park was only ~7 miles from the conference center and a sane person would probably have taken a taxi, I wanted to explore a bit in this newfound land and as such I brought my bike along for the ride. At the moment the ride down on our antiquated rail is a 7.5 hour journey, occupying approximately 450 miles / 725km. This is also approximately how long it takes to drive down, netting the main advantage of rail travel being 'not having to pilot'. This is my first go at bringing a bike aboard a long distance train, for Massachusetts surface rail / commuter rail you nominally just kinda park your bicycle in a spot allocated for wheelchairs (where wheelchairs get priority), and nominally stand / sit somewhere near your bike. As the ride is generally less than an hour this somewhat works, although bikes are pretty terrible at standing up on their own. The 'Amtrak Bicycle Contraption' is interesting. Like on the surface rail, the bicycle area is dual purpose, it nominally is a luggage rack, however bicyclists get priority, and the shelves turn into a, well a big hook and a strap.  This bike is, well its very heavy. You may have spotted that this is indeed the bike I built mid-pandemic [link] and somewhat documented here [link]. The weight spread between front and rear is at best comical. The back of the bike is a 1.5kw hub motor, LiFe 400wh battery pack and controller. You're advised to take off the front wheel but realistically I was not sure this was actually necessary. With some finagling I was able to get it hooked in and lashed in place. The front wheels are quick-remove so that worked to my advantage. With the bike stowed I found seating nearby. The train was remarkably crowded for so early on a Sunday morning, but the experience was about an order of magnitude less terrible than an airline. I did not have to disrobe or queue or provide identification or like anything. I boarded, my ticket was checked a few times and that was it. Seats are also like 30-50% larger than coach seats on a plane. I did not feel uncomfortable, but did want to open a window from time to time which seemed not possible. The view was also pretty stellar,   The Amtrak northeast regional has similar amenities to an airplane flight, in this case its a cafe car, which is approximately half food sale and the other half a bunch of dining tables. You can kind of just stay in the dining car but they eventually shoo you out if you're spawn camping. I didnt get a good picture of the cafe seating area as it was almost fully occupied. A cup of hot coffee was 3$, which is pricey but you're a captive audience. I did find out afterwards that none of the coach seats have 'cupholder technology'. There is no where to put a cup of coffee. The fold down tray does not have a little indent, the window seat did not have a spot, so you kinda just hold a thin paper cup of coffee for like 30 minutes until you finish it. This is pretty silly. The ride got bumpy towards queens / Penn station, so holding the coffee was a must, I think if it was just sitting on a tray it may have jumped off. Still, plenty of legroom / room for a full backpack to rummage about in.   I didn't end up ordering food as i knew in advance that it was pricey and somewhat limited. I brought along a sandwich and some snacks for the ride. If you get restless you can wander the cars its fairly easy to get up and stretch. After NYP the train thinned out and became more spacious, I had my own aisle which was nice. One other thing i was impressed with you have access to mains power. This may not be an issue for you but mains on a plane is capped at 70W, and those breakers are very trigger happy. I've had issues plugging in a normal Lenovo power brick, where the mains input capacitance was enough to trip the frigging in-seat self-resetting breaker. Here? I pulled 400W no problem. I imagine these have a single or maybe two 1kw breakers somewhere in the car, but having actual power was fairly excellent. Amtrak Bandwidth Oh baby I was somewhat surprised by this one, the Amtrak does excitedly exclaim that it has onboard WiFi, while this is technically true, my experience was at best mediocre. I think that to hit the mark as 'you can work on the train' the service really needs to perform better. I'm not asking for business video calls, or even voice calls. I'm talking about having an image upload on an email not timing out. It was Sunday so my 'work' on the train was actually website updating, but lets see how that went:  Uploads over SSH were about 40-80kbps when things were working. This was the case both on the ride down to MD and the ride back to Boston. While it's possible certain ports were throttled, it didn't seem likely. This was sufficient for sending slack messages, or responding to signal messages but nothing else. I took a short video clip of the train struggling in the rain due to a signal issue and the 10mb file took approximately 14minutes to post over ssh. What is really odd is this is supposed to get fixed, I was excited to see any effort to fix / upgrade this and I found a detailed write up of Amtrak looking at installing towers every 0.8 mi / 1.3km to provide high bandwidth networking for the trains, and possibly provide better communications for other Amtrak hardware. This is wild [link]. So what happened to the Wireless Track side Network? Well lets first dig into what was going on as of this writing, PC MAG actually did a phenomenal job detailing Amtrak Net in 2022 [link]. I can't tell from the article if they were on the Ascella or the Northeast Regional. The relevant tidbit is here, for someone working purely on the network the train WiFi was over an order of magnitude slower than a tethered phone would have been. While I had no WiFi signal strength issues, I was not seeing the prescribed 2.9/2.5Mbps, I was seeing closer to 1Mbps at the best, winscp would frequently disconnect and try and reconnect for file uploads.  What would be a 'useful number' though? I think in the present day, in the crowded corridor between Boston South Station an NY Penn, I'd prefer at least 5 Mbps symmetric allocated per passenger. That's enough for remote text work, slack and email, not enough for a call but it gets you most of the way there. Struggling to upload a 5mb PDF to an email was not doing it for me. Arrival in MD I got off at College Park and cycled to the conference center. There were a few interesting road features I had not run into previously, namely lots of water culverts, everywhere. There were man-made streams piping runoff from everywhere, this made cycling a little curious going at it blind, so I fired up google maps which proceeded to point my bicycle at a highway crossing. After some fiddling around the endless suburbia I arrived at a very pretty university conference center hotel. This was a really interesting venue, with the rooms a short jaunt between the conference halls. After some sign in hoop jumping, I had my key and found a shower. It was a long trip.   This is the lowest-tier room, way more than I was expecting. Space to work and sleep an assortment of people, all to myself. I charged up my e-bike, modifed 
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