> Around 430 passengers in Niigata Prefecture were forced to spend the night on a packed four-car train after it got stranded Thursday evening by heavy snow along the Sea of Japan coast.
> About 110 passengers on a Sanyo Shinkansen bullet train bound for Shin-Osaka Station stayed overnight on the train at Okayama Station, western Japan, after the train arrived around 2am on Monday.
> The train had been stranded en route for about two hours due to a breakdown of railway equipment, apparently caused by snow.
Agreed, being stuck on a train in a winter storm is far far less terrifying to me than being stuck in a small car, running out of gas (or battery charge), without water or food or access to bathrooms.
If you're in the middle of Virginia on I95 in an electric car, you'd be fine.
To get from Fredericksburg to Richmond or vice versa, you have at least 60 miles of charge in your tank or you were never going to make it. At highway speeds, that's at least 20 kWh of battery power. It won't take more than 300-500 watts to heat the cabin continuously even in the middle of a blizzard. That means your battery will last 44 to 66 hours at minimum. So you've got multiple days of heat, water is falling from the sky, and the bathroom is immediately outside your doors.
This is one of the nice things about electric cars: the motor uses no energy while idling, and moving the car requires so much energy that you'll never run out if you're stationary. Most new EVs today have 60-80 kWh batteries. It would take several weeks to drain a full battery just running A/C or heat along with the radio and screens.
If you're trapped for a day in a inches-per-hour snowstorm, you're not going to be able to run the engine the whole time. You may also be in a snowbank, with wind causing drifts to build up.
> In New Jersey, 23-year-old Sashalynn Rosa, of Passaic, and her 1-year-old son, Messiah Bonilla, died of carbon monoxide poisoning while sitting in a running car that had its tailpipe covered in snow. Rosa's 3-year-old daughter, Saniyah Bonilla, was hospitalized in critical condition and died on Jan. 27. The father of the children was just steps away shoveling snow from around the car.
> Angel Ginel of New York died in a similar way Monday afternoon. Police say Ginel was found inside his running, plowed-in car in Brooklyn. His relatives believe he got inside the car to warm up Sunday, and the car got buried.
I ran a similar calculation for my Spark EV with 14 kWh capacity remaining. I can run my router and two wifi APs for around 15 days (at least) if needed. So I picked up a small inverter and will manually fail over from my UPS if a power outage goes beyond an hour or so. (Of course, if there's no power for 15 days there are likely bigger problems than internet access.)
Still significantly less comfortable than being able to walk around and use a proper bathroom.
And if you have young kids.... yikes I can't even imagine the hell of that sort of situation.
It would be really nice to have an alternative to being forced to drive for every day tasks. Instead, we have forced car dependent through law and through federal spending.
That happens even without snow. I've been stuck on Amtrak trains because there was some object on the track (crashed vehicles) and the train just sat there for hours and they refuse to open the doors even though were were in the center of Oakland and could have happily just walked out.
Amtrak is not a great example of how trains should work.
Amtrak is particularly vulnerable in that they lease their tracks from freight companies, who generally prioritize their own (much longer) trains over Amtrak. So a small delay can snowball into a large one very quickly.
Right? Imagine a mode of travel which does not suffer from emergent collapse, which is managed by professionals with expertise and specialized heavy equipment, which in any case is not normally troubled by snowfalls of less than 2 meters in depth, and which in clear weather is dramatically faster and cheaper than driving, and which, as a bonus, is systematically cheaper than cars and highways and which will not destroy the atmosphere!
It's less likely to help in this specific corridor. The I-95 is for people going from everywhere to everywhere up the eastern seaboard; there's definitely room for improvement on, say, the Richmond-to-DC direct trains, but to really take pressure off I-95 here you'd need a total overhaul from Florida to Maine and up through to Chicago. I-95 north of Richmond choke-points almost everyone driving any of that.
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2018/01/12/national/heavy-...
> Around 430 passengers in Niigata Prefecture were forced to spend the night on a packed four-car train after it got stranded Thursday evening by heavy snow along the Sea of Japan coast.
https://www.scmp.com/news/asia/east-asia/article/1904881/jap...
> About 110 passengers on a Sanyo Shinkansen bullet train bound for Shin-Osaka Station stayed overnight on the train at Okayama Station, western Japan, after the train arrived around 2am on Monday.
> The train had been stranded en route for about two hours due to a breakdown of railway equipment, apparently caused by snow.
(I'd rather be stuck in a train, that said.)