1, Patronage on both Egged buses and the Light Rail is up, but not all the way to pre-7 Oct. levels.
2, On one occasion when sirens were heard, our teacher asked all four of us students to move to what is considered the safe area of the building, a stairway without windows surrounded by stone walls. Nothing happened, and we returned to the study room (Beit HaMidrash).
3. The November issue the Light Railway Transit Association (I just might be their oldest member and have been one for about 71 or 72 years, www lrta.org), Trams & Urban Transit, has some details on the 132 new light rail cars that will serve the new Blue Line that will bring light rail service to the Hebrew University, Givat Saphadit/French Hill, the Malcha area, and the original Jerusalem Railway Station, now a cultural center with a theatre adjacent. A logical externsion from its Malcha southern terminal would be as an interurban over the original Jerusalem railway line, being maintained but not in service, to Beit Shemesh,
The new 132 cars will built by PESA in Poland. For comparison, the operating Red Line originally operated by Citypass and now by Caphir, has 48 cars of similar length, and pre-7 Oct. carried 140,000 passenger journeys each weekday.
The 48 Alstom Civitas cars are all double-ended, with drivers cabs at both ends. But except for preliminary initial testing, they operate only in 2-car trains. This means that there is both unnecessay equioment and space wasted. They have 12 wheels, all powered, with three body sections having the trucks\bogies (4-wheels) below (low floors possible because the wheels protrude into the spaces under the back-back seats), and two additional body sections are suspended between the sections with trucks/bogies.
The PESA cars will slso be low-floor, but with 16 wheels, four trucks, and three body sections. Two trucks/bogies will be under the body section at the front and rear and two under the middle section. They are single-ended, and so should have greater capacity than the Red Line cars, and will operate back-to-back.
A correction has been made to the previous posting. The two middle trucks are both under the center body section, not underr the joints. This means that the inner ends of the outer body sections are suspended from the middle section.
Testing has begun on the northern extension with construction essentially complete. Safety issues are expercted to delay both northern and southern openings until Passover 2025. Zev Rothkopf's picture is at the B'nai Yaakov northern terminal.
The new PURPLE 'tram' line in Jerusalem.
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