More Monday rail news:
— InnoTrans, the world’s largest rail trade fair, has been rescheduled to April 27-30, 2021, in Berlin. The event, held every other year, was postponed from its original date of Sept. 22-25 of this year when Berlin’s government placed a ban on events with more than 5,000 people through Oct. 24. The 2018 edition attracted more than 3,000 exhibitors from 149 countries, along with more than 150,000 visitors. For more information, see the InnoTrans website.
— New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority has significantly expanded the number of locations where it is checking employee temperatures for signs of the COVID-19 virus. The MTA reported in a Saturday press release that it is now rotating checks at 71 locations, up from seven when the program began and from 22 when it was first reported [see “News Wire Digest for Friday, April 10”]. That includes 40 subway locations, four on the Long Island Rail Road, and three on the Metro-North Railroad. Temperatures of more than 3,500 workers are checked daily.
— Milwaukee’s streetcar, The Hop, saw ridership drop by about 80% in March to 310 riders per day, the Milwaukee Business Journal reports. The free streetcars, which began service in November 2018, cut their hours of operation late in the month, running from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. on 20-minute headways. The streetcars had previously operated from 5 a.m. to midnight on weekdays, with 15-minute headways during peak hours and 20 minutes at other times.
INNOTRANS. A friend in the UK writes me that from 2021 there will no longer be any free access to Innotrans for members of the general public. You will have to pay like regular ‘trade’ visitors. I haven’t been myself but there seems to be great disappointment around this among railfans over this side of the Atlantic.