Comment by db48x

12 hours ago

Right, but Germany has stations every few miles. Here in America the next station might be hours and hundreds of miles away. Better to stop ¼ mile away instead; people will hardly know the difference. The point is that if for any reason they cannot reach the station then they’ll always stop at the nearest safe place instead. The crew always have an alternate stop.

For really long construction work they’ll actually build an entirely separate train station, like they did in Denver Colorado a few years back. They knew that the construction of the new station downtown would take a few years, so they built a really cheap platform a few miles away on a siding and moved all the arrivals and departures there for the duration.