http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/08/business/global/08rail.html?hp
OK, I understand there’s some high tech components involved that may require some special expertise, but there’s also plenty of fine American civil engineers here in the U.S. capable of designing and building track alignments and bridges to whatever design speed you want–and we here in America need the work!
I’m an 18-year highway project engineer licensed in two states (PA and MD)–easily capable of doing railroad design. Anybody need American civil engineers for rail work–contact me.
John
No use reinventing the wheel from the hub out…some hardware (and software for that matter) along with experience may be cheaper from where high speed rail is practiced.
It’s a shame we have apparently become incapable of doing hi-tech for ourselves, but I guess that’s the situation with our engineering and manufacture for the requisite designs and equipment.
Whether we want to admit it or not, we are not number one in high speed passenger rail. I don’t understand why they just be consultants in the matter.
Engineering is different from some other American work professions because engineering consultants don’t just merely give an opinion and then leave the matter up to the “client”.
To be an engineering “consultant” is to do and be held legally responsible for most of the design work, unless one is the oversight consultant, in which case one is responsible for checking that the work is being done correctly. There are also project management engineering consultants that are responsible for keeping the project on schedule to hit all the important milestones and submission dates (but not getting too involved in the technical details).
So in fact those Chinese consultants will be providing most of the technical expertise (reads like nearly all) and doing much of the design work themselves–or training Americans to do some of it–assuming some qualified/talented Americans are available.
Respectfully submitted–
John
Tell that to Boeing and Lockheed Martin…General Electric got out of the HSR market in North America because there was simply not enough business…
Some say some of the shortcomings of Metroliners and the UA Turbo train were because they were designed by dismisse aerospace engineers. Nonetheless, there are no HSR or even standard passenger car manufacturers in the US because there had been no market…virtually everything not Heritage here has been designed and otherwise manufactured by off shore companies often with just final assembly or hardware assembly done here.
Not just passenger cars, but apparently up-to-date catenary designs for electrified services probably will be derived from off-shore products, if not directly imported.
The shortcoming of the Metroliner is that the gummint got involved.
The Budd Company, they tell me, started out as an automotive supplier that moved into the railroad passenger car business with their Shotweld process for joining stainless steel. As far as I am concerned, they were eminently successful at what they did, much as GM, again, an automotive company, was successful with the Diesel-electric locomotive.
The Budd Company, in fact, had an off-the-shelf product for this application, namely, the Silverliner MU car. The idea was to get high-speed service, you would “up-gear” a Silverliner. The original US-DOT “test article” was such a modified Silverliner, setting a 150 MPH + speed record somewhere in New Jersey.
But you see, there was this national pride thing going on, the Japanese (add an element of post WW-II jingoism) were besting us with their 150 MPH train, so our train had to be designed fo 160, never mind that it would never operate over 125 MPH. I know of this because my Poppa was working for the GARD engineering research division of GATX and was involved in all of this.
So to meet the 160 MPH top speed and something like 1 MPH/s acceleration (0-120 in two minutes), they had to up-power as well as up-gear the Silverliner. Adding power added weight, requiring in turn even more power. The goll’ durned thing was overspeced and overweight. And then the Pennsylvania Railroad got into the act, requiring subsitution of conventional (and with the weight and suspension tuning harsh riding) pedestal trucks for the Budd Pioneer III design (Silverliner, Amfleet).
“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings.”
The Metroliners had numerous reliability problems, including snow in the electrical system, requiring updates. It is easy to blame it all on the government, etc., but the fact remains, we couldn’t do a proper HSR then, and still haven’t 40+ years later.
At that time, too, Paul, there was as slow down in aerospace so displaced engineers were hired to do the Metroliner work. Yes, the govn’t got involved, but to employ these areospace engineers was one of the reasons they felt they should and could albeit it was to aid and abet those damned railro
OK, I won’t blame the government, I will blame the advocacy community.
We, the U.S., more properly the Budd Company had a perfectly workable high-horsepower MU car – the Silverliner, and this equipment had been demonstrated to be high-speed capable with minor modifications. But no, we couldn’t be content with 120 MPH operation as that would not be “proper HSR”, instead, we had to triple the HP and boost the weight by 50 percent to get the carbarn queen known as the Metroliner. We had to spec it for 160 MPH operation because we wanted bragging rights over people different from us in a distant land, even though as stated elsewhere the overhead wire wouldn’t allow operation over 125 MPH.
Yes, through advances in electric technology, we got Metroliner-level HP from the AEM-7 locomotive, pulling good ol’ FRA-standard compliant USA-made “Metroshells” (the Amfleet), essentially the Metroliner design without the propulsion equipment and with the original truck design intended for them. This came about on account of a change in management (the Paul Reistrup Amtrak), and this change quietly “saved Amtrak” by bringing about a workable corridor service. And yes, the locomotives came (initially) from Sweden, and I guess this sticks in a person’s craw that someone outside our borders may have expertise in something that we have use for on this shores, and this craw-stickage continues with the idea that engineers in China would have anything to contribute over here.
Then we reverted to the bad experience of the Metroliner with Acela – overpower
Paul: Sorry, but perhaps my sarcasm escaped you? I only think it is too bad the US is incapable of building a viable HSR over a 40 year period. Wow! A 45 mph top speed gain in 40 years! What a leap. That would seem to be the worst sort of incrementalism. The fault is in our dependence on domestic ROW engineering in the NEC that has gained very little for an enormous expenditure. No wonder California is turning to China/GE!
Not sure exactly what you mean by “fault is in our dependence on domestic ROW engineering in the NEC”. The problem is not with the domestic engineers–we can only do as directed by our clients.
The facts are that, due to the abuses of the past, where for example state DOT’s, etc. realigned streams and rivers at a whim to build highways, today in America the environmental process vastly hinders construction of any large public project. They don’t have quite the same kinds of environmental restrictions in other developing countries. It can take 20 years now in America to get a big design project through the environmental process to achieve a “record of decision” that allows preliminary design to proceed.
In Pennsylvania, at least 21 other state and federal agencies must approve new highway construction projects. Seems ridiculous–but is sadly true.
Also, the eminent domain law in Pennsylvania was specifically changed to forbid the acquisition of ANY right-of-way (R/W) that will not be built upon within one year. This is a major handicap to PennDOT. They need to widen and reconstruct I-83 around the state capitol of Harrisburg at a construction cost of more than $1 billion. However, they cannot buy any additional R/W till they are essentially ready to build. Every day that R/W is being further developed and will become even more expensive to buy in the future. (Note: The concept of “ultimate R/W” was ruled unconstitutional many years ago–any plans showing such are pretty much null and void, depending upon the date filed.)
I would imagine the eminent domain laws, as recently revised, will also hinder future rail realignments along the NEC.
A HSR project will have to have full government buy-in, and a fast track environmental process, regardless of what state it woul
Not leaps of technology but failed leaps, which burned through money that could have been used for incremental improvements in more places. To the extent that the advocacy community invokes “shame”, “US is incapable of building”, and yes, sarcasm regarding US technological leadership or lack thereof, this drives projects towards “specsmanship” (Metroliner, Acela) rather than quiet, incremental, and successful efforts (AEM-7, running Amfleet on same schedules as tilt trains) towards achievable goals developing the necessary experience and expertise over time.
This is sad. I am not surprised of course, for years this nation has laughed at the idea of HSR and now we are not laughing so hard. Alternative energy is another area we need outside help in. I will try not to get political here.
While attempting to keep politics per se out of this, I have wondered many times through the years how the negative public perception of HSR has been colored by the railroad bankruptcies of the 1970’s?
For better or for worse, the average American thinks railroads are all but dead. This was never displayed more vividly than in some of the rather laughable editorials about Warren Buffet’s purchase of BNSF that seemed to liken the U.S. rail industry to a glorified tourist railroad enterprise or full scale toy trains.
The average American has literally no idea that today’s rail movements virtually equal or exceed even the glory years traffic of WWII (and have exceeded in some recent months).
And how much of the negative HSR perception is also a result of the typical selfish American attitude that “I want to drive my own car where I want to when I want to.”?
Plus, as (unfortunately) a highway design engineer, I can readily attest to the fact that American transportation policy and funding is and has been for many years controlled by engineers who only ever built highways (and that’s all they really know how to do), who perceive railroads as little more than toys under a Christmas tree–most certainly at the end of the line behind air, river, and ocean-going traffic (all of which comes behind highway in the pecking order).
It’s not all their fault–it’s just that highways are all they ever knew or were trained to design–and nothing else is as important in their own minds.
John
So driving a car is selfish but using commerical transport, e.g. trains, planes, buses, etc. is not. How come?
There is a critical point here, the public.
My biggest concern is having Americans looking at rail as a transportation option. There is a new generation of Americans that are being raised thinking roads and airlines are the only way to move goods and people; and if we have a congestion problem, just build them bigger. All I here is “railroads”; they are to slow, and if the freight ends up on a truck anyway, why