If anyone is interested in high speed railways there is no better book than an annual atlas put out for free by the UIC - International Union of Railways.
This PDF covers all the lines and all of the equipment in service and planned. It includes maps, specs, types of signals, grades, speeds, etc.
In addition I have attached a couple of pages of lists that show nearly all of the services of 200 km/h (125 mph) in chrono order from the first Shinkansen in 1964 in Japan to 2012. Unfortunately this chrono list only goes to 2012. The PDF includes everything to 2024 but has no updated chrono list like this.
It is a grounded, guided transport system and could also categorised as a railway subsystem. The most important difference, however, is the speed. As travel times had to be reduced for commercial purposes, speed emerged as a
decisive factor with HSR providing the necessary improvement, which is why UIC considers a commercial speed of 250 km/h is the principal criterion for defining a line as high-speed.
Nevertheless, average distance is a second criterion when a line does not have to compete with air travel, where it may not be as important to run at 250 km/h. A lower speed of above 200 km/h (any lower is within the capability of a
conventional train) and more commonly 220 or 230 km/h, is enough to capture the highest possible market share for a collective mode of transport. This also applies to very long tunnels whose construction cost depends on the diameter
linked to the square of the speed.
For speeds above 200 km/h, the infrastructure can be categorised as āhigh-speedā if the system in operation complies with the necessary standards regarding track equipment, rolling stock (generalisation of trainsets), signalling systems
(eliminating trackside signals), operations (long-range control centers), and the geographical or temporal separation of freight and passenger traffic.
The High-Speed Railway Network can also include infrastructure sections.
If you are building brand-new infrastructure with mechanized viaduct construction and the ability to do top-down TLM operation, you can get 300 km/h at relatively low marginal cost over what is needed for 'faster than 125mph" service. However, the key even at 125mph is to reach and sustain peak speed; a few islands of even substantial speed will not make up for slow sections or excessive stops.
In my opinion PRIIA was correct in using the 125mph criterion; 100mph service with equipment built to that design uses just half the horsepower.
There is a kind of design āforkā with electrification, which is basically essential to speeds over 125mph. There is comparatively little more expense in constructing 300 km/h catenary over 200 km/h, and that has been inherent in the use of āhighest practicalā diesel speed for PRIIA use (and in most 110mph projects where establishing the āsealed corridorā alone consumes great expense ā see the recent threads decrying American construction expense and uncertainty).
I thought JL_Chicago had a pretty good discussion of the issue in one of the other recent threads.
We have been woefully incompetent in developing automated track machinery on any scale (choosing to import most of what we do have, which is more maintenance- than TLM-oriented) from specialist companies like Plasser & Theurer in Europe. I do not really expect any āonshoringā or domestic companies to fill that hole ā neither the opportunity cost nor the aspects of stranded capital and preventative maintenance suit out current excuse for capital management with respect to railroad track construction.
Iām not going to get into the whole corruption/unionization kerfufflecin New York ā it is what it is. Likewise on many of the other current capital projects in the NEC; they seem to have forgotten even how to prioritize via PERT. It is NOT that they canāt manage it; I well remember how a showstopping maintenance failure on a substantial amount of elevated highway was discovered in the '80s, meaning that some relatively great mileage of elevated steel highway construction would have to be removed and then replaced. Remembering the disaster that was the West Side Highway ruin in the mid-Seventies, and the vast time it took to replace the Morningside bridge over the Manhattan Valley at 12(th St., I was sure that was going to be a multiyear piece of hopelessness ā they worked 24/7 and had the job completely done in something I recall was about six weeks.
I repeat the lesson of the construction of the elevated railroads in the mid-1870s and, to a different extent, the 1885 Portage Bridge that was only recently replaced: the right equipment and the right means of fabrication can get vast things accomplished both quickly, effectively, and relatively cheaply. If, say, Musk were to expand the Boring Company into other aspects of route construction, and adapt (if not utilize) the methods developed and learned āelsewhereā in the past 10 years or so, we could have the reusable machinery and cadre needed to do many of these projects rapidly and wellā¦ at appropriate scale with appropriate penetration into the market.
The Brits deserve credit for making the most of their infrastructure. The three mainlines Great Western, West Coast, and East Coast all cruise at 125 mph for long stretches. Iāve ridden both mains to Scotland ECML from London to Edinburgh and WCML from Glasgow to London. About 400 miles and not much over 4 hours for the fastest expresses.
Amtrak couldnāt even dream of doing that on the NEC even though in my opinion the NEC is no more challenging than the WCML.
And I just read that now that the Brits finally are planning to put ETCS (PTC) on their ECML theyāll go up to 140. The line side signaling is already there. Itās just been capped at 125 because all they have now is AWS (ATS).
Wes Eden of Brightline is projecting $12 bills to build their 200 mph line from LA to LV. If he pulls this off it will become the litmus test. Fractions of what California HSR or Amtrak were/are planning to spend. No one will be able to spend more with a straight face after that.
Damn. I literally broke an incisor gnashing my teeth over this bit of information.
While Iām looking forward ā I think ā to seeing the actual speed capability of the Avelia Liberty sets, I suspect Amtrak may still have some institutional memory of how fast they ran trains in the months before the Chase wreckā¦ and perhaps be saying ānever againā.
Call me paranoid, but there just may be more to the barriers that have been placed for 50 years to prevent incremental top speed improvements on the NEC and especially elsewhere. Follow the $$
Amtrak speeds have gone up since then from 125 to 150. They implemented ATC speed control on freights after Chase. Before freights only had cab signals without any enforcement. Amtrak and freights now have PTC which is even more enforcing.
Amtrak is planning 160 for the Avelias. With Alstomās (French) PTC Iām confident itāll be safer than before Chase. We learned a lot from that wreck.
My understanding was that the 150mph speeds were only on restricted parts of the rebuilt trackage north of New Haven, not even on the stretch between North Brunswick and Trenton (where the high-speed testing on Metroliner and later Acela was done after the crossovers were removed at Princeton Junction).
As an amusing aside, my āfake-AIā system for effective ATC on freight consists in the late '80s was related to improving safety after the Chase wreck. Conventional PTC of that era didnāt produce optimal braking at full service, which for ABDX in the absence of graduated release needs careful modulation of the brake set to get slack out of the foundations and the train as a whole ā we developed a handheld device that would modulate a Rotair valve in parallel with the standard brake valve in case of a āpenaltyā application, which would be programmed to use the train makeup to produce optimal braking with minimum cost on individual locomotives. This went nowhere when heavy freight was removed from the NEC (the excuse being price-gouging on 25 Hz electricity billed to Conrail)ā¦
I did note that after 1986 there started to be trains through Princeton Junction that seemed appreciably faster than 125mph. I did not see this after the late '80s.
Confirmed. Amtrak - Northeast Corridor Employee Timetable 2024-02-05, Special Instructions 150 mph tracks 2 and 3 between Midway and CP Clark. Train types A and B.
I didnāt find any south/west of there all the way to DC.
This was the problem with the āracetrackā 10 years ago:
145 is the fastest speed on fixed-tension catenary, which is much of the ārestā of the stretch, apparently. Perhaps you have something definitive on the section from CP CLARK to CP HAM (in north Hamilton Township) which had the drilling complete for new poles but might not be constant-tension, weird as that may seem.
There was a stretch from around Marcus Hook to Claymont (where the 128mph GG1 test speed was recorded) that is getting new poles and easing of a couple of curves to yield 145mphā¦ but nothing I could find indicated that the new wire would be constant-tension. (I would find it hard to believe anything with new poles and support would not be built to 60 Hz constant-tension standards, especially in the window of Biden-administration priorityā¦ and with part of the stretch in Delaware, the stretch being between the Philadelphia bottleneck and the point where smooth braking into Wilmington station would commence southboundā¦)
Clark to Ham still 135. Maybe constant tension not finished yet?
FYI here is a link to the ETT pdf. Itās online. Scroll down the page and you can download it as a pdf.
FYI if you just google - amtrak employee timetable - you get a bunch of hits where you can download various years. The latest 2024 is the first hit from the google search.
I donāt know if a newer one 2025 has been issued and/or is online.
I always download or print anything I see of interest on the net. Who knows when someone higher up says to delete it. And Iāve seen that happen a lot. Oops itās gone. But I still have it!
Uploader here. I havenāt seen anyone link to it until now, although search engines found it a year ago. Have an award.
I keep documents with multiple editions in lists so Iāll always put the NEC ETTs into their own list. There was another edition I obtained for May 5, 2025 but no search engine has picked it up. Certainly that changes with this post. I anticipated speed changes for the Avelias but it looks like theyāre not ready yet.
I do not know when new editions get published so I await tip-offs so I know when to send a new FOIA request. Thank you for forward-thinking on downloading documents.
