City leaders are laying the tracks to connect Sandusky to the future of high-speed transportation.
High-speed passenger trains running 79 to 110 mph have caught the attention of both Ohio legislators and Sandusky City Commissioners.
“Passenger rail is penicillin for pain at the pump,” said Stu Nicholson, public information officer for the Ohio Rail Development Commission.
At its most recent meeting, the Sandusky City Commission voted to support U.S. Rep. Marcy Kaptur’s federal appropriation request for matching funds for the development of the Ohio Hub Cleveland-Toledo- Detroit passenger rail corridor, which would connect many Ohio cities and in the long run save Midwesterners about 9.4 million gallons of fuel.
Nicholson said if the funding can be secured, some initial passenger trains could be up and running in as soon as two years. To build the entire system, with 6-8 trains running 110 mph on seven different corridors, could take 10-11 years. The rail development commission is now in early talks with Amtrak about a partnership to utilize existing corridors. Sandusky has an Amtrak station on North Depot Street.
“It’s a big step to take, but an important step,” said Steve Fought, spokesman for Kaptur, D-Toledo. "It’s not 'pie in the sky
As always the benefits are way overestimated and the costs way underestimated. There’s no way you get high speed rail that distance for $4B dollars. No surprise, its the liberal/union supported candidates pushing it, which Brown and Kaptur are. It definitely smells too much like pork. Most transportation experts expect even greater mandates in fuel efficient cars to come before too long as most of the technology for cars averaging 40-50 miles (depending on the size) a gallon already exists. Probably a target date of somewhere arond 2020. That will remove the cost of gasoline as a driving force in high speed rail just about the time this system might be ready to go.
If the state persists, they be smart to cut their losses and try more of a mid-speed rail project. A lot less cheaper to build and could also serve smaller communities. Of course, unless the roads are simply too congested, you could accomplish the same thing for a lot less cost by giving some subsidy to a bus company or two.
If anyone thinks I’m being too negative, the late chairman of the PA High Speed Rail Commission in the mid 1980’s told me his group at looked at Ohio’s study and basically thought it wasn’t anywhere near accurate. Based on what he told me, its doubtful Detroit/Toledo and Cleveland areas are big enough termination points for true high speed rail service.
High speed rail, maybe not. 110 mph over long stretches for $6.7 million per mile is more than reasonable; it certainly beats the costs per mile of building new interstates.
How are the benefits overestimated? Don’t just say it; describe it.
Your attacks on organized labor are unwarranted. Theodore Roosevelt would have you pegged as an enemy of the USA, frankly.
Corrupt big business and corrupt (supposedly “non-liberal”, but merely in name) politicians get a free pass, then?
Poor logic. Cars like that already exist overseas, but that hasn’t slowed the demand for high speed rail (which this is not). The implication that US retail fuel prices will always be lower than those overseas is jumping the gun, also.
Technology for 50-mpg cars existed back during the last “gas crisis”, too.
This is “mid-speed” rail, frankly. And the cost is rather cheap.
I don’t think that you ought to criticize any “liberal” politicians anymore, by ad
The Ohio Hub, the Mid-West and South-East High Speed Rail schemes are realistic ways of upgrading the rail system and attracting business travellers on trips of 200 -300miles who would otherwise fly. The Ohio scheme for example, seems to be a thoroughly researched and sensible proposal - 110mph diesel trains travelling along upgraded existing tracks.
Burning 2.42 gallons (of #2 Diesel)/mile on a 300-seat train at 45 percent load factor works out to about 2500 BTU/mile. A Toyota Camry driven at legal highway speeds (we are talking Ohio, people) gets 35 MPG on gasoline – with two people, it is using 1800 BTU/passenger mile. How the train described in the report is penicillin for pain at the pump is a good question – penicillin is not used for treating pain anyway unless it is pain specific to an infection.
What load factor should I rely on? The Ohio Plan talks about 70-80 percent load factors – how do they get that, with airline-style overbooking on peak periods and telling people they need to stay over a Saturday night to travel from Columbus to Detroit?
The 45 percent load factor, by the way, is the assumption of the PRWG of the Vision Report. 45 percent load factor does not mean that a train is underpatronized – it means there are seats available for people at times they want to travel. The load factor is as much an operational and a service-level decision. You can operate higher load factors with people jammed airline-style into the train and with people wanting to travel at their preferred times turned away.
There is sometimes an apples and oranges comparison where the automobile is evaluated assuming a single-occupant trip while common-carrier modes are evaluated assuming every seat taken. The idea is that motorists don’t bother to share rides or take passengers but that a common carrier mode such as train is automatically “shared ride” and there is no reason people cannot occupy the seats. But just as an automobile is used to carry varying numbers of people and that flexibility is part of its advantage, a common carrier mode may need to run with empty seats outside of peak times.
The context of my remarks is that while I am the local crank who keeps bringing up fuel economy, almost every advocacy discussion of trains comments on the “gas crisis” without a critical look as to whether the envisioned trains will make a meaningful contribution to reducing fuel usage.
Its like ethanol. There too, it depends on how you crunch the numbers, but even with favorable number crunching, the energy saving is small compared to the costs such as subsidies and raised food prices.
Are they talking about electrical or diesel high-speed?
If it is electrical, I would suggested that Ohio doesn’t really constitute a high enough population density as the NEC does. I would recommend just making the lines better for running those P40s at their top speeds. Between Toronto, Ontario and Montreal, Quebec, VIA rail will operate trains as fast as they are proposing but not all the time of course. I forsee several major challenges that will dramatically effect cost of this proposition.
Traffic-Unlike for VIA Rail, Amtrak would still need to deal with the traffic crazy of junctions in the state such as Deshler and Fostoria-the worst busiest junction in Ontario is Bayview which has recently been triple tracked thanks to the government for the GO trains into Hamilton. Bayview only sees about maybe 40 trains a day compare that to up to 150 a day. You are looking in some cases of trains waiting for trains and trains fouling lines to build their trains for either a pick up or drop off at a yard.
Land Availability-I haven’t been all through Ohio but I have been in a few places that are fairly well built up even close to the tracks making it hard to build extra lines or even just passing sidings without expropriation of private citizen’s land-an unpopular thing that people don’t look favourably upon especially in the U.S. That in itself could cost tons of money especially when you get irrate citizens that want to challenge it via expensive lawsuits. Now, I don’t know what Ohio State is like about preserving old right-of-ways but if they exist without being built over, it might work. However, there is the problem of is it a safety hazard. Cities and government usually needs to do assessment studies for environment impact and other impacts to see if there is any problems with the proposed site. There might be a few cases where they have to reroute a line because of safety reasons
Diesel-electric. Note that the top speed quoted is 110 mph, a speed that the P42DC is capable of already.
Like I’ve told other people, that’s commuter-rail thinking. Ohio’s average population is a little behind France’s, which I mentioned above (277.3 and 280 people per square mile, respectively), and there is lots of electrified true high-speed rail in that country.
If you want to take individual cities, Cleveland’s average population density is 6,166.5 people per square mile, Cincinnati at 4,249 people per square mile, and Columbus at 3,383.6 people per square mile. (The density per square mile numbers for Toledo, Akron and Dayton are 3890.2, 3497.3 and 2979.3 respectively.) Incidentally, most of the endpoints of TGV trains don’t have as high of population density as these Ohio cities, unless you are referring to Paris, Marseille or Lyon.
If you can show how spending $6.7 million per mile to correct all of that is insufficient, by all means go ahead. It may turn out that the dollar amount is not enough, although it seems like it may work out.
I’m also trying to figure out just how VIA Rail has solved any sort of problems related to high-speed rail.
[quote]
What makes the NEC different is that those lines were always high traffic lines including the passengers thanks to New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Washington DC (country capital), Baltimore and major hubs l
Thank you JT22CW for some clarity. In your response, you and I would consider Ohio as population dense enough but North American standards versus European standards for electric trains are totally different. Europe also doesn’t run as much freight traffic does and chances are, their trains aren’t anywhere the length of the trains that run through Ohio which in my opinion, is a major factor in speed restrictions. As for VIA on the Kingston Subdivision which is the CN line that VIA uses between Ottawa/Montreal to Toronto, CN doesn’t operate as much trains as you would think compared to CSX and NS on their lines in Ohio. There is also few junctions that could slow down traffic as well. CP doesn’t make much contact with CN till outside of Belleville as far as I can remember so most of the time it is parallel running. Freights go 60 to 70(intermodal) and passengers go anywhere between 80 to 100 and 110 if they have LRC equipment. Also a difference, federal government basically makes CN and CP give them good times to operate which is something that Washington DC doesn’t do for Amtrak.
Cleveland - Columbus - Cincinnati is a good candidate corridor. Three large cities to play connect the dots with. Flat. Straight. Good existing alignments to choose from. Good opportunities for market/route extensions.
Nothing new here, though. The NYC tried out the Xplorer on this route back in the 50s and Ohio has been talking about it for at least 25 years!
All that’s missing is money!
Might be better to start with commuter rail in the 3 cities and then connect the ends to form a corridor. Feeder systems are a big part of the NEC’s success (and in Far-Away land, too!)
Oltmannd makes a good point. You would think a line connecting these 3 cities would be more of a priority for Ohio. Or has the recent change in the controlling political party tilted the playing field towards northern Ohio?
Cleveland and Cincinnati each have metro population over 2M. Columbus, slighty under 2M. If Ohio could get this going, it’s not too much of a stretch to extend to Indy, Pittsburgh, Toledo/Detroit, and finally, Chicago. You’d be creating a network where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.
My road Atlas shows Clev.-Cinn. as only 252 miles apart. Assuming you could get a RR right-of-way that’s comparable, you’d only have to average about 65 mph for the trip to be competitive with other forms of transportation as long as the ticket price was OK. So no electification would be needed. If you could get 70 mph or more average, rail could dominate the non-private auto market. If I was Ohio and was itching to spend money on passenger rail, I’d make this my first priority. Given Columbus positioning along the route, I bet the passenger miles generated, especially with the business travel to and from Columbus, would far exceed the planned northern Ohio route. State capitals in the larger states always have a ton of travelers coming/going from them during the week. The main reason for PA’s spending so much to develop the rail corridor between Philadelphia and Harrisburg was all the legislators in the heavily populated SE corner of the state used it on a regular basis. Last I looked, there were 13 round trips a day between Harrisburg and Philly on weekdays in about 18 hours. (Although extending most of them to NYC has also significantly helped ridership from SE PA areas.)
