Seems our European brothers are into rail construction: the new Simplon tunnel from Switz. to Italy is in operation, it’s 21 miles long(34.6 km) took 8 years, cost $3.5 billion. The rails are rubber cushioned and freight trains can travel 100 mph and passenger trains 150mph. This tunnel was built because the traffic north and south almost buried Switzerland in trucks, hence a rail tunnel. NOW they are building a longer tunnel, the Gotthard: 36 miles long, done in 2017. So maybe train travel does have a future here, maybe if we could get trains over 100 mph it may improve the future of trains.
Will this mean the world will lose the breathtakingly beautiful over-mountain train routes? (I can hardly think of a more boring train ride than in long, long tunnel.)
Mark
Now, if only they could build a tunnel straight through the center of the earth, so we could run container trains directly from China.
Mark:
I’m with you. If you’ve got a copy of Signor’s DONNER PASS, there’s a section in it that outlines Kaiser’s plan for tunneling under the Sierra’s for all of the predicted post-WWII traffic. It consisted of about ten tunnels, many over 18 miles long between Rocklin and Truckee that was supposed to cut about 100 miles off of the route (with ‘breather’ spots in between). Hey, I’d rather watch trains, myself.
Besides, I’d always heard that the Swiss invented the Alps so that they could run trains OVER them. Dang!
Tom [:P]
Us subway fans would not necessarily agree with you.
But those Swiss? Well, they’ll drill a hole through anything, I guess. Take a look at their cheese.
Nope, it is still a matter of population and density. We had trains that ran over 100 mph. (Zephyrs, City of, Chiefs, North Coast Limted, Empire Builder, etc). Things are so far appart out here in the great USA west it is much cheaper to fly. We need something more like 300 mph trains to make it user effective. That is, I have to be able to get on a medium distance haul train and get somewhere in reasonably the same amount of time as I would on an airplane. For Denver this means Omaha, Kansas City, Salt Lake City, Alburquerque, and maybe Dallas in less than three hours from pre-security check in to destination. On long distance hauls (LA to Chicago) trains will probably never be able to compete with the air.