So what are the chances of high speed luxury train like this in US? 0.0% , 0.01%? [:D]
Acela’s not close enough?
Momma buy me THAT!
I would say the chances are around a googolplex to one.
…but we can dream.
Could someone with a broadband Internet connection let me in on the joke?
The deal is that any mode of transportation can be made luxurious and perhaps even pleasant when enough resources are applied to it. Any mode of transportation can be made unpleasant when enough cost-cutting is applied.
Any mode of transport can be made green when you cram in enough seats. Any mode of transportation that provides a high level of comfort (and privacy) becomes un-green.
Yeah, yeah, all modes of transport are (heavily) subsidized. The question then becomes where are we as individuals and we as a society getting the most value? Just because we rely on government funding for many things in our society doesn’t mean we have to just throw up our hands and say that everthing government gives money to is being done in the best way possible.
One of the arguments for HSR (that is, primarily, purpose-built passenger-only railroad lines) is that the Japanese, “Europeans”, more recently the Chinese, and some others have built or are planning these things. I put “Europeans” in quotes because the British, the people who started the modern railroad era, have been holdouts on HSR, putting their effort into equivalents to the US NEC and proposed 110-MPH “high-speed rail” corridors. I guess it means that HSR has some goodness that just about everyone else around the world appreciates but Americans are too auto-loving, too government mega-project hating, and too stupid to catch on.
One of the things about Europe (and Great Britain) is that they tax the heck out of motor fuel (and their auto share of passenger miles is at the 80 percent level instead of the 90 percent level as in the U.S.). Another thing you notice is that opposite to what we have in the U.S. right now, the U.S. taxes Diesel fuel at a higher rate so that truckers pay their “fair share” of road maintena
Paul: If you check, I think you will find that Diesel fuel is cheaper to refine and is cheaper at the pump almost everywhere in the world than gasoline, except here. Cheaper in Germany and Europe, cheaper close to home in Canada as well.
This is a classic instance of what the legendary Nobel-laureate physicist Richard Feynman called the “Gell-Mann” effect after his Nobel-laureate colleague Murray Gell-Mann, of whom he must have been “goofing on” as being, in Feynman’s opinion, somewhat less than properly skeptical according to Dr. Feynman’s high standards.
Like Dr. Gell-Mann, I don’t have first-hand industry-insider knowledge on many topics and end up accepting as being factual things that are told to me. But this is not the case with respect to the question of Diesel fuel vs gasoline given my work experience in the automotive industry and in the specific place in the automotive industry where this question was being decided. The answer, in case you are interested, is that cars burn unleaded gasoline in engines with much higher compression ratio than generally thought possible at the time I was there, and as a consequence, the gap between gas and Diesel cars is much narrower.
This business of whether Diesel is cheaper to refine or somehow are lower-demand lower-value petroleum product is a kind of moving target.
One of the rationales for oil-burning steam as an alternative to coal-burning steam or even to Diesel locomotives is that whereas steam locomotives operate at a pretty low thermal efficiency and go through tender-fulls worth of fuel, the Bunker C or “residual oil” used in oil burners was as much a “waste product” of the petroleum economy where primarily gasoline and to a lesser extent the “light distilates” (i.e. jet airplane fuel and Diesel fuel) are the products of value. This was also pretty much the reasoning behind the Union Pacific “Big Blow” gas turbine
Regardless of Gell-Mann effect, I was told Diesel is cheaper (i.e., costs are lower to refine one gallon of Diesel than gasoline) to refine by an Exxon Operations VP who probably ought to what it costs Exxon.
The tax rates on Diesel are lower: Fuel taxes in Germany are €0.4704 per litre for ultra-low sulphur Diesel and €0.6545 per litre for conventional unleaded petrol, plus Value Added Tax (19%) on the total of fuel and the Fuel Tax.
That high speed luxury train is being marketed to run on existing high speed lines…in the US you’d have to buld the lines first…
I’m going to monkey-wrench this and suggest that we don’t need high-speed luxury trains, but frequent luxury trains of any type.
Let me tighten that wrench a little tighter:
Fast, frequent, and on time.
Fast does not necessarily mean 250-300 MPH. 110 MPH would work.
Recently? The cost to produce gasoline and diesel from crude oil depends on many thing, but perhaps the greatest is market demand. If you just distill crude oil straight up, you can pull off various fractions of hydrocarbon and blend to produce - everything from LPG to No 6 fuel oil. There is a cost to doing this and you get what you get. In this case the cost to produce gasoline and diesel are nearly the same. The content of the crude drives the output of the various fractions to a great degree. The marketplace determines the value of each product, so certain crude oils are more valuable than others, particularly when the market demands mostly gasoline.
However, things have changed over time. Catalytic cracking enabled refineries to convert the heavier fractions into lighter ones, reducing the yield of heavier fuels and increasing the lighter ones. (Ever wonder why the UP stopped running the gas turbines? The refineries were turning a surplus of heavy fuel oil that they pretty much had to give away, into valuable gasoline.) This also made some of the lesser varieties of crude oil more valuable since their hydrocarbon content could be more flexibly converted into products in demand.
More recently, the combining process allows lighter molecules to be combined into gasoline or diesel, rather than flaring them off. And, the the remaining waste gas that used to be flared off in great volumes is now captured and sold as LPG and propane.
In the past, refineries were designed to handle one type of crude and produce product in line with the hydrocarbons native in the fuel. In the past few decades, the trick has been to make refineries flexible so that they can handle a variety of crude stock and produce product in volumes that matches the market. But refineries are not infinitely flexible a
OK, Don. What or who are you going to believe, your reasoned narrative regarding the modern refining industry or an Exxon Operations VP?
Seriously now, the “Peak Oil crisis” is really a “hydrogen crisis” as you can use coal in power utility boilers and even in railroad steam locomotives (yeah, I know about your railroad Master Mechanic friend who thinks the best thing you can do with a locomotive boiler is to pour cement into it so someone doesn’t get the idea of operating it and causing a boiler explosion). Where you need liquid fuels is in transportation – rail, auto, ship, and air – and to get liquids, carbon needs to be combined with hydrogen to form hydrocarbons.
One place you can get the hydrogen is from water, and there are a number of “paths” to doing this. One path is making “water gas” (a mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen) from coal, but to do this, you have to get energy to free the hydrogen from the oxygen in water, burning up a lot of the coal and turning it into CO2, which is a big no-no in this day and age. This is not restricted to coal – you could use heavy oil or “pet coke” for this process, and yes even natural gas. There are technical reasons to turn natural gas into CO and H2 – the so-called “stranded gas” that would otherwise be flared because there is no pipeline long enough to bring it to market, but that is another issue.
Another place to get H2 to make liquid fuels is to use solar energy to generate electricity and then use electrolysis – although everyone keeps talking about that as a practical use for solar energy, I get the feeling that scaling up electrolysis to the necessary level is harder than people let on. Yet another way is the solar energy of photosynthesis, such as using “switch grass” as a source of ethanol or other motor fuels. Also, there was once talk about high temperature “pellet bed” reactors using heat to dissociate H2 from wa
You know what this reminds me of? The A-380 super jumbo jet.
When these things are in the design stage, there is all manner of lounges (what is the deal with providing ash trays anyway?), reservable conference rooms, and state rooms or bed rooms for overnight travel.
When these things are built, it is a matter of “cram as many passengers as you can into this thing.”
One of the things we keep returning to in these discussions is that “trains have room to get up an walk around” whereas planes, are just planes, and even for those of us who think planes are kind of cool, airline travel has gotten to be something we all dread.
But there is nothing intrinsic to trains that makes them spacious with every manner of amenity and makes planes cramped. I suppose trains are low rolling resistance and all more space for a certain amount of cost in capital expenditure or in fuel, but that advantage may not be as large as you think when you take into account the proposed 225 MPH operation of the Mercury Train.
What is different about trains and planes is that the trains have a more visible form of subsidy that pays for sleeping cars, diners, and lounge cars. Planes have a more hidden form of subsidy, where the “above the tarmac” part of the operation has to show some semblance of a profit, hence the squeeze on the passengers to squeeze profit out of the operation.
Don’t they have 3-2 seating on HSR in Japan and I read where they were going to decrease seat pitch on some TGV trains in order to offer cheaper fares on some routes. Like you like to point out, there’s nothing intrinsic about “more room” and train travel.
Don and Paul M: How correct you both are. My experiences in the airline industry is “if the passengers come we will stuff them into the airplane”. The only things that stops more seats in airplanes are number of emergency exits (1 per 25 seats) and 90 second evacuation requirements (only 50% exits allowed on tests). Trains do not have those limitations.
We already have this happening on the NEC as Regional cars have more seats than LD cars. Could it be sometime in the future a car with 3&2 (or even worse 3&3) seating & 1 restroom and call it 2nd class (horrors)(commuter class?) ?
[quote user=“Paul Milenkovic”]
OK, Don. What or who are you going to believe, your reasoned narrative regarding the modern refining industry or an Exxon Operations VP?
Seriously now, the “Peak Oil crisis” is really a “hydrogen crisis” as you can use coal in power utility boilers and even in railroad steam locomotives (yeah, I know about your railroad Master Mechanic friend who thinks the best thing you can do with a locomotive boiler is to pour cement into it so someone doesn’t get the idea of operating it and causing a boiler explosion). Where you need liquid fuels is in transportation – rail, auto, ship, and air – and to get liquids, carbon needs to be combined with hydrogen to form hydrocarbons.
One place you can get the hydrogen is from water, and there are a number of “paths” to doing this. One path is making “water gas” (a mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen) from coal, but to do this, you have to get energy to free the hydrogen from the oxygen in water, burning up a lot of the coal and turning it into CO2, which is a big no-no in this day and age. This is not restricted to coal – you could use heavy oil or “pet coke” for this process, and yes even natural gas. There are technical reasons to turn natural gas into CO and H2 – the so-called “stranded gas” that would otherwise be flared because there is no pipeline long enough to bring it to market, but that is another issue.
Another place to get H2 to make liquid fuels is to use solar energy to generate electricity and then use electrolysis – although everyone keeps talking about that as a practical use for solar energy, I get the feeling that scaling up electrolysis to the necessary level is harder than people let on. Yet another way is the solar energy of photosynthesis, such as using “switch grass” as a source of ethanol or other motor fuels. Also, there was once talk about high temperature “pellet bed” reactors using heat to dissociate H2 from water – to do
South Shore experimented with 3-2 seating in one coach in the mid-1960’s. Metro North (M-1A and M-2) and LIRR (M-1) MU cars in the 1980’s were all equipped with 3-2 seating, a bit tight but then these cars were in suburban service.
Jersey Arrows and Comets and SEPTA Silverliner IV’s, too. LIRR couldn’t get people to take middle seats (or stop plopping their briefcases there), so M7s have 2-2.
Lets revisit what has worked in the U.S.A.
Aimed at the Frequent Traveling members of the public (not the general public), comfort, reasonable speed, less hassel, frequent service and less than 500 miles.
The “Acela” does it all, Boston to Washington by way of New York, Philadelphia, Wilmington, and Baltimore. Cruise at 135mph with some 150mph stretches. Business Class 2+2 seating rows and Ist Class 2+1 seating rows ONLY, leather seats**.** No Coach Class, no Standing Room ! Amtrak owns 20 “Acela Train Sets” and run them every hour. More people now ride the “Acela” than fly the Corridor.
The “Acela” is a Heavy, Crash Tested train meeting American Safety Standards. Any overseas train set design will also have to meet that standard as did the “Bombardier Alstom Consortium”.