Minnesota High-Speed Rail Project Minneapolis to Duluth. Always seemed like a bad idea to me.
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They need to refocus their efforts up there on a decent St. Paul Union station connection to the Duluth line then maybe try this again.
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A HrSR line is at best the most that should be considered. A connection to Rochester makes more sense as it has about 50% greater population ,+ Mayo Clinic. Ideally, the line from LaCrosse could go over to Rochester then up to the TC.
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That does figure. Better city connections in the U.S. that are way ahead of Twin Cities to Duluth. I am looking right now at The Brightline from Miami to Orlando as a shining example of whatās possible.
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All this talk of High Speed Rail. Sometimes I wonder if it is for the better.
Here in the U.K. for instance. The āLetās get from London to Manchester quicker.ā Apart from business people not many other people actually benefit (imo).
What about people on route where the train does not stop?
I believe money should be spent on improving the services already provided.
Have extra carriages on trains instead of people 'packed like sardines on a two carriage train.
Train tickets should be able to be used on all trains going to the destination booked.
At present if a train company cancels a train, customers have to wait until the train of that company. In between waiting, say 30 minutes or an hour, other train companies run the same route. It is the original train companies fault, the passenger always suffers,
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I didnāt know Minnesota was going to put HSR inā¦
Iāve been there multiple times and heard none of it recently 
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UK has a mediocre and expensive train service.
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You are so polite. 
We are not so. 
Well itās what many of your fellow countrymen say also about UK passenger rail, especially in contrast with the continent. Hopefully it improves with the major change.
Honest talk rather than passive-aggressive, sarcastic politeness.
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This project actually stopped being high-speed rail or even higher-speed rail many years ago. All the final environmental work was based around 90 MPH max.
The original idea was for 110- MPH service and probably only got off the ground at all because, back in the days of the HSR stimulus funding (2009), Jim Oberstar D-Duluth was head of the US House Transportation Committee. It always seemed to me that it was destined to be studied but never constructed. I was surprised when they kept throwing money at the studies even after Oberstar lost his seat in 2010. But it seemed like there was always a little more money to spend on the next round of required studies and environmental review. At some point they couldnāt make the numbers work at 110 MPH even with the rosiest glasses available, and they turned it into a 90 MPH service with trip times ācompetitiveā with driving. (I didnāt read it carefully enough to know whether the ādriving timeā included the legally-mandated stop for caramel rolls at Tobieās Restaurant and Bakery in Hinckley.)
Eventually they ran out of things to study and so it languished for a while. It certainly didnāt seem like anyone was going to actually pay the half-billion dollars that the studies said it would cost. I figured that eventually its advocates would move on with their lives and that some day it would just quietly slip off MnDOTās āUpcoming Projectsā page.
I was even more surprised when the state legislature appropriated $185M in the last biennium to pay for āthe stateās shareā of construction costs, so that the DOT could pursue Federal funds for the remaining portion. Instead of $500M in federal construction funds the state got $500k to update their environmental documents, which were over 5 years old.
The current legislature is looking at projections showing surpluses turning into to deficits by the end of the next 2-year budget. Itās not surprising that they would claw back money that was appropriated as a state match for a federal grant that never came.
I would think that this is the part where the general consensus finally admits the infeasibility of the project and stops pretending it will happen. Like when someone wins their partyās nomination and then loses the presidential election, people will say it had its shot and itās time to move on to something else. But I was wrong about the project dying 15 years ago, and the loser of the 2020 presidential race not only won the nomination again but won the presidency, so I guess I donāt know what to think.
Dan
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Not much of a corridor at any speed even 79 mph when one endpoint metro area has only 281,000 population.
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The WCML is at capacity. I donāt think thereās room to go 6 track wide so they have no choice but build new. Might as well build for this century speeds.
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