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They will come, sooner or later. Because high-speed train are more fuel efficient than any airplane. Because just as land for additional highways cannot be had, leading to coummuter and corridor train reuiremenets, so eventually land for new airports and airport expansion won’et be available. Admddttadly, this may not happen for the next 50 years, but it will eventually.
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Birthline is not high-speed rail, just higher-speed rail. I do not count on the private sector doirng this. I think it will wait until it becomes an emergency response to a critical situation, and then be first a Federal Project like the Inerstae Highway Syssem.
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The first application might be to an existing corridor, such as New York City - Albany - Buffalo, with trip times cut to 1/3 what they are. Mostly dedicated tracks on or adacent to existing RoW. Then Cleveland=Toledo-Elkhrt-South Bend- Gary-Chicago, with a branch Toledo-Detroit, mostly for the Cleveland - Detroit market. Once that happens, the Lake Shore NY - Chicago train, if Amtrak LDTs are still around, would be replaced by two high-speed consists, an overneight 11pm - 6am westbount and 11pm - 8am eastbound sleeper train and a through daytime coach and parlor train that would also provide one of the schedules each way on the two corridors. Eventually, the Buffalo - Erie - Cleveland section would be added, this probably waiting until high-speed transcontinental service is planned and under construction.
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Upgrading the NEC to true high-speed is more difficuilt, but will come eventuallly. There are hard choices. Serving the Rhode Island and Connecticut Shore Line cities is far more expensive in construction then using the old White Train route. Ditto using the existing electrified route Newark New Brunzwick - Trenton - Philadelphia rather than Bound-Brook - West Trenton - Jenkintown - Philadelphia. When done, though, the HSR will
Transcontinental HSR would have patronage if done right. One can imagine a 22nd Century Limited with the end-point timings of the 20th and the Broadway, except that the end-points would be NY and LA or NY and SF. Would BNSF Transcon or UP make more sense? UP to LA migh be helped by a then existing HSR Las Vegas - LA. Possibly HSR from the east to SF would mean copying the Swiss with a really long tunnel eliminating the worst of the existing CP-SP route, or could the HSR follow the WP’s route? One can imagine a Chicago - St. Louis HSR coming in advance of any transconinental, ditto Chicago - Milwaukee - Twin Cities. St. Louis - KC might follow, with passengers prefering HSR via St. Louis instead of a relatively slow direct ride to KC, if the trains ran through St. L.
JUST SAY NO!
So your NYC-Chicago route is going to have a new-build track for two trainsets? Talk about a waste of (my) money.
So you are saying that there will be less land required to build secure, grade-separated long distance HSR corridors (and it’s infrastructure) than would be required by the handful of airports required to serve the same corridor?
I don’t think his proposal is to be taken seriously. Just another scheme to preserve an archaic (since at least 1960) mode of transport. If saving LD for Boy Scouts, elderly, small towns and handicapped arguments fail, try another. Any port in a storm.
With the efforts of the various Toll Authorities involved in a car trip from New York to Chicago + the actual costs of car operation - it is getting to the point that taking the train will be cheaper
There are mostly free alternative routes.
I don’t think the issue was ever patronage. It starts with construction responsibility, passes quickly into relative advantage for the few at the expense of the many inconvenienced by the construction and ROW characteristics, and finishes with a bang, perhaps literally, concerning liability.
Assuming you can get OPM to pay for it all, more power to you. But I’ll bet you’ll get very little sleep unless fascinating amounts of money are spent in compensating hydraulics for the short-period oscillations undamped by the suspension at the necessary speed, or the acceleration/deceleration profiles required for the necessary stops … now including Chicago near the middle of the night. You’ll be needed for the necessary noise blanking, too.
The problem is partly that, for at least three orders of magnitude less money, you can acommodate all the prospective users on much more luxurious aircraft, which already make this trip in far less time with little actual fuss. Easy preboarding for the rich, you know, especially as this could be handled as charter access via TSA. And the tech for near-supersonic operation without ground shock waves is well in hand, and likely workable for wide-fuselage vehicles, giving fast turnaround and hence the same justification for using greater fuel for higher speed that was one of the legitimate drivers for the SST all those years ago.
For what? They’re utterly unsuited for conversion to anywhere near this speed of HSR; to allow even substantial running at 150 to 185mph would require tilting equipment run with great care, with very dubious 'bang for the b
The whole LA-NYC HSR thing would miss the things that the OP keeps pontificating about in LD trains. You’d lose the sleepers and the whole “see the country” thing. To meet the same schedule as the 20th Century or Broadway, you’d have to have an average moving speed of 200mph+ because of station stops and winding through urban areas. How much scenery will you see? You won’t need the sleepers because it would be a day train. Then you’d have to add large rental car lots near the stations. All in all, it’s a nightmare…
As Overmod and Backshop pointed out, and I will add succinctly, HSR or ultra-HSR make little sense for those longer distances. They can never come close to airplanes. Let’s stick with the 90-250-500 mile corridors.
The whole point about the “22nd Century Limited” is that it would reproduce the ‘experience’ of the Century – something proven in a number of contexts to be useful and desirable. While it was nice to watch the scenery up and down the Hudson, that wasn’t the primary ‘draw’ of the Century: the point was to have the use of what was a good private club, after the close of business in one city, that would have you at a convenient point in the other city rested, refreshed, and ready to go do business right from the train door.
The New York-to-SF or LA train wouldn’t be about ‘scenery’ or even the cruise-train experience so much as being equipped and timed for ‘overnight’ service eliminating all the rigmarole of flying “quickly” and then securing a rental, going to a hotel, etc. to be fit and ready for the reason you traveled. A “day train” defeats the point at either end, and while one might be put on to serve intermediate points ‘not in the middle of the night’ this could even more easily be served by across-the-platform coordinated corridor services than by some LD approximation rocketing you to six-hour layovers just in time to check into a hotel when you get wherever.
I would further argue that one of the really-cheap-sleeper options for a high-speed ‘overnight’ train would be a better option than ‘coach’ seating for what’s likely not to be less than a 15-hour trip time (net of all stops and energy-consumption optimization). Much wiser to build the train explicitly with the assumption of overnight rest – and I mean real overnight rest, not tossing and turning with train motion – than to p
The goalposts keep moving…
One other thing to remember is that unlike 70 years ago, NY, Chicago and LA aren’t the big hubs for business that they used to be. Nowadays, we have Seattle, Silicon Valley, Charlotte, Houston, etc., etc. Much more business is international. I have a friend that flies to China on a monthly basis. Others that go to Ireland. Once again, to build an entirely new coast to coast roadbed for just a few trains a day is fiscal foolishness. It would probably have to be electrified, which opens up another whole can of worms.
“Really High-Speed North American Passenger Trains?”
I’m sorry to say this David, I truly am, but it’ll never get done.
I suggest to everyone they read Fred Frailey’s column in the August “Trains,” which I wish “Trains” would publish on-line, and I’m surprised they haven’t.
Mr. Fred tells us why, exactly why, and pulls no punches.
He offers a glimmer of hope in the last paragraph of certain conditions that might make some of it happen, and they don’t involve government, either Federal or state.
A sobering bit of writing from a very disappointed, but realistic man.
[quote user=“Overmod”]
Backshop
The whole LA-NYC HSR thing would miss the things that the OP keeps pontificating about in LD trains. You’d lose the sleepers and the whole “see the country” thing. … You won’t need the sleepers because it would be a day train.
The whole point about the “22nd Century Limited” is that it would reproduce the ‘experience’ of the Century – something proven in a number of contexts to be useful and desirable. While it was nice to watch the scenery up and down the Hudson, that wasn’t the primary ‘draw’ of the Century: the point was to have the use of what was a good private club, after the close of business in one city, that would have you at a convenient point in the other city rested, refreshed, and ready to go do business right from the train door.
The New York-to-SF or LA train wouldn’t be about ‘scenery’ or even the cruise-train experience so much as being equipped and timed for ‘overnight’ service eliminating all the rigmarole of flying “quickly” and then securing a rental, going to a hotel, etc. to be fit and ready for the reason you traveled. A “day train” defeats the point at either end, and while one might be put on to serve intermediate points ‘not in the middle of the night’ this could even more easily be served by across-the-platform coordinated corridor services than by some LD approximation rocketing you to six-hour layovers just in time to check into a hotel when you get wherever.
I would further argue that one of the really-cheap-sleeper options for a high-speed ‘overnight’ train would be a better option than ‘coach’ seating for what’s likely not to be less than a 15-hour trip time (net of all
Never say never in this case. If a time comes when it needs to be done then it will get done.
To think that not all that long ago a maze of passenger trains all connecting to one another, combined with Interurbans and Street Car lines could get you anywhere. With sleeping and dining services. How that just vanished is beyond comprehension. Culture and societal directions or manipulations? It could have progressed steadily from there to a system without question today.
Most likely not in any of our lifetimes. But however much the idea is pie-in-the-sky, no future project will ever happen if there aren’t those that dream big; and God knows this world is cetainly suffering from a lack of dreamers.
Really?
With a car, on a road, you have “self-directed transit”. Leave when you want. No transfers. Any route you want. Stop when and where you want. Quite likely get there sooner.
With a plane, you get there faster. If you have a week off, you can go visit family across the country; and, presuming you like their company, you get 5 days of fun. Take the train, and you’re lucky to get ONE day.
That’s how it vanished.
Hence the last paragraph in Mr. Fred’s column. Again, if you (meaning all) haven’t read it please do so.
To read some posts dreaming for a return to that never was golden era, you’d think jet aviation had never happened.
There was no reason we could not have the best of all worlds. The last two posts totally ignore significant chunks of the population, including teens, elderly, folks who cannot drive, handicapped, not middle class and so on.
The situations described for the demise of widespread, frequent and reliable passenger service is very middle class centric and rapidly approaching unsustainable. Japan and Europe never gave it up.
North America should have been at the forefront of rail passenger service and we would have had a far better and I might add cleaner society today.
We were sold a bill of goods and that’s fine, market forces and all, but it did not mean we had to include the destruction and ridicule of passenger services.
On a personal note: I have been back to Ontario twice in ten years since living in Northern Saskatchewan and took the Canadian both times. I still converse with folks I met on the train and limiting my time with family was just fine as an extra 4 or 5 days with them would have been … uncomfortable.
Did a circle tour of North America 3 summers ago by car but had little to no choice. You just cannot put together that trip any longer by rail where as at one time you could.