If driverless vehicles achieve reliability and safety requirements, I think even more, longer trips will be taken by car. Look at Volvo’s XC90 passenger “seat” option. Why would you mess with public transportation headaches if you can travel like that? Take a pitstop when you need to.
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/rpFcx_cMbv0/maxresdefault.jpg
[quote user=“Lithonia Operator”]
CMStPnP
Lithonia Operator
What I wrote is: “No passenger rail system in the world is profitable.” You have yet to show us a profitable passenger rail system. You have used as an example only Deutsche Bahn, which also does freight railroading and logistics. If you can provide a link to a credible article which shows that the passenger division on its own makes a profit, then you will have made your case. It’s up to you to make your case that my statement is untrue (if it indeed is). So far you have not done so. You should have used Google to find such an article, and linked it, prior to publishing a statement ecompassing the whole globe in a discussion forum.Your just going to keep narrowing your definition until the stats you ask for are far more granular that what is reported and impossible to obtain publicly. DB reports along business lines, you want passenger train by passenger train accounting then request it from the company.
Some of the arguments are not consistent though because airlines fly routes that lose money or in which the air cargo under the seats makes the flights profitable. Additionally airlines fly government subsidized routes. Good luck finding passenger train by passenger train accounting stripped out from everything else.
DB reports rail passenger services (2019 - profit), Logistics services (2019 - profit), Freight (2019 - profit), etc. Within the rail passenger services division it even splits out Long Distance, Commutter, Regional, and ICE reporting. &n
I disagree that you will see long distance trips achieveable nationwide consistently anytime soon. I live in Texas and have driven…
Milwaukee - Detroit, MI
Dallas, TX - Naples, FL
Dallas, TX - Milwaukee, WI
San Diego, CA - Phoenix, AZ
Dallas, TX - Denver, CO
Milwaukee - Twin Cities
(a few examples)
On some of the above routes, the safest bet is to never let the gas tank drop below half because there are stretches of road for over a hundred miles or so with just nothing on them. You miss one refuel point you have a slim safety margin to get to the next one but if you miss the next one your screwed and will run out of gas. Infrastructure in this country is far from being setup to where you can just sit and let the car drive and sleep the night away. You better be attentive. Why half a tank…because also there are construction zones in the boonies that cause traffic tie-ups and significant traffic slow-downs. Hit one of those between your fill ups and unless you started with half a tank you could find yourself in trouble. Same will hold true for electric vehicles as well as complete lack currently of nationwide recharging stations.
Further, your going to find and I know it because I have a Mercedes loaded with all the driver minder crap…there are sections in this country with zero satellite or radio coverage in which all that nice stuff shuts down completely including the Sirius XM radio. It will give you a w
So $15 Billion direct to our airline sector from the General Revenue fund for one years operation is a small subsidy? It just happened. Your overlooking the massive infusion of taxpayer money into the airline and road infrastructure in this country, subsidized largely by the DoD. Airline ticket fees, gasoline taxes do not cover it all I am afraid.
Further Amtrak gets same treatment from our government. Seperate that out if your demanding it be seperated out from DB otherwise apples and oranges. Also, subtract the multiple billions spent towards intercity rail in the 2008 stimulus bill please. Then subtract the hundreds of millions if not billions our states pay for Amtrak related items as well. Amtrak isn’t making a profit anywhere…or did I miss something? Or are you overlooking that? What is the cumlative investment by California in Amtrak California? Last I checked it was North of $5 Billion…where is Amtrak California turning a profit.
You know it is rather interesting Amtrak government owned, DB government owned. One makes money and the other doesn’t.
[quote user=“charlie hebdo”]
Lithonia Operator
CMStPnP
Lithonia Operator
What I wrote is: “No passenger rail system in the world is profitable.” You have yet to show us a profitable passenger rail system. You have used as an example only Deutsche Bahn, which also does freight railroading and logistics. If you can provide a link to a credible article which shows that the passenger division on its own makes a profit, then you will have made your case. It’s up to you to make your case that my statement is untrue (if it indeed is). So far you have not done so. You should have used Google to find such an article, and linked it, prior to publishing a statement ecompassing the whole globe in a discussion forum.Your just going to keep narrowing your definition until the stats you ask for are far more granular that what is reported and impossible to obtain publicly. DB reports along business lines, you want passenger train by passenger train accounting then request it from the company.
Some of the arguments are not consistent though because airlines fly routes that lose money or in which the air cargo under the seats makes the flights profitable. Additionally airlines fly government subsidized routes. Good luck finding passenger train by passenger train accounting stripped out from everything else.
DB reports rail passenger services (2019 - profit), Logistics services (2019 - profit), Freight (2019 - p
I’m tired of playing a game with someone who moves the goalposts every time his assertions are hollow. Or engages in whaddaboutisms, aka, false analogies.
Joshua has good advice for y’all
That’s not going to fool anyone…
There you go again making the absolute statements! It evidently fooled him, and right there your statement falls to the ground… [:)]
Rather than continue with silliness, here’s a critical article.
https://hsrail.org/blog/eight-principles-establishing-us-passenger-rail-system
Except that it blows up completely before he gets to Principle 5. His invoking the New Tokaido Line makes great sense, and I can technically extend it over to HAL freight by invoking Class 9 slab track of proven construction and performance. But since the days of the Super C there has been little interest in pure speed as a freight service… let alone something shippers will value nationally.
And no ‘emergency’, not even WWII shipping levels redux, is going to make passenger-train speed a freight-railroad priority. Assuming that the bar stays at the pathetic government 79mph speed for “passenger”, which for most long-distance national service is decades behind most of the rest of the world – as well as grossly inadequate for many of the ‘national’ long-distance services, and even for many of the corridors in a link-up-the-corridors “national” model (which appears to be Amtrak’s current alternative to what is in the eight-principle article).
These issues would have to be thoroughly addressed before most of the items in the eight principles actually apply to profitable* freight railroading.
Meanwhile, there’s a whole 'nother issue here, which I hadn’t even thought much about until my nose was rubbed in it a few months ago. That is the ‘commodification’ of container intermodal down to mineral-train profit levels per well. When transporting boxes no longer commands a premium price, and Walmart monopsony-style race-to-the-bottom margins get applied to the various aspects of ‘rail’ intermodal, much of the incentive for high-speed anything starts eroding; as soon as you have a surplus of any kind of suitable well equipment, the incentive to run anything but a least-common-denominator one-speed railroad gets even less. And there is very little place for
To facilitate the discussion a bit, here are somewhat paraphrased versions of the eight principles:
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All United States transportation programs are based/predicated on infrastructure programs. [You can’t run trains without effective track and control]
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All successful infrastructural programs are national in scope.
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All successful Federal transportation-infrastructure programs have been national [he uses air-traffic control and, interestingly, the Bureau of Public Roads ‘Road Gang’ rather than the Eisenhower defense-highway system and HTF as examples]
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America launches priority infrastructure programs at national scope only in an emergency [especially those involving multi-trillion-dollar stranded capital with delayed utility]
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It’s not about Amtrak and its issues [the premise being that once national-scale high-speed infrastructure characterizes the ‘iron ocean’ there will be greater incentives for people to invest in high-speed service even in the structurally-unprofitable areas of LD service]
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No Federal-level transportation-infrastructure program has ever succeeded without active collaboration of a major industry. [Also making the point that major industries, and consortia, can develop to generate the necessary ‘collaboration’ once the infrastructure program provides the opportunity … I have just been reading about space and missile development in 1959 to 1960, very little of which would exist without not only a Cold War, but reports of a ‘bomber/missile gap’, and at this point I’d recommend that anyone who hasn’t read ‘The Insolent Chariots’ do so.]
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Congress must establish a new agency within the DOT to plan passenger-compatible and then passenger-prioritized infrastructure programs.
Where I want to see a paragraph or two on the High Speed Rail Alliance site is how they propose represent
You can chat with guy that leads the HSRA via Email. However, before you do, this is not him or his organization speaking or even their official position. This is a guest blogger that happened to post on the website. Head of the HSRA has different views than those expressed by the guest blogger. So you might want to ask him in your Email what the main points of the HSRA are in regards to High Speed Rail. I already know some of them and I do not agree with all of them as being realistic in the United States in the current political climate.
It’s very frustrating to me personally because I feel the Chicago to Milwaukee corridor and it’s political and grass roots support system is the perfect model to follow for others in the country. Yet nobody else sees it and everyone wants their own formula. Chicago to Milwaukee worked out…though it took more than 50 years to get here Because the local business community in Milwaukee wanted an alternative to the automobile or airline to reach Chicago #1. They had past experience on C&NW and Milwaukee Road trains #2,&n
See, the problem is that very few of those elements either describe, or could conform practically with, much of the national passenger rail system – they are corridor and community-specific.
So what we fall back on is the model that has been adopted by the pending-successful development efforts, which involves a hefty dose of either ‘prequal’ or the political support that would lead to a successful take rate upon introduction. One of the considerations here is whether ‘service more often’ is more or less important to the subject communities than high speed that precludes more or longer stops and that requires expensive infrastructure both for riding quality and to accommodate trains.
Sustained high speed is most definitely in the sort of ‘national-scale’ development project range the poster described, with the added consideration that few of the actual benefits of high speed can be observed until a considerable and contiguous part of the route has been expensively completed. If you build it and for any reason they do not come… you may be in trouble even though your premises were good or even sound. Not only deep Keynesian pockets but a certain immunity to consequences is in order, both of which are more likely “Federal” than local at the planning and execution stages. But if the results don’t suit local preference, and local buy-in is ‘necessary’ – as in recent memory with the ARC tunnel project – there may be insufficient Federal resolve even with proven gains in utilization to get a project accomplished ‘properly’.
I cynically think that one of the only ways this might become ‘implementable’ is if some massive stick, like greatly increased and more pervasive corporate taxes on railroad companies and their owning structures, were to be “nationally” introduced, with the desired capital programs for electrification, or higher speed,
I’m glad I posted the article as a stimulus to new discussions. Rather than examine each point for flaws, I like what OM and CMStPnP did in introducing new ideas.
Not new, since I suggested this long ago, but the only way higher speed passenger rail (>125 mph) can work on ROWs (not track) shared with freight is nationalized infrastructure. Private rails cannot afford this. Except for approached to major cities, true HSR needs dedicated ROWs.
In order to gain support for the larger projects (corridors) you need to demonstrate what works with the smaller projects (corridors).
Understood the fixation with High Speed Rail but High Speed is not necessary for success in all cases. Successful rail passenger corridors are defined as:
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Frequency of trains.
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Convienent accessibility.
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Travel times comparable to other modes.
Easy to cheaply achieve in short corridors, my contention is you need to do that first before you attempt a $100 Billion SFO to LA Corridor for example. If you attempt the latter first as California did, you set efforts back years or even decades more.
In fact is that not what Brightline and Texas Central are doing?, cherry picking corridors where the likelyhood is highest they will have success and the construction costs are not that expensive? Eventually they will run out of cherries to pick. Look what happens though if any of their experiments are successful. Private rails can do it…Amtrak and the government can’t will then be the thought process. People will start to seriously question the subsidy to Amtrak then. Why are they spending so much money on Amtrak when it has not produced a single successful near high speed corridor that is profitable?
BTW, Germany and the rest of Europe crawled before it walked. That is they all had near high speed rail passenger service first, then started on the high speed lines. They did not jump right into large high speed rail projects after WWII, they incremented their way up to them. Same deal with Japan though Japan focused on it sooner than Europe did.
I’m not a specialist in all types of HSR, but that’s not the case with Old Man Thunder’s New Tokaido Line (or at least some of the other Shin Kansen) and it isn’t the case with most of the LGV system. Real HSR, whether or not it is effectively built (the original New Tokaido Line really wasn’t; it needed complete line and surface every six weeks or so) is new construction on new routes that suit the very demanding characteristics involved, in both horizontal and vertical profile as well as extremely long-radius and spiraled curves.
Britain tried heroically to design something that could work up to somewhere in the low end of the HSR range with the APT, but riding it ‘at the limit’ was something of an adventure. Note that modern projects like HSR 2 don’t even attempt to make extensive use out of existing route infrastructure – it just isn’t suitable for those speeds no matter how much of it could take ‘the ton’ back in the day.
Even the American projects that would have come the closest to super passenger railroads in the age America could afford actual high-speed private railroads would likely be modern disasters. If you look at the first or second Ramsey surveys for Gould’s high-speed Pennsylvania main line project, or PRR’s response with the Sam Rea line – their curvature as built would be far too great for true HSR, and complicated by being on heroic fills and in massive cuts and tunnelling posing enormous expense to ‘rectify’, with obsolescent and not very suitable forms of elect
Nope, you misread what I posted and I don’t know how you misread it because I did not put all that detail into it. What I am saying is they had the near high speed rail lines FIRST (up to 110 mph) before they built the dedicated HSR lines. I am not saying the HSR lines evolved from the near high speed rail lines on the same right of way. I think we need to do likewise in this country.
It was the LONG DISTANCE originally under Amtrak in some corridors that paved the way for the corridor trains by lowering the startup cost allocated to the state for the second frequency of a corridor train.
It will be a series of successful near high speed short corridors like Chicago - Milwaukee that will build political support for the more expensive longer distance HSR projects. Or at least a series of longer distance HSR projects that are successful financially. Maybe Dallas-Houston will start to turn public opinion but it’s my opinion you will need more than just one. Though I have to say Dallas was mostly anti-rail transit prior to DART, then attitudes started to shift, then came TRE, then the Denton A-Train, then TexRail, and Dallas keeps getting the voter green light to continue down the path of more rail transit projects.
It will take a large leap of faith for taxpayers in this coun