240 miles, Houston to Dallas via College Station, 87 minutes.
Not sure I like Reed’s calling the 240-mile length ‘right in the middle of the strike zone’!
It was amusing to see, in the comments, some mathematical maven calculating the required peak speed using a “15-minute” stop at College Station. Perhaps he should smoke less and read more; if the actual dwell time there is more than about a minute, somebody has failed to learn the right lessons from both Europe and Asia.
I’d expect to see some kind of Rt-128-style development, perhaps with incubators, build up at the College Station stop. Note that there’s more than just A&M there; the total number of students is above 40,000. Quick and reliable access to the two endpoints, especially if ‘yield pricing’ or cheap standby is used, ought to be popular.
Originally the project was to start two years ago, now slated to start in 2020, completion by 2025 or 2026. I am not an expert but I live in North Texas and have seen the same construction company build freeways here a LOT faster than that timeline. To me that is a LONG construction schedule for a topography that is largely flat and only differs in plus or minus 500 feet in elevation.
In other articles I googled with a Sept 2019 date. Texas Central states the $14 Billion project is signed but also admit they have no financing yet. I am pretty confident that Dallas is not going to build anything Dallas to Fort Worth until the Dallas to Houston leg is a definite for completion and operation. Initially they said if Dallas to Houston was built they would build a leg to Fort Worth. I don’t see any real concrete move forwards on the DFW portion either.
So everyone seems to be waiting on this company’s ability to actually achieve financing beyond voluntary small donations for engineering whereas this becomes a real project and not just a pipe dream.
While a 15 minute stop in College Station is clearly excessive, a 15 minute delay to stop seems reasonable. Train must slow from XXX mph to stop, dwell, and accellerate back to XXX mph with delay clock running all the time. Without having real data, a 15 minute delay for a two minute stop seems reasonable.
Keep in mind that the original maven was considering acceleration/braking ramp separately from the station dwell (this is clear from the language in his comment).
The ‘numbers’ are not as difficult as you expect because a worst-case can be calculated roughly as follows: Determine the cost-effective braking and acceleration rate profile for the trains involved (in addition to not being continuous, they are probably not symmetrical for braking vs. acceleration) which will probably be expressed in fpsps but are easily converted to mphps. Apply this with respect to the expected cruising speed, which will give you the time involved in braking reduction and subsequent acceleration without any complicated integration. Technically you still have to integrate to get the distance, and you need the distance for the next part of the calculation (which is to subtract the time required to traverse the distance from braking to full speed recovery at nominal cruise speed, a part many critics of high-speed rail tend to forget), but you could estimate it roughly enough for the purpose with ‘piecewise’ averaging (say every 10mph delta with corresponding rough average for deceleration rate) and then summation of the corresponding piecewise distances. (You can do much of this ‘well enough’ via graphing, as I did before I learned integral calculus.)
There’s a bit of an operating quandary here, because to reduce the station dwell you may want to ‘stage’ the passengers near the doors while the train is still in the process of braking, and start the slower part of initial acceleration while passengers are still finding seats.
I personally think the 165mph published ‘average speed’ you get by simple division is reasonable for two accelerations, two braking runs, and European-style short dwell
The initial cost estimates for the project were $10 billion. Now it is $14 billion for the construction. Or is it $15 billion as reported in a May 14, 2019 article in the Austin Business Journal. And how much will the project cost when the equipment is included?
The total cost of the project, however, is not just $14 or $15 billion plus the equipment. Debt servicing costs must also be included.
The claim that the project will be built without public financing is not 100 percent accurate. The promoters have indicated that they will apply for Railroad Rehabilitation & Improvement Financing (RRIF), which means that they can borrow substantial amounts of money for 35 years at the same interest rates as paid by the federal government.
Assuming the cost of the project is $14 billion, and it is financed using government backed money, the total cost could be as high as $19.3 billion before equipment, etc.
Texas Central has not provided any financing schedules. I took the average interest rate for the U.S. Treasury 10, 20, and 30-year bonds to allow for the fact that the project probably will be financed in increments as opposed to borrowing all the money up front.
If I remember correctly, the initial cost estimate for th
Being allowed to issue government-backed corporate bonds at lower interest rates is not government financed or funded, unless they forfeit. It’s the same as the land grant railroads got in the 1860s and later.
It is using the government’s credit rating to get a better rate than it could get in the competitive market. It is using the government for leverage.
As of Friday, November 1, 2019, the interest rate for the U.S. Treasury long-bond closed at 2.18 percent. The rate for AAA corporate was 3.38 percent, while that for BBB was 5.53 percent. Being able to use government backed financing for some or all of the project is a subsidy.
The financing of the transcontinental railroads of the 1860s has nothing to do with financing of Texas Central Railway.
I was mentioning one aspect of the land grant transcontinental plan, not the mileage subsidy and Credit Mobilier, the worst scandal until your TX Enron fiasco. I suggest you read some history.
I don’t own Enron. Save your lectures for someone that cares.
BTW, had you taken the time to go back and look at my posting, before jumping on it, you would have noticed that I removed the reference to financial scandal.
According to the Texas Department of Transportation Congestion Index, the average rating for I-45 between Dallas and Houston is 1.20. The average for I-35 between Dallas and San Antonio is 1.25.
Most of the congestion on I-45 is in north Houston. On the other hand, I-35 is heavily congested near Hillsboro, where I-35 W and I-35 E merge, Austin, San Marcos and San Antonio.
Assuming the justification for high speed rail between Dallas and Houston is to offer mostly motorists an alternative to driving, how come the railway is being built between these two cities as opposed to along the I-35 corridor between Dallas and San Antonio? It has more congestion that I-45 between Dallas and Houston.
Can you show me where RRIF loans directly involve taxpayer-supplied funds? Because that is what’s implied by ‘public financing’ in this context. Being ‘able to get the same interest rates’ doesn’t imply any sort of opportunity cost to the government, either.
Now, had they, or you, said ‘without government assistance is not 100 percent accurate’ I would agree with you. But I don’t think that’s what they have said in the first place.
My post was constructed and posted before you edited the original. And as another member points out, your erroneous post is misleading at best.
You live in TX where Enron operated a criminal shell game.
Houston is the 2nd largest metro area in TX, almost 7 million as of 2018, while San Antonio metro area has only 2.5 million. Perhaps a spur can connect?
Hey, you can’t blame him for that! I live in Tennessee and you can’t blame me for the outcome of the Scopes trial!
I don’t blame him but unless you are truly ancient, unlike JPS and Enron, you weren’t contemporaneous with Scopes
This is what I said: The claim that the project will be built without public financing is not 100 percent accurate. The promoters have indicated that they will apply for Railroad Rehabilitation & Improvement Financing (RRIF), which means that they can borrow substantial amounts of money for 35 years at the same interest rates as paid by the federal government.
If you can borrow money at the U.S. Treasury long-bond rate, you have an advantage that does not accrue to borrowers that have to borrow at market rates. Call it what you want, at the end of the day, the promotors of Texas Central Railway are getting a one-up if they borrow under the RRIF program. They are riding on the backs of the U.S. Government.
Clearly, you have no idea of traffic on I-45 between Dallas and Houston. Anymore than you have any idea of traffic on I-35! Or for that matter any idea of Texas’s transportation challenges. But nothing stops you for opining on what you don’t know.
The key point in my post was that the estimated cost of the project has been creeping upward since it was first announced. Moreover, the full cost of the project includes the cost of debt service irrespective of the source of funds.
If the promoters are able to use U.S. Treasury rates to borrow some or all of the monies for the project, the ultime cost of the project will be less than what it whould be if they had to go to the market. Call it whatever you want, RRIF monies mean at least indirect government support for the project.
The freeway to Houston goes through the middle of nowhere after Dallas and the next time you really see civilization is Houston. By contrast the Freeway to Austin serves fairly large cities such as Waco, Temple, Fort Hood, Austin’s Northern and Southern Suburbs, San Antonio’s Northern Suburbs, and then San Antonio. So the Freeway to San Antonio is much slower moving. It’s also a double decker freeway through parts of Austin due to space limitations of the Hill Country region and urbanization, which also makes for slower travel. Freeway to Houston has none of that…straight shot through country that is flat as an ironing board. True it is a difference between the two freeways of a 100-200 miles. The freeway to Houston is before the challenging topography. Freeway to Austin skirts it on the edge in most places but also cuts right through it in other places.
Texas is not all flat. especically the Hill Country which looks like the terrain you see around the Wisconsin Dells or Missisippi River with the limestone bluffs and what not. The rail lines that traverse that topography have quite a few curves. I would imagine one or two tunnels as well…though I never rode the rail line to Austin and San Antonio.
The Heartland Flyer to OKC from Fort Worth goes through similar terrain as the Texas Hill Country as it encounters what Oklahomians call the Arbuckle Mountain region. It is not a flat as a pancake route either.
The financial scandals associated with the building of the UP and CP had at least an indirect impact on the U.S. taxpayers. Some of the monies allocated for the building of the railroads were diverted into the pockets of construction company officials, politicians, etc.
Enron was a massive accounting fraud. It along with several others led to several significant regulatory enhancements that have reduced the probability of a repeat performance.
The Enron bankruptcy resulted in shareholders losses of approximately $74 billion. In addition, the company’s employees lost billions in pension benefits.
Enron filed fraudulent federal tax returns, which had an impact on the U.S. Treasury. In addition, the Treasury could have been impacted by the losses suffered by Enron’s individual shareholders, although the impact would be very difficult to measure.
The scandals associated with the building of the UP and SP are different than the Enron scandal.