Here in the United States, we’re lagging behind the rest of the world when it comes to shiny new passenger rail, despite being leaders in previous centuries. The Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) has just released a story map of how the US could close the gap (a little).
The Corridor Identification and Development (CID) Program is a way for FRA to provide both funding and technical assistance as corridor sponsors (mostly state Departments of Transportation) evaluate either new intercity service or expansion of existing services. While it isn’t a guarantee of anything, it is a step in the right direction to rebuilding passenger rail capacity in the US.
Some cities would be getting rail service back for the first time in decades, and perhaps even more exciting is that several of the routes being studied are for high speed rail “primarily or solely on new trackage.” As any railfan can tell you, vintage rails aren’t the best for trains going fast (sorry, Acela). With recent polling showing strong public support for the build out of high speed rail, it’s an exciting time for those who prefer to travel by rail.
We don’t think you’ll be able to ride a gyro monorail, nuclear-powered, or jet train on these proposed routes, but we do hope that Amtrak and FRA are looking to the state-of-the-art when it comes to those high speed alignments. While you’re eagerly awaiting new passenger service, might we recommend this field guide to what all those different freight cars going by are for here in North America?
Shipping by water is cheaper than by rail, rail is cheaper than truck.
The US has a fair amount of inland waterways that *could* be used for cheap shipping.
The Jones Act in the US prevents most cargo transportation by water in the US, so that we’re only using about 10% of our inland waterway capacity.
Simply changing this one law would bring about a price/cost revolution in most products in the US.
People keep thinking about how nice it would be to have passenger rail, and how nice it is in other countries, and so on.
But everyone keeps ignoring this particular elephant in the room…
Probably the biggest unconscious coming-of-age story in the US is Huckleberry Finn, which is entirely illegal to now to act out anything like that in person. Even if you excluded all the transgressive parts.. It was a work of fiction, but people really did things loosely like that story.
As a silly tangent, the musician Grimes tried to go on a riverboat adventure like this and was busted.
Nobody can name the elephant, and we’ll be deleted for mentioning it off-hand. There is currently a shifting of currents online where people are suddenly very tired of this sprawling yuppie Corporate-Urban Cultural Complex and its consequences. It’s very interesting, an interesting time to be alive. I love trains btw.
Grimes’ river adventure is possibly worthy of a write-up here, if only because her and a friend built a raft/house-boat. They tried to sail it down the Mississippi, but ran into engine trouble quite soon after starting out. The legal problems they had were as a result of illegal mooring whilst they tried to sort-out the engine. They tried to make-do without the engine but nearly ended up wrapped around some rocks. Eventually after further mooring trouble their boat was hauled away by the authorities.
https://www.startribune.com/this-boat-don-t-float/49134952
Lucky they didn’t die. Authorities likely saved their lives.
Halfwits would be wise to stay the F off big, turbulent rivers with homemade boats.
Not that their aren’t stretches dammed up and safe.
But in General, not for the average boater/boat.
So you recommend to adhere the rules as default, even if you don’t know why they are in place?
There are no rules, per se, that you can’t boat on the Mississippi on a homemade raft (It’s not the Reine.)
Just Darwin waiting.
Charging for raft rides would be against the rules, but who cares?
Rules made to be broken after all.
They, apparently, moored somewhere unsafe. Doubt it was marked as an unsafe spot. Those change with every high flow day.
Pretty easy to do if you’re unaware and unskilled, why big rivers are dangerous. Fools don’t know what’s under the water or how poor the visibility from a barge pusher is.
Having a sense of self preservation is not ‘rules crazy’.
Rather the rules crazy will die doing things that aren’t against the rules, but are stupid. Think rules keep them safe.
Like mooring in the middle of the channel with no lights.
For Germans:
It’s the difference between crossing an empty two lane road against the lights and walking across the autobahn at night dressed in black.
One is fine, the other is stupid.
Rules are irrelevant.
>adhere the rules as default, even if you don’t know why they are in place?
Especially in that case. Imagine if you defaulted to breaking all rules you don’t understand. Think about it.
HOW exactly does the Jones Act “prevent most cargo shipping by water in the US”? I looked it up:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merchant_Marine_Act_of_1920
The Jones act requires that any shipping on the inland waterways be captained, crewed, owned, and built by Americans.
Coastal access comes under slightly different rules, and we allow foreign ships to dock in American ports with some restrictions.
There’s no reason to disallow shipping because the ship wasn’t built in the US any more than we disallow foreign built aircraft to land in the US. A published set of internationally recognized standards is all that would take. Like we currently do for international shipping.
We would need to rewrite the law with some attention to national security, but we already allow foreign ships to dock at big coastal cities, so one solution would be to make the inland waterway rules similar to the coastal port rules.
IIRC, some US ports require a port captain who will go out and take over the ship and guide it into dock. Something like that might be useful for the inland ways, perhaps disallowing this practice for certain stretches waterway of national importance on a case-by-case basis. Show up at the port of New Orleans with a ship, swap out the captain for an American, then take the cargo the rest of the way up the Mississippi – that sort of thing.
Allowing a foreign shipping company to, for example, operate a French vessel shipping to cities within the US would relieve a lot of friction in the economy.
I think you’re missing some key details why despite the best intentions of your idea it wouldn’t work: Any foreign ships made for ocean freight that are docking in ports on the coast would simply be too big for any travel up any one of the rivers (eg the Mississippi) to begin with, too big either for the river itself or any one of the hundreds of bridges that cross it upriver.
Plus if the Jones Act was indeed a huge limiting factor on the perceived under utilization of river freight why wouldn’t a logistics firm just unload the cargo from a foreign ship at a coastal port and then load it up on a 100% American made, American crewed, American captained river vessel and send it on its way?
>There’s no reason to disallow shipping because the ship wasn’t built in the US
Ships take up and release water for ballast. Invasive species and ecosystem damage comes to mind if you allow ships from other countries up the rivers and lakes.
Ocean going ships aren’t going very far up most rivers in any case.
Dredging costs would be unsustainable.
If there were the opportunity, smaller ships would. It’s like a truck vs train situation – the panamax ship carries loads of containers at lower cost per mile, but the smaller boat can go straight to the destination and get it there faster.
PWalsh is just wrong and is DERPing.
It is a frequently DERPed ‘opinion’.
Typically used to provide cover for the incompetent and corrupt government of Porto Rico.
River barge traffic in the USA is huge.
Nobody ships by truck or rail when barge is an option.
Nobody.
But the rivers are big, there is room for more. That much is true.
The port of New Orleans handles 100% of the bulk crop exports from the Mississippi basin.
All of which is shipped down rivers on barges.
It is trucked from the fields to the grain elevators, but what’s the alternative?
It’s slow, your not going to ship seafood or your Amazon order back up the river on those empty barges.
Perhaps Scandinavian rotten fish products. But nobody in the USA (outside of Minnesota) will eat Lutefisk Surstruming etc.
Also the Mississippi/Missouri rivers are dangerous as F in many places. Big Rivers are no joke. Even little rivers demand respect.
Also independent from speed, barges are only really good for bulk goods, for it to be cheap you have to transport enough freight from one point to an other, not from one point to a large number of others.
The Jones Act does not prevent any shipping on a US vessel. The true limitation is that there are not many navigable East – West waterways especially near our East and West coast oceanic ports. Passenger rail in the US only survives on massive subsidies (Amtrak has never been profitable). High speed rail needs to show economic viability somewhere in the US. We have the Rocky mountains and the Appalachian range Which are serious barriers to water travel. We have the St Lawrence seaway and the Great Lakes but shipping there seems to be limited to mostly bulk product like ore. Our cargo rail systems seem to work well.
I don’t see it working in the US.
A) There are maybe half a dozen cities in the US where a car of your own isn’t an absolute necessity.
B) If it’s going to be cheaper than flying, you run into the issue that people who can’t afford to fly also can’t afford to rent a car.
C) Car rental infrastructure would need to be massive if it did fly and a bankruptcy inducing loss if it didn’t, so don’t expect anyone to be willing to risk that kind of investment.
D) It requires an astoundingly huge investment for anything longer than a few hour drive worth of rail.
E) The train culture in America is long dead. In the places you can still ride one, nobody enjoys doing so.
The US had mass rail for ages. Rail travel in literature is a quintessentially American concept. Russia had some as well, because it is cosmographically a twin nation. But there is a reason why rail in the US died, and will remain dead. It isn’t cars or planes I’m afraid. I believe it is a deeper, metaphysical scar.
Long long range rail was a thing when it was the only way to travel, but nobody is looking forward to spending days on a train if they could fly for a few hours instead.
Where it has a chance is between metro regions that aren’t too far from each other, like down the eastern coast from Boston to Richmond, the Rust belt, between the big cities in Texas and maybe down in Florida between Jacksonville and Miami.
People who can’t afford a car or to fly – they use the bus. Rail would never be able to compete with the bus.
The reality is, unless you destroy the interstate network and prohibited flying, rail could never be competitive.
That’s misleading. Interstate highways and airports are massively subsidized by the government. It’s not surprising that rail needs subsidy too.
There are plenty of places in the US that are dense enough to be better served by trains than cars, and close enough to be faster by rail than air. All are part of a comprehensive transit solution in a diverse country like the US.
Ok, don’t be weird.
There are trains where you can bring your car. If thats important it can be done. E.g. the canal tunnel in europe has that
There was/is a rail service from New York to Florida that transports you and your car.
And it requires government subsidies to stay alive, thus proving my point.
Airlines don’t have to pay a full share of all of the ATC navaid infrastructure, labor, and airport costs. Gate and landing fees don’t begin to cover airport capital costs. The taxpayer does.
So, yeah, if the airlines had to actually pay for everything that they use to enable their business, they wouldn’t be profitable at all except on certain routes – exactly the same boat that Amtrak is in regarding the Northeast Corridor vs. the rest of the routes in the network.
In this optic, what about all the public money poured into road infrastructure ? not subsidies ?
Nowhere near the amount of money that govts have to spend to allow people to drive their private transport on roads provided by the govt.
Rick:
That’s a lie, and you know it.
Airports are cash cows.
Suburbs threaten to open their own airports, demand a cut of the gravy as part of the agreement not to.
And the interstate system doesn’t?
There is a train service to/from Virginia to Florida. It’s quite nice but also pricey – the cost can be offset by factoring in the lack of a rental car on either end. We’ve always taken it one direction and drove the other.
(E) has got to be trolling. I commute via LIRR, despite having a car, because I can do other things on the train, whereas I have to pay attention to the stop-and-go traffic if I drive. Riding the train isn’t my favorite thing in the world but you can bet I enjoy it relative to having to drive in urban traffic.
im along the gulf coast, we haven’t had passenger rail in almost 20 years. ( hurricane Katrina 2005) But cargo rail comes through 3 times a week, from JAX to NOLA.
The lines are in place, there is no incentive (not enough profits) to run passenger rail in the south.
There’s profit to be had shipping humans around. It isn’t that. Freight rail survives in USAland yet people can’t be included. It isn’t corporate profits… not in the way you’re saying
Passenger rail requires rails that are set far more precisely – or else its really uncomfortable. Cargo lines are generally not suitable to transport people.
Beyond that, you would need a lot of people who needed to go to the same place at the same time and then the destination would have to be able to handle a large number of people arriving at the same time and then needing transport to their final destination.
Airports solve this by being able to spread the departure and arrival times out, which also gives more flexibility for travelers to adapt their travel to their schedule.
And freight can be side-lined, re-routed, split into multiple trains, etc. Passenger rail needs reliable scheduling. It is a whole different universe.
But really, this whole scheme is simply impossible. One need only look at the vast fortune being wasted in California and the decades it has taken to sort of build the first few miles of a high speed rail that will never be used except for a few bits if commuter rail – maybe. The costs are simply too high. At the end of steam, there were locomotives rated for 120mph and a bit of rail that could handle it. But rail travel was fading, or we might have had incremental improvement all; this time.
CA HSR is just government graft at work.
The ‘right people’ are getting the money.
Just another day that ends in ‘y’.
Judging from my visits to the USA, I would argue that if even cargo is only coming through three times a week, there is basically nothing going on in that area.
CSX is a dystopian nightmare to work with when trying to schedule in passenger traffic. They’ll steal a billion in subsidies and make you kiss their toes for it.
Before the HSR line in FL, Amtrak ran a short line between Tampa and Orlando, but they could only get permission to run once a day. Commuting was not a real option.
love how this sort of posts always brings out the personal transit-poisoned chuds who don’t know what travel by rail looked like in the united states only a generation ago, prior to the some of the greatest ecological and antisocial atrocities laid down upon the earth by the federal-aid highway act, and are completely terrified of so much as thinking about having to be perceived or interact with strangers, or be confronted by the fact that they’re one disaster away from
being unhoused too because we live in an obscenely topheavy economy.
People like you aren’t helping. I love personal transit/automobile travel and I love train travel. Making enemies out of people like you’re doing is counterintuitive.
I wish there was a way to upvote this comment.
There’s a certain joy about taking the train. Wander around, read, play a game, have a meal, etc, then arrive fresh and ready to go. When it works, of course – if it goes wrong you’re stuck entirely dependant on a train.
Your last point about the absence of any safety net for non-millionaires and below in the USA is also true.
I see us getting Chicago to Indy service back. My only rail trip was to Chicago for the world’s first midwest personal computer convention in ’79. A lot of smalls in stalls and two guys with the Apple 2, so new.
Nowadays we have all sorts of ride options away from home. Tourism will offer more. What a hassle free way it can be. Self driving has been around a long time, this personal car thing may pass back to trains on longer and corridor routes.
The Cardinal already runs Indy to Chicago doesn’t it? It’s only 3x a week right now, but is slated to start running daily, if I understand things correctly.
I believe that there was daily service between Chicago and Indy prior to 2019 on either the Cardinal or the now discontinued Hoosier State.
Tourism?
To Chicago or Indy?
LOL
Citation needed.
Aaaaand there it is.
As far as hauling passengers go, every time I have not been in a hurry and looked into going by rail I was surprised to find it is as slow as the bus and about 2X the price of flying. And they wonder why so few people travel by train anymore. Or bus for that matter. When I was a kid they had bus stations. Now you just sit on the curb.
We traveled by rail in the last decade or so from Wisconsin to Glacier National Park, and to Portland/Olympic National Park. Both cases we *could* have driven, and been dog-tired at either end of the trip. Getting the least expensive sleeper option (which includes your meals) means we were better rested, and the cost of motels/food/gas was approximately equivalent to the rail fare at the time. Car rental, of course made the total cost higher, so it isn’t parity, but we went out of a small town station, which meant easy on and off, and free parking. As opposed to the carnival that is flying. As others have said, instead of getting worn out driving, the train you can get up, walk around, buy adult beverages, look at the scenery, read a book/watch a video. Smokers are kinda screwed, because the smoke stops are hours apart. But for us, it beat flying hands down.
You can also be told to get off.
Be put on a bus for the rest of the trip.
No choice, no refunds.
I’ll take Amtrak to the bay area. But only because SF is a dumpster fire to drive and it’s close.
Delete ‘to drive’ from above.
The Newsweek poll made no mention of costs, either in terms of taxes or fares — and this certainly isn’t going to be a privately financed undertaking because there is no way it would be profitable. The ignorance of the American voter in not realizing that costs will be a problem is discouraging. It’s even worse that the American voter would be happy to make short air flights illegal; not only does it assume that it’s acceptable to have the government bullying innocent people, it displays hatred of the rich who can afford and make good use of short flights. This is disgusting.
Federal infrastructure projects are all heavily subsidized. Domestic air travel and the US highway system wouldn’t exist without them (hello bailouts and shovel-ready projects). Most small airports (and thus short haul flights) only exist because the DOT requires and funds them to maintain connectivity beyond the highway system. Same deal with some of the existing small Amtrak stations.
There are privately-funded high speed rail projects ongoing (and Brightline in Florida is already operational), but infrastructure shouldn’t have to be profitable to be worthwhile. That said, rail allows people to work while they travel, reduces wear-and-tear on highways, and also relieves traffic congestion (and accidents) on the highways. If you like to drive do that, but rail can get the people who don’t want to out of your way.
It’s only for a small section of the map, but the Southeastern Corridor has some interesting data on the economic benefits of rail here: https://www.southeastcorridor-commission.org/sec-economic-benefits-of-rail
>but infrastructure shouldn’t have to be profitable to be worthwhile
That’s a weird sentiment. The problem with building infrastructure that doesn’t have positive returns, and not measuring returns (profit) in the first place, is that you over-extend your infrastructure and end up mis-allocating public funds, because nobody’s counting.
We were also leaders in the rollout of land-line phones – should we go back to that too?
Rail is just a technology. Now we have better technology, called ‘cars and planes’. Which we use throughout the country because the United States is not Europe and conditions here are different. Interestingly enough, the places in the US that are as dense as Europe is DO MAKE EXTENSIVE USE OF HEAVY AND LIGHT RAIL. Because its economic to do so in those areas. The rest of the country uses cars for trips under 400 miles and planes for trips over because it makes economic sense to do that. Who wants to train across the country at 200 mph when you can fly at 600?
We use rail to move *cargo*, not people. And why spend billions to connect two cities with rail when you can spend millions to build two airports and fly people?
Cars aren’t a better technology, it’s how rail is utilised which makes a difference. I live in the Netherlands. I take the train everyday during rushhour to a city near me. Takes me 20 minutes, trains stop at 3 stations before reaching my destination.
By car this would take me waaaaay longer because traffic jams are guaranteed, and driving into the city is a nightmare.
I can even get some work done in the train. That’s the difference.
In the US this might be different, but there’s a reason the subway is so popular in major cities.
Utter BS. China is way larger than USA and has decent network of high-speed trains.
A colleague was born/raised in China, and did an analysis of why the train is profitable-he said it boils down to population density. In China, he came from a “small rural town” of 20,000 people. Take a look at a map of China-there are “small towns” like that 10 or 20 miles apart. In Taiwan and Japan, the population densities are 676 and 326 per square kilometer, in China, it’s 150/km^2. The US is 35/km^2. I love trains, I prefer to travel that way when they go where I need to, so I put my money where my mouth is, and pay for the train. Other people prefer to drive, or to fly, so all three modes get subsidized.
It is easy to sit in one’s armchair and pontificate based on the view from that chair. It is much much harder to make a “good thing” viable in the real world. Rather than “raising awareness” by activism AKA shouting, try actually getting involved in the work needed to make your chosen improvement viable. Could regulatory barriers be changed to make both safety AND the “good thiing” work? Can contributing to a fund to capitalize a business in an underserved area help? It’s possible. The Nature Conservancy works to get land easements that benefit wildlife, while the owners still keep their land, maybe that’s a model for encouraging a project.
China?
The place that mistook government spending for growth for the last 20 years?
We’ll see how that ends.
IIRC they recently stopped buying train wheels from Germany. Not going well. Tricky engineering/metallurgy problem.
China is not way larger than the US.
China, 9,596,960km2 (3,705,410mi2) · United States, 9,525,067km2 (3,677,647mi2)
They are nearly the same size.
China’s population is way larger than the US.
4.16 times larger with 1,425,178,782 vs the US’s 341,978,476
But if you consider that 94% of chinas population lives in the 43% of the nations area that lies east of the Heihe–Tengchong Line. You’re looking at 1.34b people crammed into less than half the size of the US.
Then ponder that the share of population in China who earns less than $6.85 per day is approximately 21.68% in 2024., resulting in a total number of impoverished people just shy of the entire US population.
And youre actually comparing a functionally much smaller nation with a significantly higher population that is highly concentrated and comprised largely of impoverished workers resulting in the need for government subsidized transportation being both more practical and more necessary by nearly every possible metric.
“We were also leaders in the rollout of land-line phones – should we go back to that too?”
Well considering the deployment of cell towers in the late 1990s/early 2000s and the abandonment of building out or maintaining existing copper was a factor as to why rural true broadband Internet was constantly promised over and over again but never delivered for 20 years…
On paper, my rural property has cellular data from 3 providers, and I can get it on my phone. If I’m standing in the right spot. On certain days. If the sun isn’t too bright. And there aren’t too many tourists closer to the tower. And the server on the other end doesn’t time out.
The state utility map claims I can get ADSL there from a landline provider (Frontier). With a density of about 2 seasonal houses per square mile, I highly doubt that is true. Satellite is probably my only choice.
You realize you can put a cell signal booster w a directional antenna on you roof or radio tower? (You do have a tower? Doesn’t everybody?)
You’re not supposed to put the active radio outdoors.
But uncle Charlie is toothless and works as hard as any government ‘worker’.
Safe to ignore.
Don’t step on aviation, military, cop bands and they will never get off their asses/bother you.
>Who wants to train across the country at 200 mph when you can fly at 600?
I do, that sounds great, much faster and more comfortable than flying the affordable way, if you’re only going 2000 miles or so and not to/from a hub city. Unless you’re going to/from a hub city you’ll probably have two hops and a layover, and it’s very possible that you add more distance that way than you do by following interstates or rail routes. And the affordable way means coach, and not paying extra to avoid getting an early first flight with a long layover if that’s what’s available. So you have to arrive fairly early to get yourself and any luggage set up to go on the first flight. The time to get thru this can vary, since you might get selected for anal probing, so you allow extra time. Then you wait for the flight to actually occur, and boarding takes forever because somebody doesn’t believe that luggage rules apply to them or that they need to be able to prove they have a ticket. Then once you’re on, and they finally get in the air, it’s been a few hours and you’re now just starting to move. Have fun getting compressed between the worst people you’ve ever met for a few hours while you find out what it sounds like to live inside a vacuum cleaner full of crying babies. Here’s a pretzel! Once you arrive at your layover, you’ve got another couple/few hours of waiting in doctors-office chairs and overpaying for gas station snacks before you need to be at the next gate. And then it gets delayed and moved to another gate, because now it’s later in the day and things have started to back up. The plane you’re supposed to be boarding isn’t here yet, and once it is they say they’ll delay you further to clean it. When you finally get boarded, your seat is wet and you smell something disgusting masked by cleaning products. But hey, as soon as you finally get in the air again, this time with a different set of people who don’t understand personal space or hygiene, you’ll be going 600! Except that really you end up doing more like 500 with the headwind, and then you spend a bunch of time circling waiting to be cleared to land. But still, you only spent what, 15 hours between entering one airport and exiting the other? Why, what could ever surpass the pace of 2000/15=133 mph?
But in all seriousness, getting on a train is so easy that I almost boarded the wrong one the first time. Bring whatever you want, there’s plenty of room. Coach is way more comfortable even on the practically-antique amtrak’s, and you get 110v power and probably free wifi, or if not then at least cell service still works since you’re on the ground. So you have the room, power, and wifi needed to pull a laptop out and do whatever you like. Or watch the scenery go by if there is any, or stretch out on the seat if there’s nobody beside you. If the rails got to the point of maintaining 200mph for most of the distance, and yet could still stop every now and then, it’s likely to me that the true time would work out favorably, or at least close enough for the difference in experience to make the difference.
+1
Notice how spaceminions assumes the train route is a mathematical line between stations used only by the passenger train.
That’s a tell.
Not an honest argument.
sm isn’t THAT dumb.
There are both minimum and maximum distances where train travel makes sense.
He said “going 2000 miles”. If that means for you to be tied to a straight line no matter what … this got you really going again, obviously.
He assumed ideal path for train, then went on a wall of text for the airplane complications.
That’s akin to ‘lying with statistics’. But you know that. Ur not that dumb either.
Yeah, if I was going to really be unfair to the planes I’d have refrained from generously assuming that someone picked a route that’s around 2000 miles by road or train, while by air if there was any way to fly direct it’d be more like 1600, and yet air still took me the length of time I indicated, meaning it’s actually wasting even more time than it seemed. After a few decades of construction and the adoption of cell phones with gps, I could probably shave some miles off the driving route too, but for the sake of a hypothetical train I am just considering it based on a route with a fair amount of extra miles for indirect travel.
I did no such thing; I picked 2000 miles because that’s approximately how far I have driven on repeated road trips between the same two places. This is a specific journey I have a lot of experience with by multiple methods and routes, actually, as I’ve not only driven a number of ways but also occasionally flown with a few different airlines, the most recent being Southwest. It takes about three long days of driving, which can be scenic for parts but isn’t the most pleasant or cost efficient. The direct crow’s flight distance would be shorter, but I can’t expect direct flights between the two airports, and with an intermediary it’s longer. And the airports are each not very close to the actual endpoints, besides. Last time, on leaving the airport I took a train most of the rest of the way, and it was the best part of the trip.
You’re being weird, and I don’t get it.
Ur not this dumb.
At best you are cherry picking.
People want rail transit, the recent Twin Cities-Milwaukee-Chicago Amtrak Borealis line has been pretty popular despite being a few hours slower than driving. Heck, I priced it out, and taking the Borealis out and back is roughly the same price as a flight on Southwest’s cheapest tier! I’ve also seen plenty of people saying they’d rather take a train to avoid the chaos that is flying.
As a Wisconsinite, I’m liking the Midwest line proposals. I can see the Hiawatha extension between Milwaukee and Green Bay being super popular, mostly because of sports. People would make so many day or weekend trips for Brewers and Packers games. Plus, both are just great cities, so easier transit between the two (and Chicago!) is a huge benefit. It even stops in Fond Du Lac and Oshkosh!
+1
I just travelled from San Francisco to Denver on the California Zephyr. Zero issues. Zero.
Will it have working A/C?
Yes, in the winter along northern corridors.
B^)
I (A European) was in the US (Pittsburgh) for a business conference two years ago and afterward decided to go to my family in Vermont and then to friends in Montréal and fly out from there.
I knew the state of US public transport but was actually positively surprised by it. The Pittsburgh-New York train was full booked, and I could see this corridor doing a train every two hours instead of 2 a day. People on the train were friendly, from all layers of society, and the train was on time. It could certainly benefit from high speed rail, but all in all It was pretty fast.
A later train from New York to Middlebury got stuck in Albany behind a broken bridge, but they were extremely good in communicating what happened, what our options were and arranging a bus for onward travel.
Also LIRR to Greenport and From New London back to NYC were fast, punctual and with friendly staff and passengers. However, a platform that is long enough for one door at Greenpoint is kind of a joke.
Only minus point was that I had planned a train trip to Montreal, wich was listed on the Amtrak site, deapite not running for over two years (because Covid).
All in all I would definitely ride US rail again.
For rail to make sense there needs to be proximity between population centers and high enough population density.
This combination can only be found on the east coast. Acela is a great example of a train that makes sense. Yet even that train struggles to remain financially viable.
For the rest of the country pretty much all the other “high speed” train ideas are driven by those who ignore economic realities, and those who benefit from the massive government largesse that it entails.
Off course there are vastly near-uninhabited strwtches in the USA, but we have many lines which serve only small villages in Europe, and despite that have one train (just a single railcar) every hour (or more frequent) from 6:00 to midnight, and quite successfull.
Not making profit if you count everything, but roads also don’t make profits.
The roads absolutely make a profit. They cost a certain amount and the politicians tax us even more than that amount and launder it into their pockets. That’s profit, just not in as honest a way as a normal business makes one.
That said, we’re still happy to pay for the roads. For a very odd definition of happy. Trains? Nobody who isn’t a clueless coastal egghead or a wannabe thereof wants them.
What country are you from? In the Netherlands, the road netwerk certainly doesn’t run a profit, and we have fairly high road, car sales and gas taxes. Which effectively meand road transport is subsidized. This is not a bad thing per se, a state should subsidize infrastructure (road, rails, waterways but also things like a postal service, sewers or internet) to get its economy running.
Bull.
Swamp German fuel taxes are insane. Why your cars are so lame.
All of Europe taxes gasoline like cigarettes.
They are extracting funds from gas taxes to build bike trails. Guaranteed.
Also ‘The Netherlands’ is the size of one large city.
Nope. Not even Germany “makes a profit” of it’s road system, and they have lower road, car sales, and fuel taxes than we have.
Being from the UK and suffering the debacle of HS2, we are in no place to criticise
However I visited Japan recently and travelled on their network and a number of things were apparent
1. A quick, relatively cheap quality rail service can be a game changer. It means that the area people can live and work expands offering greater freedom and opportunity. So if you area is sufferings low employment, you can easily travel to another area on a daily basis. It also regenerates inner cities, because being in easy reach to a station becomes a good selling point
2. Rail is often compared to air travel, but a good system it should not be. With air travel you have to factor in arrival and departure times and the fact that the airports are often outside of towns, while trains take you to the center. For example, I would never fly to Paris, since with the Eurostar, I can pretty well rock up, and once through security checks, it is relatively quick journey to the centre of Paris,
3. One of the mistakes of proponents of high speed rail make is emphasizing the high speed part. Yes the Shinkansen are quick, but not in a OMG way. The important part of the high speed rail is its frequency. With trains going every 10 minutes, it is more like a high speed conveyor belt. Again this beats air travel
4. high speed rail cannot be achieved by reusing existing infrastructure. The Japan railways are rightly proud of their punctuality and reliability, but that is only achievable with dedicated purpose built track, which is expensive and you may never get a return of investment, so you have to factor the social benefits as well as a nation
As someone who drives an hour each day, I always are wishing to recover that time. During the 10 days travelling round Japan, at no point did I feel the loss of a car, or want to step on a plane.
Stopped reading when you cited Newsweek.
You can read?
I think he can read enough to know that Newsweek is NOT a credible source…. Nuf said…
The map in the Title image shows a (proposed) line across the southern portion of North Dakota. Back in the 1970s, AMTRAK chose the lower population northern portion for service. Although I no longer live in that great State, I would consider taking the southern route to visit friends and relatives and not endure a 10+ hour drive to the same destinations. (If the cost isn’t ridiculous and we are allowed to bring better/cheaper food/beverages). An overnight sleeper would probably be nice too!
Amtrak in that part of the country travels on rails owned/maintained by others-last I heard that was BNSF-where *freight* is the moneymaker and the reason the rails exist. The current route exists because of Devil’s Lake, and the significant numbers from tourist fishing traffic. They had to shift to a more southerly route because of high water and flooding on the tracks, until Devil’s Lake, their county and the state put in money to raise the northern route. I also read where the amount of freight traffic meant significant amount of delay as the Amtrak train had to pull on the sidings to let the very high amount of freight traffic pass.
Places that have high speed rail transport have special infrastructure dedicated to that style of transport. In america we have 100 year old rail systems with tight turn radiuses on wooden ties that are appropriate for 50 year old box cars running on dedicated easments that no one else can use. Amtrak for the most part is obligated to use THAT system and freight has priority. They are attempting to build light rail from L.A. to Vegas but nobody is holding their breath
Neither are we holding our breath that the SF-LA “high speed” rail will be built anytime soon.
Bakersfield to Modesto is sure to be a profitable route.
Amtrak has priority.
Until it falls off schedule (always).
Then it waits, sometimes puts the passengers on a bus.
The biggest challenge that rail and water transit have always had in the Western US are geographic; not political or economic.
Yes, the US was a leader in the development of rail in the 19th and early 20th century. This made sense most of the population lived east of the Rockies in the “flat” part of the continent. The Rocky Mountains alone prove the largest challenge trans-continental rail travel. Note that on that map there are only FOUR (4) existing lines running over the Rockies (I did see the plan for a fifth, lets see when the EPA will allow it); compared to the multiple interstate and federal highway routes. As a reference for our friends across the Atlantic, take the highest points on the Alps and then stretch it from Moldova to Portugal, that is the kind of land barrier that we are dealing with in the Rockies. Also of note for those in North America East of the Rockies; the “flat” parts west of the Rockies are more rugged than most of the Appalachian’s. Rail hates elevation changes so if we were to increase the number of rail lines to serve more of this area the environmental groups will likely shut down the project due to the required geographic reshaping need to allow for rail travel.
As for water travel again while much of the river infrastructure east of the Rockies is well developed; in the west we only have a few large rivers. The Columbia currently does have a large amount of cargo traffic but is only navigable from Astoria to Spokane with Portland and Spokane being the major ports. This is only with the addition of three (3) major dams (that they want to remove to help the Salmon populations). The Sacramento is somewhat redundant due to San Francisco bay and only gets you to Sacramento. The Colorado could have been a possibility; but California’s poor water management means that the majority of the flow (>75%) is diverted to LA and the San Joaquin Valley making the river un-navigable from the California gulf.
Several years ago, I wanted to ride Amtrak from the station in Baltimore to the station in DC. They wanted over $70 to go that short distance. The pricing for such trips has to be affordable for people to ride the trains.
It *clearly* needs improvement then. So push for it.
Considering there’s 4 different routes at least, now, I think you might be able to get a better deal today.
Nothing much is going to happen until the cost of construction is lowered. It has grown astronomically compared to European cost. Looking at the cost of the two new Hudson River tunnels I find that the cost of building them is much more than the amount the Pennsylvania Railroad spent to build their tunnels plus the cost to build the new station in NYC and its rail yard plus the cost to build the connecting tracks to the existing PRR tracks adjusted for inflation of course.
Feature not bug.
The ‘right people’ are getting the money.
Same as in Europe.
Don’t look at England’s new HSR project.
It’s equally as stupid as California’s.
Also France. They built the two or three HSR lines that made sense. Then French politics took over. Every small city demanded it’s own HSR line. Money pit from hell/Paris. And they still don’t connect to Spanish HSR.
Having made the Amtrak trip between Seattle and New York 4 times in my life, there were places on the line where the train had to pull into a siding because freight had priority. While jointed rail has for the most part gone the way of the dinosaur on routes like the Northeast Corridor, there are still places that have jointed rail. I’ve watched videos on Youtube of train enthusiasts like MilleniumForce and Jawtooth, and sometimes they show in their videos, the dates on some of the rails. There are rails that are still in use that were laid down in the 1800s. For those touting so-called “high speed rail” it’s not going to happen in this country.
If America truly wanted a high speed train network, first off, you’d have to get rid of the rails and go maglev.
I’ve always had this idea since I was a kid. It sort of came to fruition in the movie Genesis II (Gene Roddenberry) starring Alex Cord. The idea is a straight tunnel underground between the West and East coasts. This tunnel would have an airlock at each end with the air being evacuated from the tunnel itself.
It would be a maglev system capable of 2000 MPH. Seattle to New York in an hour, hour and a half?
I’d like to see that become a reality in my lifetime. Sadly, I don’t think I will. Couple this with the fact that a lot of rails are being removed for the rails-to trails program. I used to watch the Spirit Of Washington Dinner Train pass near my home in Kirkland. Twice a day, every day. The tracks are long gone and while the now “Cross Kirkland Corridor” does get a lot of use, I miss that dinner train. :) Anyone remember the Tropicana Train? I don’t know if it still exists. If America wants to have a high speed passenger only network, it should be a maglev network. That is the only way high speed rail will work here in the USA.
I’m loving the comments as I like watching trains (Virtual Railfan on Youtube) and while the rail system here in the USA is a pale shadow of its former self, a true country-wide high speed maglev system is possible.
We did it in the 1800’s, we can do it again in the 21st century. It would create a lot of jobs.
I believe it has been done in Train Simulator. Seattle to New York in an hour hour & 1/2? Someday…….
Found Elon’s account.
For what it’s worth:
Shelving HSR coast to coast until maglev/vac tube can work IS a good idea.
That’s likely never.
Maglev is a McGuffin, imo. Sure it works, but only if we crack room temperature superconductors. And can make them cheaper than concrete.
The idea of sucking the air out the tube is a bad one. What happens if everyone on the train dies from lack of air? In a tunnel? And who is going to displace a billion extra tonnes of rock to make the tunnel? And then the effort and costs of pumping all the air out!? And it still won’t be useful, because it’ll have to be small bore, so then you can’t carry a full sized load. And what do you do with the maglev units in the sidings? Keep running them power all the time? Have giant airlocks at the branches and junctions? And every station! And right wing terrorists will destroy it “for trump”.
Just build a regular, average tech train track that can carry a car and the drivers at 150MPH to 300MPH. Look at the Eurotunnel under the Channel, for example.
Or, wait another 5 years(? Elno? You there, Elno??) for self driving cars and trucks that will do the same thing on the existing roads, which will largely kill the use of a car train, or a commuter train, in much the same way we don’t hear of buggy whip manufacturers much these days.
Meanwhile, video conferencing/remote working will continue to eat into both these things.
The train itself is hermetically sealed. It’s an interesting idea to say the least, and it could probably be done on a small scale. A high speed rail network will never be profitable. I think I remember seeing a statistic that most people don’t travel more than 150-200 miles from home.
We already have maglev technology. Enclosing a hermetically sealed train in an airless tunnel to remove the air resistance would make for a very efficient system indeed. It would be interesting to see a simulation of such a system. With all the AI stuff, it should be possible to visualize.
While the idea of self-driving cars seems appealing, they would all have to coordinate where each car is, how fast it’s going, how far away it is from other cars etc. Putting a car on a flatbed much like the auto train eliminates that problem. I’m no engineer and don’t know the problems that would be encountered for such a tunnel. I did see a Youtube video on how the Lincoln Tunnel was built. Tunnel boring technology has come such a long way since then.
It would be an interesting trip. Go to the station, get on a hermetically sealed train, move into an airlock, once the air is evacuated from that, the train moves into the tunnel and gets going. Once it arrives at the other end, the airlock at the other end has its air evacuated, then it opens, the train enters, the door on the tunnel side closes and air is reintroduced before the airlock opens to discharge the train into the station.. So many possibilities…..
At first, it would have to beat the cost of two steel beams laid on the ground, otherwise conventional rail is cheaper.
Then you need safety measures for the case that the train suddenly starts to not being hermetically sealed (may be some dirt on the sealings, or touching the wall because one of the levitating magnets somewhere in the tube blew a fuse). You cannot stop fast, and you cannot let air rush into the tube, because both would crush the passengers on the front wall.
You need a very good vacuum, otherwise you collect a gas buffer in front of the train, defeating the idea of the vacuum tube, therefore you have to stay relatively long inside the airlock, and you need really powerful pumps. Sealing of a thousand mile long tube with big diameter sure is challenging: there will be lots of welding joints, and other than on pressurized tubes eventually passing molecules don’t just go away, but will have to be extracted, and therefore have to move to the next pump. But in a vacuum, there is no pressure difference to induce a flow — or you use the train to push the leakage to one end, but that again would result in a substantial drag defeating the idea of a vacuum.
You will have to service the whole tube (or at least check that everything is fine), and you have to get the service units there. That is either long downtime or many additional air locks on the route, which themselves carry the risk of malfunction.
For the self driving cars, put them on a train with overhead catenary and charge them on the way (assuming electric cars). So they have no range limits and arrive fully charged.
Like I said, I’m no engineer, but still I find the idea fascinating.
I for one would like to go cross country at very high speed, and while 600 mph is fast, I’m not a fan of flying. At least on a train, you can get up, walk around, sit down in the dining car, have a nice meal. Yes, a plane is faster, but there’s just something about riding a train. Today’s train in the USA is slow compared to the trains in Europe, Japan, and China. It’s like comparing the Acela to a steam train from the 1800s. While a high speed maglev countrywide network would be interesting, there’s something to be said for the leisurely pace of a train ride.
While Federal law requires railroads which have joined Amtrak, which is nearly all of them, to prioritize Amtrak passenger trains over freight it has never to my knowledge been enforced until this lawsuit just filed a few days ago. https://www.justice.gov/opa/media/1362071/dl?inline
Wow, that is interesting!
I enjoy reading comments on HaHa-a-day. He has all the answers.
I make a conscious effort to avoid them.
I’ve just heard all these lies before.
Since – as the transporation secretary pointed out – there are several derailments every damn day in the US I would strongly advise you to NOT get a high speed rail system for passengers in place.
Incidentally, I hear that in the US trains don’t have the ‘kading kading’ sound anymore since they now use continueos rails, and when I then hear they have a crazy amount of derailments.. well I start to wonder about a link.
Correlation is not causation.
And then we get the high-speed passenger rail, it goes really well for the first couple years, Congress makes a TSA equivalent for railways, suddenly no one wants to travel by rail anymore, and everyone is left wondering why Americans don’t like trains as much as they said they did….