$53 Billion for High Speed Rail?

[finnbow]

In theory, it sounds great - high-speed rail for 80% of Americans. In practice, it is fraught with problems and expense.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...021302203.html

My brother-in-law is the VP of an engineering consulting company that specializes in rail transport and even he's against it for many of the same reasons stated in the cited article. What a crazy waste of money.

None of our existing railbeds will support real high-speed rail (not the Acela joke in the Northeast corridor), right-of-way is crazy expensive, and there are no American manufacturers of high-speed rail cars. WTF is Obama thinking?

[noonereal]

Originally Posted by finnbow

WTF is Obama thinking?

not much

he gives a good speech though

[d-ray657]

Originally Posted by finnbow

WTF is Obama thinking?

Jobs? Oh wait, you got it right - Win The Future.

Regards,

D-Ray

[finnbow]

Originally Posted by d-ray657

Jobs? Oh wait, you got it right - Win The Future.

Regards,

D-Ray

The interesting thing is that, according to my brother-in-law who has prepared a lot of rail studies, there are no manufacturers in the US with the know-how or interest in manufacturing high-speed rail cars. They're all afraid to mobilize an effort to do so, because once the real costs of this boondoggle are known, Congress might well pull the plug.

[BlueStreak]

Originally Posted by finnbow

The interesting thing is that, according to my brother-in-law who has prepared a lot of rail studies, there are no manufacturers in the US with the know-how or interest in manufacturing high-speed rail cars. They're all afraid to mobilize an effort to do so, because once the real costs of this boondoggle are known, Congress might well pull the plug.

Sad, isn't it?

Dave

[BlueStreak]

This country has become pathetic. You know we once had a great passenger rail system, don't you? The automotive industry deliberately killed it, so they could sell more cars. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, GM and Ford bought up passenger railroads just to shut them down and scrap them. Nice, Huh? Now, our passenger rail system is all but totally gone, and our native auto industry is a pathetic piece of shit. But, that's okay, we have a great high tech ind....................Ooops, my bad. That's headed for India too. Well, there's the "service industry". But, I'm sure the bastards will find a way to keep a hamburger warm and fresh long enough to make the trip from the nearest slave labor using tin horn dictatorship. Lord knows we can't have any pimply faced American kids making that exorbitant minimum wage and lavish burger flipper benefits, they might become accustomed to the high flying lifestyle and assume it's an "entitlement".

We need more fast food jobs to provide patients for the booming medical industry........Without that, where would we be?

Dave

[merrylander]

The development of high speed rail needs steel and concrete ties, the old days of wooden ties and gandy dancers won't cut it. Which is why Amtrak re-built (and is still rebuilding) the northeast corridor. For our granddaughters christening we took the Accela to New York,, just as fast as flying (when you consider the cab rides at both ends), and much more comfortable and relaxing.

For the wedding in Aspen we took the Superliner and spent an enjoyable two days on the train, meals were excellent and you meet a different type of people on trains, more relaxed and civil, unlike the yahoos that seem to populate airplanes.

The real probllem with Amtrak is that they own no tracks other than the NE corridor, so passenger trains give way to freight. Plus we subsidize roads and airports but not rail.

[Charles]

It appears to me that all that high speed rail will accomplish is to allow for us to go bankrupt faster.

Chas

[piece-itpete]

Chas FTW!

Car killed rail because they are MUCH more convenient.

Here in Ohio, our newly minted fearless leader gave the feds their highspeed rail money back. We didn't want to get stuck with operating costs.

Pete

[Combwork]

[QUOTE=BlueStreak;54621]You know we once had a great passenger rail system, don't you? The automotive industry deliberately killed it, so they could sell more cars. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, GM and Ford bought up passenger railroads just to shut them down and scrap them. Nice, Huh?

Same thing happened here. In 1948 the U.K. rail system; track, rolling stock, everything was nationalised. In the 1950's/60's transport minister Ernest Marples (who purely by coincidence had family interests in one of the major road building companies in the U.K.) along with Richard Beeching (chairman of British Railways) closed down as many rail lines as they could get away with, and those they couldn't were deliberately underfunded so they could not develop. Now the railways have been privatised again but not the track. That all belongs to railtrack. Kind of makes sense; they maintain the rail network and charge the train companies to use it.

Now it's proposed we spend millions of £ (possibly billions; no fixed price has been given.) over 15 years to upgrade some mainline rails so trains can run at best about two thirds of what the Chinese are already doing. Their high speed rail system already covers the 1,318 kilometers (over 800 miles) between Beijing and Shanghai at a maximum running speed of 380 kilometers per hour (230 miles per hour). By 2020, at an estimated cost of $300 billion, they're aiming for a total of 25000 kilometers of high speed rail. Using magnetic levitation (no rails so technically not a railway) they've a line that from start to stop reaches 268 miles per hour and covers the 19 miles from Shanghai to the airport in just over 7 minutes. Wonderful irony. We show the Chinese how to build a railway then they show us how it should be done.

Brunell was right. If the 7ft broad gauge used on the Great Western Railway had become universal, fast comfortable spacious rail travel would never have fallen out of fashion. Contemporary reports said that the trains didn't rock, and ran quieter than companies using standard (4ft 8.5 inches) gauge.