$53 Billion for High Speed Rail?
 

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?

not much

he gives a good speech though

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

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.

Sad, isn't it?

Dave

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

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.

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

Chas

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

[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.

Really? Try sleeping in a car doing 60 - 70 MPH like we did on the way to Aspen.:D

WHen they use concrete and steel ties the gauge can be maintained with greater accuracy so there is nowhere near the rocking as in the old days. I took the TGV from Paris to Rennes and did not notice the old rocking movement.

I'm not slamming rail travel, it is very civilized.

However Ohio alone is 40,950 square miles. The US area, NOT including Alaska, is 3,207,700 square miles. I'd like to hear a useful plan that is superior to automobiles.

China has a couple of big advantages. It's all new, and they don't have to worry about the mating habits of the Chinese Horning Water Buffalo when they build.

And it helps to have monster money. They are building a highway system that connects all cities in China of more than 200K population, at the same time.

Pete

Consider for a moment that France has ~63 million in a country slightly smaller than Texas. High speed rail makes sense there. It probably only makes sense here in the Northeast corridor (which is already served by the quasi-high-speed Acela). Making it a reality for 80% of the American public is a pipe dream.

I wonder what the demographics are regarding where 80% of the population lives? I reckon that you will find they are clustered around major cities. The Bugtussels of this country may well only account for 20% of the population (and they are probably quite happy about that).

One of our problems, especially right here around Charm City, is the isiot population that cuts chain link fences so they can take (often fatal) short cuts across rail lines.

Yes, they are more convenient. And don't get me wrong, I love my vehicles, but, they are a far less efficient mode of transportation for long distance, mass transportation. Airliners are even worse.

And, besides you're not entirely correct. Cars beating rail was not purely a function of the free market. The auto industry (And their lobbyists.) did intentionally damage it. In the sixties, the Democratic Party fought any efforts to deregulate or subsidize privately owned passenger rail and Republicans fought any attempts to nationalize privately owned passenger rail. And with Detroit flush with cash (At the time.) from muscle car era profits, one can only imagine where the lobbying money came from for that..........:rolleyes:


As I see it, we as a nation will eventually be forced to do something about our voracious appetite for petroleum, like it or not. Some would say we're already past that point. Continuing to fill the streets with millions more cars and the sky with ever more and larger jets just because they are "more convenient" will have to become a memory. And don't forget the cost of building and maintaining millions of miles of new and ever wider highways.

We can get the jump on it, or we can continue down the current path. Which is horrendously inefficient, to say the least.

Dave

I heard that the Feds are quietly slowly increasing the ethanol content of gas to see how the national fleet handles it. Unverified.

When I was a kid, my elementary school library had a book on cars of the future. They were nuclear powered.

Pete

But, don't you think an direct East/West Coast Express link or two could be viable? If one could leave say, New York and be in LA 13-15 hours later for 1/2 to 3/4 the price of an airline ticket? Speaking as someone who no longer flies, but really enjoys train travel, the allure would be quite strong. Atlanta to Seattle, anyone?

Dave

And, some flew and/or drove themselves.:rolleyes:

Dave

Obviously, we couldn't use rail to go everywhere, Pete. No one is going to take a train to go get groceries, that's ridiculous. But, between major cities? Inter-coastal travel? I bet if we could (eventually) make it cheaper than flying, the airlines would catch hell.

Dave

The Feds are currently working on both. [edit: flying cars and cars that drive themselves]

Ethanol is a plastic corrosive. We'll be seeing refit kits soon, and it won't be exactly cheap.

Pete

that is only part of the story

The Feds are working on it? I haven't seen much about flying cars in years.

But, I saw a Mercedes Benz video last year about a prototype car they've built that is almost able to drive itself unaided. (There have to be transmitters along the roadway telling it speed limits and warning of upcoming road signage/signals, etc. ----Then there are "judgement calls" that a machine isn't too good at.:eek:

Dave

What's wrong with low speed rail, other than it doesn't generate enough income to pay for itself?

Chas

Blue, they're figuring it out. The big problem last I heard was new blacktop with no lines in rain.

Have any of you guys ever HAD to take the bus??

Pete

I have, liked it better than flying. Used to, they stopped every hour or so, which gave you an opportunity to buy more beer.

Chas

Actually, you can take a roundtrip bus to NYC from DC for $21.50. Roundtrip rail fare is $278. Chew on those numbers for a while.

No kidding???

ArKaMo wasn't even that cheap, but it was worth it to ride in a purple bus with an orange interior!!!

Chas

Several private companies sprung up to serve the Chinese immigrant population between the Chinatown's in DC, Philly and NYC. They've become such a hit that a number of competing companies have joined in with increasingly nicer buses and better service. Now all sorts of people travel on them. They have A/C, clean bathrooms, and TV/VCR.

http://www.staticleap.com/chinatownbus/

That's a point. Although after 10 hours or so that grimey feeling in the clothes...

And the Chicago terminal was a trip for this Provincial from Cleveland. I'd never seen people peeing on walls indoors before.

Clean bathrooms??! Amazing.

Pete

Hammacher Shlemmer will sell you a flying car for a mere $300,000 (why they send me their catalogs I really don't know).

Bit more than that but then we go first class.

Putting corn likker in gasoline is the dumbest effing move I have ever seen. Of course Archer Daniel Midlands thinks it's great and they own Grassley. My Ford Probe with a 2.2 litre four used to give good gas mileage until the screwed about mixing ethanol and gasoline. When I bought the Impala LS with a 3.8 litre V6 it gave me the same gas mileage as the Ford was doing. Once they programmed and designed to engines to be able to burn that shit it was one thing. But cars designed and built before E85 watched their gas mileage go into the toilet. And yes it is hell on plastic, my Ariens tractor has a plastic tube inside the gas tank. When the engine stopped running I pulled it out and it was full of holes.

I wonder how the cost compares between building a mile of super-highway and a mile of high speed rail track?

Regards,

D-Ray

Around 1.5 - 2 million /mile for heavy traffic rail. That doesn't include elevated rail or similar situations.

I have no idea for highway.

In July of 1982 the Navy made me take a bus from Warren to Cleveland for in-processing at the Federal Building. Greyhound. It took three and a half hours and the obese guy sitting next to me slept the whole way and smelled like rotten cabbage. For a while there I wondered if he was dead. But, I'll be damned if he didn't wake up just as we arrived in Cleveland.

Once in San Diego, I got wasted drunk and somehow ended up on the city transit bus riding around all night with the homeless people. (It was raining.)
Actually, it was a lot of fun. The homeless can be a blast when your good and tore up.

Dave

It's not just building cost, it's running cost. Once built, assuming both are well maintained I would guess the overall cost for new rail would be lower than new road.

To whom? Roads are already paid for by excise taxes on motor fuels. Trains, OTOH, are just a money pit for public subsidies.

One of the big problems with passenger rail in the US is the sprawling nature of our cities. If you live in a typical suburb of a big American city, you may well be an hour or more from the rail station and the rail station where you're headed may be an hour from your ultimate destination - and there may not be good public transport connecting the rail stations to anything else.

High speed rail in the US is a big, costly solution looking for a problem. If we want to spend money on rail, why not build world-class light rail/subways in our major cities? There are only a handful of big cities in this country that have light rail/subways that compete in terms of quality and coverage with major cities in other parts of the industrialized world. Even DC, with its Metro, doesn't yet have train service to its major gateway airport (Dulles). This is true of most major airports in the country.

We need to learn to walk before we run.

We have a little of it going on out here. A couple blocks from it is not the greatest as it is the old town. The light rail intersects Amtrack here and does go to the SF airport and there is not much need for a car there as most everything one needs to live is within a block or two of the housing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richmond_Transit_Village
The Chinese were talking to Arnold here in Ca. interested in setting up high speed so there must be a profit to be made, now the Germans have bought majority of the NYSE. Too bad we are starting to sound so third world. :(


Carl

rotten cabbage LMAO!! And on your advice, I'm hanging out with homeless people Friday night :)

Finn, Cleveland must be ahead of the curve on something, our light rail goes to the airport. So you can get off the plane and easily go right your choice of fabulous destinations: the beatup dead downtown, or to the hood.

:p

Pete

Downtown was fabulous and the 'hood wasn't the 'hood when Clevelands light rail was built. Outsourcing and the failure to move to new and better things in it's wake created the mess you have now.

Dave

Agreed. I remember going downtown at Christmas, to see Mr Jingaling, window displays, and slide the slide on 'The Christmas Story'. Seems like a different planet now.

Of course, there were already many very bad neighborhoods in those days too.

Busing killed what was left of the good neighborhoods. Anyone who can gets out of there for their kids sake.

A few weeks ago the Plain Dealer ran a story - 'what if Pittsburgh and Cleveland joined into a single municipality?' I thought, yeah, right lol.

Pete