High Speed rail.
I’ve been involved in high speed rail, specifically this project. We developed a system that could weld the track sections (NOT an easy task) and then we got involved in some ONR stuff as a result, and it all sort of disapeared.
Look, people, High Speed Rail isn’t going to work in this country. We were built on individual transport, and individual transport is what we want. There are a lot of people who wish for rail, but they’re clearly more interested in the romance of it than the reality of it. The reality of it, is that it’s never going to profit, and it’s never going to be anything but an infrastructure cash sink.
h/t ed hering
17 comments Og | Uncategorized
I was looking at some welded rail on Wednesday and wondered how that was done. It also caused me to wonder how the track handles expansion and contraction due to normal heat/cold cycles. There doesn’t seem to be any room.
I think there is one place in our country where high speed rail might work. That is in the DC to NYC to Boston corridor. It’s the only Amtrak route to run at a profit. It’s where we have the closest thing to high speed rail.
I’m a railfan and I have to admit that the proposed routes are all a waste of time. This from a guy who has ridden a tourist railroad just to go from point A to point B and back.
I’d like to take the train from Indy to Chicago to go to the Museum of Science and Industry. However the train takes even longer than driving. I think for a fraction of the cost of one proposed high speed rail boondoggle, we could invest in upgrading infrastructure along all the Amtrak routes and have a smoother working rail network. But I’m not even convinced that upgrade would make economic sense.
The interurban network collapsed for a reason. Those who dream of high speed rail are hopless romantics. In Europe, the cities and towns are five miles apart. The average county seat in Indiana is twenty miles or more from its neighbor.
Drive through central Indiana, Illinois, Iowa Kansa and points west and you will understand the futility of spending tax dollars on rail. No one is willing to drive an hour or more to catch a train that will only get them close to their destination.
Just got into it with a person I know from Boston. Apparently we’re patsies and puppets of big oil if we don’t want ‘efficient high speed rail like Europe or Portland’. I gave links to information about subsidies for both rail systems as well as energy data which shows that unless a train is full, it is less energy efficient than all of those folks in cars.
No answer as yet.
Pretty much everyplace passenger rail could work in this country, it’s already working.
That would be nowhere.
In every place where passenger rail is in use, is is a money loser that can only sustain operation with large tax dollar infusions. Passengers pay on average only 58 cents of every dollar it costs to operate a rail system. This is just operating costs. Every additional passenger is a net loss.
DC METRO’s answer: Advertizing to increase ridership.
Don’t get me wrong: I love trains. I love riding them and watching them, and rail freight is still pretty damned efficient. But passenger trains just do not fit the way we live as Americans, and you won’t easily change Americans to fit the Won’s vision of what America should be.
With conventional freight railroad track, they weld the rail by inundating the joint in thermite.
They stick a ceramic jug on top of the joint, filled with thermite, and then set it off. They end up with a bit of a blob where the rails connect, and they grind it down to the rail profile.
I saw the UP track guys replacing a rail section right off Exchange, and it never occurred to me that thermite would make such a stink.
It sounds like you were watching a patch. It seems that there would be a more practical/efficient way for forming new lines or replacing whole rails.
Professer Hale,
“Passengers pay on average only 58 cents of every dollar it costs to operate a rail system. This is just operating costs. Every additional passenger is a net loss.”
How much is it worth to you to get a gullible cell-phone yammering hippie off the road twice a day? I got 42¢ right here.
The problem with most rail proposals (other than the subsidies required to make them halfway workable) is that they generally also mandate too many stops in places nobody gives a damn about.
Folks drive to Indy from all over the state to get on a plane to go somewhere. I’m still more or less unconvinced that they wouldn’t do the same to take a long-distance train somewhere — if the train was an express that went straight to its destination, or maybe made one or two stops at most in major cities along the way.
If I could get on a train in Indy that went straight to Fort Myers without stopping, I’d do that in a heartbeat rather than fly. But that option doesn’t exist, and won’t for perfectly good reasons already enunciated by Og and commenters above :)
And I continue to maintain that it is damn difficult to drive a train into the side of a skyscraper, Silver Streak notwithstanding.
Tam,
42 cents on the dollar. A typical daily trip is 4-8 dollars x 22 working days per month. BTW, you are paying some of the other 58 cents too in the form of transit subsidies that are paid to the riders at their places of employment.
The cell-phone hippie is likely to still be using the road because the METRO doesn’t reach his neighborhood.
Nope. I read Trains magazine; that’s how they do it. Thermite.
I never thought passenger railroads were to make a profit, since the only time they did, the profit was made from the bags of mail stuffed into the mail cars attached to these trains. And that’s why I never complained when passenger airlines get bailed out – they provide a service crucial to keeping the nation going.
But since every spring I see the INDOT and local crews throw out the orange barrels en masse on tons of roads, and seldom see a rail bed rebuilt, I wonder where the cost of maintaining asphalt and concrete roads might go down if there was less traffic because people were on trains and buses (both electrified systems powered by the atom). And if I could go to Indy in the time it takes to drive, why not?
A lot of Amtrak’s time woes stem from the fact that they own no track, and are beholden to freight timetables. If they had their own track, it doesn’t even have to high speed rail, I bet you get a lot of times within driving time for jaunts like NY -> DC, LA -> SF, etc.
From the 1890’s to 1950’s, every small city on up had a streetcar or electrified bus line, and from anyone I ever spoke with from that era, all liked it and none thought it a waste.
You’ll never beat the airliner for distance travel.
GM killed the street cars with their buses.
The biggest problem isn’t where will the train(s) go, it’s how will you get to your final destination AFTER you get off the train.
Trains are cool. I’ve ridden many, many trains when I used to visit Europe on a regular basis, but here….too many miles, way too many miles….and far too few people…
All The Best,
Frank W. James
Frank outlines the problem.
People in the city think the train is a good idea as they see several thousand people going the same direction every day.
People in the country know it won’t work as they see one person a day going some where.
High speed rail needs to go between place to place without stopping in the middle to increase the rider load.
In the old days, around 1900 through 1950 or so, trains carried one passenger car, two to four box cars and one or two flat beds. One box car was for mail. They would stop in each town dropping some freight and getting some freight and add on the passenger from one town to another.
When most of the roads between towns was mud the train was a better deal. You would walk to the town and then ride the train.
At the turn of the last century there where thousands of small towns next to a rail stop.
As the country got richer we moved from rail to cars as the roads improved. Most of the little towns dried up as the work congregate in large areas and most primary and secondary roads are now paved so in a car you can load up and go 600 or so miles easy in a day. A train would take a week to cover the same distance as they are still stopping at each and every town. Fewer towns now, but the same process.
We no longer uses horses to get from place to place but we still have people who raise them and care for them. More as really big pets more than any kind of economic value. At least the government does not wany to make us use horses to go from place to place.
The train is a romantic nod to a simpler time, that was not so simple.
Man that was a lot longer that I thought it would be. Flame on.