High Speed Fail
As was touched upon by others in the comments yesterday, there are some very good reasons High Speed rail will not work here.
One of them, and the biggest of them, is the infrastructure, or lack of it. The existing rail that Amtrak shares with freight is not smooth enough for high speed transit. Ever watch freight cars rock back and forth as they go over a turnout or grade crossing? this type of motion is fine for a heavy freight car moving along at 45 mph, but it would derail a fast moving, light passenger train.
As Ed pointed out, the rails get welded together (yes, thermite is the commonest method) and the individual pieces of rail are sometimes as much as a mile long. A mile of continuous welded rail will grow in summer and shrink in winter- that mile long piece of steel will be 101″ longer at 100 degrees than at 0 degrees! To prevent the rail from just leaving the track it is secured to plates, which hinder it’s growth. And consequently the rail will weave and buckle all up and down the line.
The only meaningful method of making high speed rail is to use a maglev or Monorail approach, using non contact type bearings that will allow the train cars to ‘Float. Any contact type rail will naturally involve wear and require replacement, which over any distance will be expensive, and cannot be shared with other types of transport.
The Maglev type systems now in use in mainland China are excellent examples, and work well, but as other commenters have pointed out, our very automobile driven western society does not lend itself to train transport. If trains were parked on commercial air routes, then it might make sense to travel by rail instead of air- and personally, the idea of getting on a train and going cross country at speed appeals to me a GREAT deal, because I LOVE trains. I used to get on the City of New Orleans on a friday at the Homewood Illinois station and ride down to baton Rouge to visit with friends on a weekend, then ride it back up to be home in the wee small hours. Would I use high speed rail? Certainly! Even if just to say I had. Is it a grand idea whose time has come? Not even in the Won’s wet dreams.
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The problem with track expansion is pretty much handled, even with continuous welded rail (CWR). The big railroads use it all over the place and it works well for them, without buckling or weaving. So that’s not really a problem, even for high speed rail.
The real problem is that–as a commentor pointed out in the other thread–high speed trains need their own tracks. Amtrack leases trackage from other railroads and you can’t get much speed even out of a TGV or Shinkansen when it has to wait at a siding for a slow freight to rumble past.
It’s also really expensive to lay track. Not only must you buy the land the track is lain upon; you must install signage, signals, grade crossings, fences, and-and-and, all of which costs money. For a high-speed train, it’s correspondingly more expensive because (for example) a simple two-gate grade crossing won’t do; you need to have barriers and warning signs and all kinds of other things to ensure some dumbass in a beat-up pickup truck doesn’t decide to drive around the gate because “There ain’t no train comin’!”
It’s not practical here. Furthermore, the federal government is spending 175% of its income; we don’t have the money.
x2 on the money. We don’t have it and no amount pissed down the hole will prime any enterprise.
I have a friend who is a geological engineer specializing in road bed construction, both rail and tire driven.
He and his company have been working with major rail lines that are experiencing “liquification” of some roadbed substrates caused by harmonic vibrations set up at certain speeds and by certain weight within rail cars, And the number of them rolling.
Its similar to what happens to some soils during earthquakes, evident in Japan recently….and way over my simple woodworker’s head.
Point being is that trying to put in a homogeneous rail system across vastly different substrates causes all manner of demons to arise from Momma Gaia.
Stan, just shakes his head and mutters: “dummasses!”
Laying track always was a tremendously expensive operation, cf the first transcontinental railroad in the 1860’s — Credit Mobilier got a tremendously huge amount of land from the government, as I recall, a sort of checkerboard of sections along the main line, alternating one side to the other. It had been pitched since 1965 as graft and corruption, but I think it was just because of the terribly expense of laying track, and in 1865 the Feds had land, not cash.
“So that’s not really a problem, even for high speed rail.”
lol.
I wonder where you got that idea? The average Amtrak diesel is an F40, and they can’t GET over 60 miles an hour, and if you took one up to 60 mph on the average rail line for any length of time, the majority of the passengers would be horking from seasickness. What’s “visually” straight on a rail line is hopelessly weavey for a passenger car at speed. In the cab of a diesel pulling freight cars, you can feel it like crazy.
The only possible solution, is to run the entirety of any highspeed rail network as an elevated system.
Monorail, suspended or just raised rail, it doesn’t matter. It just has to be above the grade of conflicting traffic, be a system of rail dedicated to passenger travel, and not in any way woven into the existing ground (freight) infrastructure.
Going further though, it also has to be truly HIGH frikken SPEED between major destinations, without undue stops in Hogwaller, OH, Swampbucket, FL, or Goatporker, CA.
And it is the mere fact that bypassing those delightful (if only imaginary) boroughs, that’d doom such a system to political oblivion.
Being in flyover country, we can handle. But to be bypassed by the bullet train a quarter mile from your door?
Ain’t. Gonna. Happen.
That’s the pity, too. I’d gladly ride a non TSA fucked highspeed rail to Orlando.
Oh, did I mention TSA? Yeah, they’re gonna fuck up ANY good rail system, anyway.
Hell with it, I’m driving.
Jim
Sunk New Dawn
Galveston, TX
High speed rail?
I’d settle for continuous running rail.
Try getting from Anna Arbor to Chicago via Amtrak.
You have no idea when you’ll actually get there.
If you’re going to a trade show and don’t need to drive, park and want to relax on the ride (if the heat/ac is working in your car) it’s nice.
But don’t make an appointment based on when you’ll get there. You may be sidetracked in Kalamazoo for a few hours wondering why.
Well, the problems you mention are due to running passenger trains on freight rail. Freight rail is built for “slow and steady”, so it’s fine if the ride isn’t silky smooth.
I figure that there is the TGV and the Shinkansen and the WTF-ever they have in China–so I expect the ride quality issues have solutions.
We’re not going to be using those kinds of trains on rail which is built for freight, no–which is all the track we’ve got in the US–but if we were to build a rail line specifically for high speed rail, the ride issues you mention would not be present. At least, I’d hope so.
“the ride issues you mention would not be present.”
Of course not. They don’t use CWR on high speed, they use lapped rail in short sections that overlap one another.
CWR doesn’t really improve ride quality beyond getting rid of the clickity clackity’s. (yeah there’s more to it)
Heat expansion will still cause CWR to buckle. The rail bed and ballast will still degrade due to weight, weather and underlying substrate. Wooden ties, spikes and tie plates will still fall apart.
Get a SD-90(or three) up to 70mph with 6000 tons behind you and you can feel every bit of bad track, as well as every hill and turn.
The Shinkasen rails are welded and ground but have these weird lap joints that prevent expansion from causing the rail to wobble or buckle. I’m not sure exactly how they do it but if I ever get to examine one again I’ll take pictures.
I came to this post from a link at Snowflakes in Hell, and felt I needed to point one thing out.
“The problem with track expansion is pretty much handled, even with continuous welded rail (CWR). The big railroads use it all over the place and it works well for them, without buckling or weaving. So that’s not really a problem, even for high speed rail.”
What’s “handled” and “not really a problem” for trains moving at even 80-90 mph can be deadly to a train moving at even 125 mph (the low-end “official” definition of high-speed rail). It’s handled for freight and low-speed passenger rail, but I doubt that it’s handled for high-speed rail without either extensive modification and upgrading or simply laying new dedicated tracks.