AHC: Ride the rails to New York to Buenos Aries

naraht

With a POD after 1820, have the capability at any point to ride passenger rail from New York City to Buenos Aries. No more than 10% of the distance may be done with alternate forms of transportation. So a ferry around the Darien Gap is OK, but not a ferry from Miami to Belem.

(Decades of Darkness *may* manage to pull it off, but the POD is in 1809)
 

Elfwine

Does it have to be over one railroad company's tracks, or can the "no more than ten percent" be used judiciously to have independent lines but ones which still add up to a cross continental route?
 

W.W.A.F.T.

economic PODs which result in a wealthier south america could do it.

also if you could foster greater pan-american sentiment somehow. similarly, some sort of "american union" could perhaps result in a NY-BA railway.
 

wolf_brother

Banned
Argentina, Brazil, (Gran) Columbia, and Mexico all have the same luck and economic prosperity as the US did IOTL.

Otherwise total Ameriwank, with all of the Western hemisphere directly under Washington's control, thanks largely to ASBs ;)
 
Workable Goblin

Workable Goblin

Elfwine said:
Does it have to be over one railroad company's tracks, or can the "no more than ten percent" be used judiciously to have independent lines but ones which still add up to a cross continental route?
Click to expand...

Going by a strict interpretation of the OP, I personally would say it hardly matters how many different lines you might have to use, so long as you don't need to leave the rails for anything other than the Darien Gap and train transfers.

In any case, both of the prior posters have the right way to go about it. You need a more stable and wealthier South America (and Mexico).
 

Elfwine

truth is life said:
Going by a strict interpretation of the OP, I personally would say it hardly matters how many different lines you might have to use, so long as you don't need to leave the rails for anything other than the Darien Gap and train transfers.

In any case, both of the prior posters have the right way to go about it. You need a more stable and wealthier South America (and Mexico).
Click to expand...

Yeah (on South American and Mexico). I'm just thinking that the odds of anyone trying in any scenario to have a line specifically from New York to Buenos Aries seems pretty slim, but having a railroad network so as to allow one to ride a train (most of the time) from the two seems possible in certain circumstances if South America and Mexico are prosperous enough for a major railroad network.

Not sure what would really motivate a major north-south line through Mexico and through South America. Of this extent, that is.
 
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Lectruck

Trans American Railway line

Wow! All aboard!!! Yells the conductor!

I eagerly board the South American Tunnel Train. Speeding south from New York to Miami, then Across the Straight to Havana via the Keys Tunnel. Then to Cancun via the Yucatan Tunnel, then down Central American under the Panama Canal and thru the Andes Mountains, the via the raised Railway thru the Amazon Protected Preserve.

If we weren't going so fast it would have been beautiful. Finally arriving in the Capital of Argentina!!

Yes it was the trip of a life time, the things that can be done by Engineers in 1960 are amazing!!!

Editor of the New York Daily Planet
J Edgar Hoover
 

NothingNow

Banned
Lectruck said:
I eagerly board the South American Tunnel Train. Speeding south from New York to Miami, then Across the Straight to Havana via the Keys Tunnel. Then to Cancun via the Yucatan Tunnel, then down Central American under the Panama Canal and thru the Andes Mountains, the via the raised Railway thru the Amazon Protected Preserve.
Click to expand...

You do know how deep the Florida Strait is, don't you? It's 6,000ft deep in places. Of course, going under the Yucatan channel is even worse, since it's deeper, and far, far longer. You're better off going overland, and through the Darien Gap.
 

naraht

OP:Transferring is fine.

Definitely can change trains, lines, companies, power (acela like vs. Diesel vs. coal) or even have a break of gauge (different widths of track in neighboring countries) as long as you stay on trains for 90% of the distance.
 
NHBL

NHBL

Expansion...

Once there's an extensice rail net in various countries, the natural tendency is to connect them, so freight can run long distance.

Even if there's no long distance passenger service, you might be able to cahnge from one local to another.

At one point, you could go from m\north of Portland, Maine to the south of Florida, or to the Mississippi and well beyond, by local streetcar. At the Portsmouth, NH/Kittery, Maine line you needed to take a ferry, and had to walk across the Mississippi, but everything else was one streetcar to another--all local. Perhaps the trains will end up like that, too.
 
Workable Goblin

Workable Goblin

NothingNow said:
You do know how deep the Florida Strait is, don't you? It's 6,000ft deep in places. Of course, going under the Yucatan channel is even worse, since it's deeper, and far, far longer. You're better off going overland, and through the Darien Gap.
Click to expand...

That's why you would not use an underground tunnel for those things. I know there was a TL around a Florida Strait tunnel that addressed this...let me dig it up...

EDIT: Here.
 

Devvy

Donor
Probably the best bet is a POD allowing the Federal Republic of Central America and Gran Columbia to continue existance in some format. The larger the country, the more incentive there is to connect the various areas of the country via rail to move freight and people around as well as solidify the countries.

Early enough POD's will ensure that railways are built well before environmental considerations really hold back infrastructure works, so a railway could quite conceivably be built to cross the Darien Gap, as it would be well assured of plenty of rail traffic crossing it between north and south America.

Rail can easily run from the USA, into Mexico, through Central America into Columbia and run along the western coast of South America where it is a little flatter as far as Santiago. From there you'd probably need a short flight over to Buenos Aires as the mountains aren't easily crossable.

Obviously you'd probably need to change half a dozen times, but you would manage over 90% of the trip by train.

New York - Los Angeles
Los Angeles - Mexico City
Mexico City - Medellin
Medellin - Lima
Lima - Santiago

Maybe....
 

Admiral Brown

wolf_brother said:
Argentina, Brazil, (Gran) Columbia, and Mexico all have the same luck and economic prosperity as the US did IOTL.

Otherwise total Ameriwank, with all of the Western hemisphere directly under Washington's control, thanks largely to ASBs ;)
Click to expand...

Well Argentina had a very decent railway by the beginig of the century. It was conected to Chile (1910), uruguay, Brazil, Bolivia and Paraguay.

The biggest problems is that lines were built by different companies, and rail gauges differs.

This is a modern map, but most of it was already built by the first part of the century.

trenes.jpg
 
Workable Goblin

Workable Goblin

Admiral Brown said:
The biggest problems is that lines were built by different companies, and rail gauges differs.
Click to expand...

Different companies isn't really a problem; there were at least a dozen or so big US railways during their golden age (off the top of my head, the Union Pacific, the Central Pacific, the ATSF, the New York Central, the Southern Pacific, the Norfolk and Western, the Pennsylvania Railroad, the Great Northern, and there are a lot more that I don't remember), and our rail system is just fine (for freight). Argentina is smaller than the US, obviously, but it could probably support a half-dozen to dozen railroad companies in its heyday, with fewer as newer transportation options intrude.

Different gauges, however, is a big problem. Makes transshipment really hard. So figuring some way for them to standardize relatively early (ideally, considering the thread challenge, on 1435 mm) would be helpful.

EDIT: Also, I love how your map goes out of its way to say that it's only depicting effective national boundaries, and shouldn't be taken as a statement that those boundaries are indeed correct...
 

naraht

truth is life said:
Different companies isn't really a problem; there were at least a dozen or so big US railways during their golden age (off the top of my head, the Union Pacific, the Central Pacific, the ATSF, the New York Central, the Southern Pacific, the Norfolk and Western, the Pennsylvania Railroad, the Great Northern, and there are a lot more that I don't remember), and our rail system is just fine (for freight). Argentina is smaller than the US, obviously, but it could probably support a half-dozen to dozen railroad companies in its heyday, with fewer as newer transportation options intrude.

Different gauges, however, is a big problem. Makes transshipment really hard. So figuring some way for them to standardize relatively early (ideally, considering the thread challenge, on 1435 mm) would be helpful.

EDIT: Also, I love how your map goes out of its way to say that it's only depicting effective national boundaries, and shouldn't be taken as a statement that those boundaries are indeed correct...
Click to expand...

Argentina needed a civil war with the area with a single guage destroying things in the other half. :)

The Argentian-Chilean border issues make most of the border issues in North American (including Belize) look like a piece of cake.

Getting Rail from Buenos Aries to northern OTL Bolivia is one of the easier parts.
 

Color-Copycat

I'm just trying to picture how you could get the project done without hemorrhaging millions of dollars due to corruption and embezzlement of the funds. If you thought the Transcontinental's Cred Mobilier scandal was bad enough, just imagine the sort of antics that might play out in a project of this scale! :eek:
 
Workable Goblin

Workable Goblin

Color-Copycat said:
I'm just trying to picture how you could get the project done without hemorrhaging millions of dollars due to corruption and embezzlement of the funds. If you thought the Transcontinental's Cred Mobilier scandal was bad enough, just imagine the sort of antics that might play out in a project of this scale! :eek:
Click to expand...

Well, that's why everyone isn't talking about a single project, just a sort of "more railroads, to the point where you can hop train-to-train on the specified route". There'd be a lot of corruption, of course, but it would be larger because there were more projects, not because you're trying to do a single megaproject.
 
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