US Rail System Transportation?

HSR does not carry freight because it is not cost-efficient for freight trains to travel faster due to increased capital and fuel costs. If ground freight needs to travel faster than trains, it goes on a truck.
Nobody would ship coal or iron ore at high speed. But passenger trains did move mail and mail order goods. Goods on FedEx or UPS would be "light freight" that could move with passengers. Move the clock back to the days before Interstate highways, and trucks weren't as fast as they are now. And HSR does not have to mean 100mph or faster. Upgrades could elevate rails so they can pass congested areas at rural speeds of 60-80.
 

SsgtC

Banned
As railroads covered the country after the civil war, they were given government subsidies and land grants to build to a standard gauge. If mail order houses in Chicago can make faster deliveries nationwide, everyone will benefit. In OTL, the Santa Fe Super Chief made it from Chicago to Los Angeles in 63 hours. So, elevated HSR upgrades might only be practical in the east coast and great lakes corridors in congested areas. But that's where American manufacturing was concentrated in the railroad years. So why should a customer in Arkansas support a great lakes rail upgrade? Because repair parts from upstate New York will get there faster without the cost of air travel.
What?! Since when is HSR shipping freight?! It's not. HSR is a passenger railroad. They don't handle freight. At all. Even if freight shares the rails, it's being shipped at normal freight speeds of 40-70 MPH. If you need it faster, that's what airfreight is for. You put it on a plane or you load it onto a truck operated by a team that will run almost 24 hours a day
 

SsgtC

Banned
Nobody would ship coal or iron ore at high speed. But passenger trains did move mail and mail order goods. Goods on FedEx or UPS would be "light freight" that could move with passengers. Move the clock back to the days before Interstate highways, and trucks weren't as fast as they are now. And HSR does not have to mean 100mph or faster. Upgrades could elevate rails so they can pass congested areas at rural speeds of 60-80.
Ummmmmm, the actual, literal definition of High Speed Rail is speed in excess of 120 MPH for upgraded track and 160 MPH for new dedicated track.
 
As railroads covered the country after the civil war, they were given government subsidies and land grants to build to a standard gauge. If mail order houses in Chicago can make faster deliveries nationwide, everyone will benefit. In OTL, the Santa Fe Super Chief made it from Chicago to Los Angeles in 63 hours. So, elevated HSR upgrades might only be practical in the east coast and great lakes corridors in congested areas. But that's where American manufacturing was concentrated in the railroad years. So why should a customer in Arkansas support a great lakes rail upgrade? Because repair parts from upstate New York will get there faster without the cost of air travel.

Freight trains run just fine in the US, the railroad companies make a profit with manufacturers and wholesalers willing to pay for it without big subsidies. The problem is passenger trains don't pay off in the US. Of course, intercity travel is not a big problem. I have heard of few arguments about why a passenger train should run from say Philadelphia to Boston outside of "Other countries have them" or "I like trains".

Now, inside a city it makes more sense. Even then busses probably make more sense as they don't need expensive rail to be built. Congestion, pollution, energy efficiency are all problems easier solved by building more bus lines from East LA to West LA than building a very expensive HSR from LA to SF. You probably could build a bus system that covers virtually every street in LA and SF and run it for damn near free, if not free, for the same cost of building an HSR from LA to SF. One big benefit is those buses would actually be heavily USED.
 
Two possibilities occur to me, & both are probably ASB, but let me float 'em anyhow.

One, a national maglev system, entirely replacing existing rail. Yes, I know, crazy expensive, but it solves the issues of grade-climbing & fuel costs. (I know, it needs to avoid city centers to be really sensible. It isn't a perfect idea.)

Two, sell it as a national jobs program. Every Senator & Congressman wants pork for his district; this would provide it everywhere.

These two aren't mutually exclusive, either...
 
Two possibilities occur to me, & both are probably ASB, but let me float 'em anyhow.

One, a national maglev system, entirely replacing existing rail. Yes, I know, crazy expensive, but it solves the issues of grade-climbing & fuel costs. (I know, it needs to avoid city centers to be really sensible. It isn't a perfect idea.)

Two, sell it as a national jobs program. Every Senator & Congressman wants pork for his district; this would provide it everywhere.

These two aren't mutually exclusive, either...
Maglevs by themselves are still too slow to really compete with air travel over long distances, though once the cost issues are worked out they can indeed compete with air travel over more routes than regular rail can.

True long-distance travel that is superior to air travel will have to wait until vactrains are fully developed, which will probably be several decades from now.
 
I have heard of few arguments about why a passenger train should run from say Philadelphia to Boston outside of "Other countries have them" or "I like trains".
Because passenger trains, when deployed properly, can provide more energy-efficient transport than either cars or aircraft, while being substantially faster and more space-efficient than the former and more comfortable than the latter? Even looking at the United States, the rail from Boston to New York (almost as far as your Boston to Philadelphia) has a substantial mode share on that route, and greatly reduced the number of plane flights following that same corridor. Clearly passengers have found the service useful! Moreover, the fact that other countries have them should make you wonder: why do other countries have them? Why do they invest lots of money in building them? Maybe it's because...there actually are good reasons for using them in some places? Some places that are very similar to areas of the United States?

Even then busses probably make more sense as they don't need expensive rail to be built.
Busses are fundamentally limited in terms of capacity and throughput due to operating on the same streets as regular vehicles and having to meet dimensional limitations imposed by those streets. Similar objections apply to streetcars, also, and any other form of transit that isn't strictly grade-separated. While these problems can be addressed to some extent through infrastructure investments, you rapidly get to a point where you're spending as much or more on bus-specific infrastructure as you would on just building a train in the first place and dispensing with the pretense of "using busses" "because they're cheaper". Trains, in an urban transport context, also tend to be more labor-efficient because of the capacity issues mentioned above, so the cost of salaries is lower. Flooding a city with busses will just end up with traffic jams consisting of busses and little real improvement in transit performance, all at a much greater ongoing cost than you're supposing.
 
Because passenger trains, when deployed properly, can provide more energy-efficient transport than either cars or aircraft, while being substantially faster and more space-efficient than the former and more comfortable than the latter? Even looking at the United States, the rail from Boston to New York (almost as far as your Boston to Philadelphia) has a substantial mode share on that route, and greatly reduced the number of plane flights following that same corridor. Clearly passengers have found the service useful! Moreover, the fact that other countries have them should make you wonder: why do other countries have them? Why do they invest lots of money in building them? Maybe it's because...there actually are good reasons for using them in some places? Some places that are very similar to areas of the United States?

HSR is basically a prestige project. Other countries might do them but that doesn't mean we should. We shouldn't spend billions of dollars just for prestige. There never will be nearly enough passengers for it to pay off. There are simply not enough people going from Boston to Philly. Show me a way to get 300,000 passengers a day using trains and then we can talk.

Busses are fundamentally limited in terms of capacity and throughput due to operating on the same streets as regular vehicles and having to meet dimensional limitations imposed by those streets. Similar objections apply to streetcars, also, and any other form of transit that isn't strictly grade-separated. While these problems can be addressed to some extent through infrastructure investments, you rapidly get to a point where you're spending as much or more on bus-specific infrastructure as you would on just building a train in the first place and dispensing with the pretense of "using busses" "because they're cheaper". Trains, in an urban transport context, also tend to be more labor-efficient because of the capacity issues mentioned above, so the cost of salaries is lower. Flooding a city with busses will just end up with traffic jams consisting of busses and little real improvement in transit performance, all at a much greater ongoing cost than you're supposing.

Possibly, which means there may be a reason to build subways not intercity trains.
 
HSR is basically a prestige project. Other countries might do them but that doesn't mean we should. We shouldn't spend billions of dollars just for prestige.
Prestige might explain building one route. But when you're doing something for prestige you treat it like the Moon landings; maybe you do it a few times, but then more or less quietly quit and boast about how you did do it for fifty years afterwards. By contrast, most countries with a high-speed rail system have been actively expanding their route network, and not just a few times but many times, over decades, and often despite substantial political changes and shifts over that period of time. That indicates that they're seeing real value from the project, not just harvesting some empty boasts. They could do that fine with one decent line.

In any case, I notice that you conspicuously did not respond to any of my substantive points about the actual advantages that passenger rail has over road and air transport, or about how it actually has been successful on the actual route you are describing. Attacking the idea that when other people are doing something it might--gasp!--be something worth looking into doing yourself is more fun than acknowledging that there are in fact reasons to be in favor of investment in passenger rail other than "shiny choo-choos" or "because Japan," I guess.

There never will be nearly enough passengers for it to pay off. There are simply not enough people going from Boston to Philly. Show me a way to get 300,000 passengers a day using trains and then we can talk.
Okay, then. Show me how to get 300 000 vehicles a day using I-95. Show me how to get 300 000 passengers per day using Boston Logan or Philadelphia International. Here's a hint: you can't. Except for segments inside cities--in other words, the parts more like subways than intercity rail--none of the interstates come close to having 300 000 vehicles a day travel over them (so yes, even taking into account cargo transport they are not hitting your traffic figures). No airports in the United States except Hartsfield-Jackson see anything like 300 000 passengers a day (and even Atlanta is only 293 000). Nowhere in the entire world do that number of people travel between cities on a daily basis, except maybe during events like the Chinese New Year.

If you applied similar criteria to other industries, you would be arguing that Ford is a total failure because it doesn't sell 12 000 000 vehicles a year or that Apple is garbage because it only sells 200 000 000 phones a year and not half a billion. For that matter, as I just pointed out if you applied the same criteria to other forms of transportation you would never have built the American airport system (and even individual airports can cost as much as high-speed rail lines), the interstate system, or basically any other form of intercity transport. Applying a literally impossible standard to something and then declaring it worthless when it predictably can't meet it isn't a killer argument like you seem to think, it just shows that you're arguing in bad faith and have an irrational hatred of passenger rail.
 
Passenger rail cannot make money, so its value has to come from externalities like lowered pollution and road traffic, reduced city center traffic and parking requirements, reduced footprint compared to highways, and of course improved public perception of the governments and politicians that put it together (if it works).
 
Passenger rail cannot make money, so its value has to come from externalities like lowered pollution and road traffic, reduced city center traffic and parking requirements, reduced footprint compared to highways, and of course improved public perception of the governments and politicians that put it together (if it works).
And as history has shown, once the government gets involved it turns into the graft and kickbacks game.
 
Okay, then. Show me how to get 300 000 vehicles a day using I-95. Show me how to get 300 000 passengers per day using Boston Logan or Philadelphia International. Here's a hint: you can't. Except for segments inside cities--in other words, the parts more like subways than intercity rail--none of the interstates come close to having 300 000 vehicles a day travel over them (so yes, even taking into account cargo transport they are not hitting your traffic figures). No airports in the United States except Hartsfield-Jackson see anything like 300 000 passengers a day (and even Atlanta is only 293 000). Nowhere in the entire world do that number of people travel between cities on a daily basis, except maybe during events like the Chinese New Year.

If you applied similar criteria to other industries, you would be arguing that Ford is a total failure because it doesn't sell 12 000 000 vehicles a year or that Apple is garbage because it only sells 200 000 000 phones a year and not half a billion. For that matter, as I just pointed out if you applied the same criteria to other forms of transportation you would never have built the American airport system (and even individual airports can cost as much as high-speed rail lines), the interstate system, or basically any other form of intercity transport. Applying a literally impossible standard to something and then declaring it worthless when it predictably can't meet it isn't a killer argument like you seem to think, it just shows that you're arguing in bad faith and have an irrational hatred of passenger rail.

I am not saying 300,000 a day on one line but 300,000 a day in the entire US. Atlanta alone gets that from airflights. It is like saying because I think you need to sell millions of cars a year to keep in business your objection is millions of cars aren't sold a year in LA. LA isn't the entire US.
 
The only country even close in size to the US that has HSR is China. And China is a totalitarian dictatorship with four times the population.
There's a reason I said areas of the United States. I can run down the list if you really like, but there are many areas of the United States where passenger rail would clearly be competitive with flying and driving, all the usual places people point at: the Northwest Corridor, the Northeast Corridor, the Texas Triangle, and so on.

And because it'll be brought up immediately: Yes, actually Idaho and Kansas and Hawai'i will support a bill paying for this kind of thing, because it would almost certainly be folded into a general transportation bill that provides funding for their transport needs and because state identity doesn't actually matter as much these days as party identity. You don't exactly see a lot of opposition from Hawai'i to the Interstate Highway system even though it doesn't do us much good (never mind the H-roads, because you hardly needed the Interstate system to get something like them built), precisely because the bills authorizing transportation spending also include projects relevant to Hawai'i. Experience shows that the country is in fact pretty ready to subsidize infrastructure projects that mostly benefit one part of it, rather than being totally parochial and unwilling to have the federal government spend anything on anything that doesn't provide an immediate benefit to them.

I am not saying 300,000 a day on one line but 300,000 a day in the entire US. Atlanta alone gets that from airflights. It is like saying because I think you need to sell millions of cars a year to keep in business your objection is millions of cars aren't sold a year in LA. LA isn't the entire US.
Then you should have specifically said so, because as it is your statement strongly implies that you want 300 000 people a day traveling between Philadelphia and Boston. It would be as if you had been discussing LA, LA, LA, and mentioned that you thought you needed to be selling millions of cars per year, with no hint that you meant "globally" instead of "in LA".

In any case, if you want 300 000 a day across the whole country, well, Amtrak, as shambolic as it is, is already a third of the way there (87 000 people per day, to be exact, so somewhat less than one-third). If you built all of the major corridors people talk about--Portland-Vancouver, Texas Triangle, California, Chicago-Midwest--and upgraded the Northeast Corridor to the level that Amtrak talks about so that it wouldn't take more than three hours or so to travel all the way from Boston to Washington, you'd probably (I am not going to actually run the numbers--too much work) be pretty close to 300 000 people/day using passenger rail, considering real-world displacement effects from air and road transport. Not cheap, but then neither were airports or highways.
 

marathag

Banned
If mail order houses in Chicago can make faster deliveries nationwide, everyone will benefit.
Railroad Express Agency: A UPS/FedEx launched during Wilson's nationalization of the Nation's Railroads on entering WWI, so fast freight and parcels would not be interrupted.

It was a forced merger of the main existing Express services, Adams Express Company, American Express Company, Southern Express Company, and Wells Fargo, and known as the American Railway Express, Inc

In 1929, the ARE was recreated as the Railroad Express Agency, owned in common by the over 80 Class One railroads in the US at that time.

From just before WWII started for the USA, REA had started to specialize on refrigerated cargoes. This remained profitable to the mid '50s, where the Highways with Semis pulling Reefers were able to provide faster service, and cheaper.
Parcel traffic was also starting to go by Truck, along with Baked Goods, Fruit, Milk and all that sort.

The REA tried, and botched, an attempt with what today would be Containers and with Trailers on Flatbeds for piggyback service, and then Truck delivery for the Last Mile, in the early '60s.

By the end of the '60s, REA was operating deep in the Red, hurt as without passenger trains, there were fewer consists to attach an REA Express Car to. It shambled on to 1975, when it was finally put out of it's misery.
 
In any case, if you want 300 000 a day across the whole country, well, Amtrak, as shambolic as it is, is already a third of the way there (87 000 people per day, to be exact, so somewhat less than one-third). If you built all of the major corridors people talk about--Portland-Vancouver, Texas Triangle, California, Chicago-Midwest--and upgraded the Northeast Corridor to the level that Amtrak talks about so that it wouldn't take more than three hours or so to travel all the way from Boston to Washington, you'd probably (I am not going to actually run the numbers--too much work) be pretty close to 300 000 people/day using passenger rail, considering real-world displacement effects from air and road transport. Not cheap, but then neither were airports or highways.

A bit optimistic in IMO but it is a start. Now tell me how in the hell you are going to get the senators from places like Idaho and Montana to sign on to it when their constituents gain not dime one from it and yet are forced to pay for it. Why they should pay money so some guy in LA can spend 15 more minutes a day with his kid.

Also how this can be done at a reasonable cost. Even CA had to give up the most populous state in the union. The cost of which would have probably exceeded over $100 billion and still not do what they said it would.

Why it should be done when you can spend a fraction of the money to do more by building subways in LA and SF. Everything on your list would be cheaper and have more of an impact by doing local mass transit. Congestion, pollution and energy savings are both cheaper and done more easily with local subways.
 
From just before WWII started for the USA, REA had started to specialize on refrigerated cargoes. This remained profitable to the mid '50s, where the Highways with Semis pulling Reefers were able to provide faster service, and cheaper.
Parcel traffic was also starting to go by Truck, along with Baked Goods, Fruit, Milk and all that sort.

The REA tried, and botched, an attempt with what today would be Containers and with Trailers on Flatbeds for piggyback service, and then Truck delivery for the Last Mile, in the early '60s.
With little question, long distance movement by rail is more energy efficient than that by cars, trucks or air. In the thirties and forties, America's large supply of cars and trucks changed the dividing line that made trucks and cars more practical. Rails in the smallest towns reverted to farm and heavy freight only. Milk and eggs are handled locally, so rail delivery quickly disappeared. In 1950, it looks liked REA was still working. When jets came along, it was obvious 1000-mile passenger trips would leave the rails. But a 250 mile trip in 1950 might take 6 hours by car and 4 hours by rail. But all of the improvements went to shortening the highway run to 4 hours as opposed to tuning up the rail lines to shorten it to 3 or 3-1/2 hours.

Americans entered the fifties with cheap fuel and the dream of suburban living as Detroit cranked out the cars. Europe, on the other hand, continued to support rail travel over 200 and 400 mile spans. This does not mean true HSR, it means tuning up bottlenecks. In the early sixties, Americans sang of "Little GTO" and "Dead Man's Curve;" ending the decade with muscle cars and 19-cent per gallon gasoline. Europeans, on the other hand, paid two or three times as much for gas.

The Santa Fe railroad ran the Super Chief from Chicago to Los Angeles in 63 hours. Compare this time with delivery times of parcel post, UPS and FedEx.
 

SsgtC

Banned
The Santa Fe railroad ran the Super Chief from Chicago to Los Angeles in 63 hours. Compare this time with delivery times of parcel post, UPS and FedEx.
Yeah, UPS, FedEx and even the USPS are all significantly faster. They can all have a package there in less than 24 hours. In some cases in just over 12 hours. Even the economy options for UPS and FedEx will beat 63 hours. Even ground shipping will get it there In about 40 hours. And no one is building an HSR line from Chicago to Los Angeles to make the run competitive
 
Now tell me how in the hell you are going to get the senators from places like Idaho and Montana to sign on to it when their constituents gain not dime one from it and yet are forced to pay for it. Why they should pay money so some guy in LA can spend 15 more minutes a day with his kid.
It was in reply to SsgtC so you might not have seen it but this post broadly addresses your question.
 
Maglevs by themselves are still too slow to really compete with air travel over long distances
As constituted now, maybe. What upper speed limit are you seeing? Because I see Mach 1 as mine. There's no reason I see a maglev can't do that. And I see even a 400mph maglev with advantages in city center to city center. It doesn't have quite that edge if there are a lot of stops involved, but that might mean two types of train (so to speak): an interurban/radial that stops a lot (& accelerates & decelerates much faster) & a long-distance (slower, perhaps, to peak speed, but it stays there much longer). (Notice, too, the acceleration/deceleration issue, which contributes to shorter trip time--& even a slow maglev beats conventional rail on that one.)

This also gets around many of the issues of grade, & energy inefficiency (tho, TBH, I can't see how trucking, in any way, is more energy efficient). As noted elsewhere, maglevs really do like straight lines, even more than HSR, so that's an issue that needs working out--but if you're doing HSR at all, it does, so...

BTW, lighter passenger cars enable better accel/decel, too, which help make HSR practical.
its value has to come from externalities like lowered pollution and road traffic, reduced city center traffic and parking requirements, reduced footprint compared to highways
Those all sound like really good reasons to be supporting it everywhere...& reasons to encourage use so it will actually make money.

Edit:
Something I'm not seeing addressed: taxes.

Rail companies don't get their construction & maintenance subsidized by the taxpayers like trucking companies & airlines do, & they have to pay taxes on the land under their rails, which truckers & airlines don't.

How much more profitable is passenger rail, HSR or not, if there's no tax on the rails? I've seen it said if passenger rail got even half what highways do in public money, it would make a profit.

Edit 2:
Now tell me how in the hell you are going to get the senators from places like Idaho and Montana to sign on to it when their constituents gain not dime one from it and yet are forced to pay for it.
Two ways. One's already been discussed: put it in a transportation bill where they're getting highway money already.

Two is the old-fashioned DC logroll: offer them pork.:rolleyes: No Senator will turn it down.:rolleyes::angry: (And I should have thought to mention this long ago.:oops: )
 
Last edited:
Top