US Rail System Transportation?

SsgtC

Banned
While seriously unlikely, I have wondered if in states like California, as they were building out their impressive highway system, they could have designed them to include passenger rail, light, medium, or heavy.
No. The highway goes a lot of places that rail can't. The grades are too steep for rail. Plus, other than I-5 linking San Diego-Los Angeles-Sacramento, there other interstates are kind of a road to nowhere. Especially at the time they were being built. I-40 runs across nothing but dessert and then dead ends at Barstow, while I-15 is nothing but desert outside of San Diego and Los Angeles. And again, at the time the interstate is being built, Las Vegas isn't the city it is today
 

Marc

Donor
No. The highway goes a lot of places that rail can't. The grades are too steep for rail. Plus, other than I-5 linking San Diego-Los Angeles-Sacramento, there other interstates are kind of a road to nowhere. Especially at the time they were being built. I-40 runs across nothing but dessert and then dead ends at Barstow, while I-15 is nothing but desert of of Los Angeles. And again, at the time the interstate is being built, Las Vegas isn't the city it is today

Hmmm, there once a was a fairly trafficked line out to Palm Springs and the Cochella Valley - about 8 trains regularly, including one that actually came down from the Bay area.

I was more thinking of taking advantage of interurban connections, a webbing of rail in the two megapolitan regions (SanSan - San Diego to Santa Barbara - and the Greater Bay) piggybacking on the vast freeway build-out.
I know, very impractically political at the time, just a small supposing.
 

marathag

Banned
While seriously unlikely, I have wondered if in states like California, as they were building out their impressive highway system, they could have designed them to include passenger rail, light, medium, or heavy.
shutterstock_127554866-1.jpg


Impossible to put anything beyond a narrow gauge RR along the Coast, ans where the other US highways were at

Here is where you can put mainline rail, per 1948
ca-nv-1948.jpg
 
When people use "racism" to mean "Anything I don't like"
True.

However, in the case I mentioned, it was specifically designed to keep blacks out of some neighborhoods, since blacks used trams & (IIRC) couldn't afford buses (or buses didn't run the same routes). And I'm not the one who called that racist, I'm just repeating what I read (source, however, I can't recall...).
 
shutterstock_127554866-1.jpg


Impossible to put anything beyond a narrow gauge RR along the Coast, ans where the other US highways were at
That's exactly where a lot of rail lines go.
171106DallSheep01.jpg
(source)
We have about 40 miles of that south of Anchorage, and I've seen pictures of railroads built like that all over the world. Along the coast is the usual place to put rail lines in difficult terrain.
 

marathag

Banned
I look at those curves & ask myself if blasting away more of the cliff (not tunnelling) to straighten the route would have been insanely expensive.
Curves are worse than gradients, as unlike hills, just adding more HP won't solve the problem of rolling resistance

A curve gets you in operating costs, averaging 27% higher than straight, as curves incur more costs, as there is more rail wear, flange wear, more and better tie plates, more spikes on those plates, tiesw don't last as long,etc,etc
 

SsgtC

Banned
That's exactly where a lot of rail lines go.
171106DallSheep01.jpg
(source)
We have about 40 miles of that south of Anchorage, and I've seen pictures of railroads built like that all over the world. Along the coast is the usual place to put rail lines in difficult terrain.
So, are we all just gonna ignore the goat at the bottom of the picture? Lol
 
True.

However, in the case I mentioned, it was specifically designed to keep blacks out of some neighborhoods, since blacks used trams & (IIRC) couldn't afford buses (or buses didn't run the same routes). And I'm not the one who called that racist, I'm just repeating what I read (source, however, I can't recall...).

Well, that would be racist. Unless I missed it that wasn't mentioned in your previous posts.
 
Well, that would be racist. Unless I missed it that wasn't mentioned in your previous posts.

I recall reading that in addition to redlining, when highway overpasses were built in many US cities, they were deliberately made too low for buses to go under, to keep minorities who relied on public transit out of certain neighbourhoods. Granted, that could be apocrypha, as it would also stop trucks from being able to get through, among other problems.
 
I look at those curves & ask myself if blasting away more of the cliff (not tunnelling) to straighten the route would have been insanely expensive.
If you're building HSR, then yes, tunneling would be preferred for a straighter route. But that's not required there, and in fact there was a small straightening project which blasted away more of the cliff to straighten the highway a few years ago.
 

Marc

Donor
ca-nv-1948.jpg


This is an astonishingly good map. Thank you very much for finding it and sharing.
I see California in many ways as a paradigm and microcosm for the United States: its size and spread, its rapidly growing population over the decades, now having 11% of the total American population; and as playing such a major historical role in various kinds of transportation.
 
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marathag

Banned
This is an astonishingly good map. Thank you very much for finding it and sharing.
I see California in many ways as a paradigm and microcosm for the United States: its size and spread, its rapidly growing population over the decades, now having 11% of the total American population; and as playing such a major historical role in various kinds of transportation.
rest of the States here
LINK

And here is what the US Highway system was like in 1955
american-highways-map-17.jpg
 
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rest of the States here
LINK

And here is what the US Highway system was like in 1955
That highway map is very incomplete. Where are US 24 and US 67 in Illinois? Where's the Pennsylvania Turnpike, opened before 1950. And the Turner Turnpike, opened in 1953? The rail maps are from the forties, when many smaller lines were likely gone. I can't find a good reference, but I heard Eminence, Missouri in the Ozarks was a big source for railroad ties back in the twenties, but it is not shown on the map from the forties.
 

marathag

Banned
That highway map is very incomplete. Where are US 24 and US 67 in Illinois? Where's the Pennsylvania Turnpike, opened before 1950. And the Turner Turnpike, opened in 1953? The rail maps are from the forties, when many smaller lines were likely gone. I can't find a good reference, but I heard Eminence, Missouri in the Ozarks was a big source for railroad ties back in the twenties, but it is not shown on the map from the forties.

US Highways, and not toll roads, I imagine for some of that, for the others, some maps deliberately left things out to see who was copying them, or adding fake cities.

But 24 should have gone to Quincy. That's weird
 
US Highways, and not toll roads, I imagine for some of that, for the others, some maps deliberately left things out to see who was copying them, or adding fake cities.

But 24 should have gone to Quincy. That's weird
The map looks like it came from a goal-specific travel atlas. Where's Orlando, Florida?
 
Curves are worse than gradients
I didn't realize they cost so much more to build, too.:eek:

What I was getting at, tho. was the impact on speed, & the initial cost: is blowing up the mountain so much more expensive than a curve? It looks like it wouldn't have been. Which raises the obvious question: why didn't they do that? Or was the highway built first, so they couldn't? (That's what it looks like.)
Well, that would be racist. Unless I missed it that wasn't mentioned in your previous posts.
If I didn't specifically say so, I should have. That's what I meant.
 
A lot of the interstates were built where rail is impractical. As pointed out earlier you need very flat land for railroads while you can build roads almost anywhere. The places where rail was practical already had rail.
I'm not suggesting an entirely new system in parallel to what already exists. I'm saying, take the idea (& money) associated with IHS & apply it to getting faster train service, using national defense as a convenient excuse.
 
But you don’t have defense as an excuse. You can’t ship tanks and jeeps on a HSR. Just the troops with no equipment and that is useless. As fo regular trains. The US had the best freight system in the world when the IHS was being built. So nothing to improve.
As for speed. Keep in mind that most trains travel slower then the could go by choice. In the days of steam it was a rule of thumb that a freight engine could do its wheel diameter in MPH. And a passenger train could do about25% better then that assuming that they did not just stick on more cars (what they usually did).
So the slow speed is at least partially by choice.

No matter how we bounce this back and forth we can’t avoid that most HSR lines across the world lose money and must be suplimented. The few exceptions are mostly in very high population areas or between close high population cities. And that HSR is only useful for passenger traffic but is to slow for long distance travel on the scale of the US. So is effectively a regional system. It is just that most countries are so much smaller that the effectively only are the size of US regions and thus their HSR systems are basically just regional systems.
So in order to get a system in the US it needs to be regional. Not national as the cost of a national system is prohibitive even to the US. But that not group of states wants to foot the bill for HSR. And no one wants to pay for a regional system that they are not part of so you want get a regional system payed for nationally.

So once again we are back to the fact that nobody has ever built a HSR system on this scale. The closest we get is the work China is doing and they are a dictatorship so they don’t need approval by voters or elected officials so that does not count.
 
^There's also Spain, but they had a good express service anyway with the Talgos before the AVE came online. As for freight - even the best freight rail system could use improvement, even at slower speeds.
 
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