USA hit peak rail in 1913. Interurbans and trolleys had been losing money before WWII, with rationing only a 4 year reprieve.
The US decided instead, to have the best freight rail system on the planet, and left Passengers to Planes and Autos
AHC: The US with a high speed rail system as prolific as in East Asia or western Europe
- Thread starter Mitchell Hundred
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The US decided instead, to have the best freight rail system on the planet, and left Passengers to Planes and Autos
Look at the map above , the whole coast of China has high population density the US has nothing like that. Just relatively small areas here and there spread out.
Large swaths of the US do have the necessary population density and did have both extensive freight and passenger traffic. The problem is that our culture demands a one-size-fits-all solution to every problem. Trains won't work in Kansas? Well, the can't work in New Jersey then, either. Quicker to fly from Tulsa to Dallas? Better to fly from Minneapolis to Chicago then, too.
Just out of curiosity, how big is japan compared to, say, the east coast of the US? I mean, I can't visualize it too well.
To be fair, peak rail included thousands of miles of short run and narrow gauge industrial railroads for mining and lumbering industry. I can tell you that the miles of total track in Wisconsin dropped during that time frame significantly, as the big pine forest were consumed and the trackage became redundant.
Which is exactly my point, you said China's population density is just average and I was saying thats because half the country isn't really inhabited. The half that is is well above average density.
Then New Jersey can pay for it. There is no reason for Iowa to pay for a train going from Newark to Boston. If some guy wants to see his kid 15 min more a day he can pay for it. BTW, even CA can't seem to make rails pay. They have the highest population and are known for just burning money and even they can't afford it.
Japan is the size of CA but 90% of the population lives in an area the size of NJ as the center of the island is relatively empty.
Awful lot of federal tax dollars went into building and maintaining the interstate highway system across the great plains over the years. Just sayin'
This pretty much sums up objections to HSR in the US, but it fundamentally misunderstands the role/niche of HSR as well as what constitutes HSR.
The niche of HSR is city pairs of 1 million 200-500 mile apart with intermediate cities of 100k ~100 miles apart. The US has plenty of these, and with the lower population density, meaning less stops and restrictions the US doesn't need to build expensive 220mph trains to get good average point to point times. The US could use diesel trains doing 140mph on upgraded tracks to get a perfectly workable regional HSR in many regions. The super duper 220mph can be saved for the Bos-Wash or SD-LA-SF-Sac routes with it's tens of millions of people.
As for the PoD, the 1965 High Speed Ground Transportation Act bought 8 x 6 car 125mph electric metroliners for NY-DC and 2 x 3 car 100mph tilting turbo trains for NY-Bos. If the govt had matched the Turbo train buy with the Metroliner buy the US would have been able to put these 8 capacious, fast trains on non NEC routes as NY-Bos was electrified and metroliners used it. The Turbo train servies could perhaps be centred on Chicago or in California to generate a national appreciation of the benefits of fast trains. Americans love good service, and if provided one will use it.
Which everyone in the area uses instead of maybe a couple hundred or so.
Milwaukee Road and Chicago NorthWestern competed on the Chicago-Twin Cities run, and got 60 mph average(120mph on the straight), with stops, and Steam Engines. Only thing high tech, as it was, CTC controls. Otherwise, this was before automatic crossing gates, that just started to come into use in 1936, crossing lights before WWI, but most crossings were uncontrolled
Devvy
Donor
The only area(s) that have the population to sustain a high speed rail system are realistically below. Nothing is sustainable on a national scale unless you really want to run mostly empty trains...
Chicago is possible, but requires earlier intervention and works to provide/retain the rail routes required.
California is lol price as we can see in OTL; the mountains provide substantial difficulties.
Texas would have to be entirely new build, and has substantial politics against it.
However, as a last note, as I've said before on threads like this, the USA gets caught up in hype over headline speed. Yes the new trains in OTL can do 160mph. But this is pointless when the tracks you operate on have crumbling infrastructure. In my opinion, the money would be better spent overhauling the current trains and then upgrade/add more tracks, provide separated junctions, and widen electrification to allow faster trains to run on the branches (Harrisburg, Richmond/Newport, Albany/Buffalo)
A bridge with a 30mph speed limit from a 125-150mph track speed on either side costs approx 5-6 minute travel delay over top speed straight through. Get rid of level (grade?) crossings, add more triple/quadruple track where possible to allow high speed trains to operate continuously at high speed. NY to DC is 226 miles, basically 3 hours, average speed of circa 75mph. Even the former (pre-COVID) non-stop service from NY to DC takes 2:33 - average speed of 90mph for a non-stop 226 mile journey. Terrible. The money needs spending on the infrastructure rather than the trains to improve things.
And to link that back to this thread; there's no point in having a fancy 200mph high speed route between two cities, if you then use a crumbling urban rail route to access the city centre where you are caught behind freight trains, using road/rail level crossings, and arriving at a station with no onwards connections.
- Enlarged North East Corridor
- Chicago-based network
- California
- Texas Triangle
Chicago is possible, but requires earlier intervention and works to provide/retain the rail routes required.
California is lol price as we can see in OTL; the mountains provide substantial difficulties.
Texas would have to be entirely new build, and has substantial politics against it.
However, as a last note, as I've said before on threads like this, the USA gets caught up in hype over headline speed. Yes the new trains in OTL can do 160mph. But this is pointless when the tracks you operate on have crumbling infrastructure. In my opinion, the money would be better spent overhauling the current trains and then upgrade/add more tracks, provide separated junctions, and widen electrification to allow faster trains to run on the branches (Harrisburg, Richmond/Newport, Albany/Buffalo)
A bridge with a 30mph speed limit from a 125-150mph track speed on either side costs approx 5-6 minute travel delay over top speed straight through. Get rid of level (grade?) crossings, add more triple/quadruple track where possible to allow high speed trains to operate continuously at high speed. NY to DC is 226 miles, basically 3 hours, average speed of circa 75mph. Even the former (pre-COVID) non-stop service from NY to DC takes 2:33 - average speed of 90mph for a non-stop 226 mile journey. Terrible. The money needs spending on the infrastructure rather than the trains to improve things.
And to link that back to this thread; there's no point in having a fancy 200mph high speed route between two cities, if you then use a crumbling urban rail route to access the city centre where you are caught behind freight trains, using road/rail level crossings, and arriving at a station with no onwards connections.
Florida suddenly catches my eye. I would have never imagined that sort of population density. What are land prices like down there? I could imagine (for want of a better description) a high speed tram shuttling people between different tourist attractions in the say way a tram might link towns an extended beachfront.
Roads are inherently dual use. By facilitating the transportation of goods they open up the domestic market benefitting the entire nation's economy.
"But rails can be used for freight" Yes, they are, and the US actually has one of the best freight rail networks in the world. It's a well kept and hugely profitable industry. And it's frequently cited as one of the main reasons why US passenger rail sucks.
Dedicated passenger rails* don't have the same nationwide benefits.
*and that's what you need for true HSR, once you get over 200mph right of ways just aren't going to cut it, especially if you want to keep as tight to schedule as the Shinkansen does.
Yep, theres one of the several problems. A efficient freight railway is not very compatable with a efficient passenger railway.
Have followed these passenger railway discussions over the past five decades & for me they all circle back to separate regional dense networks. You can make the existing passenger service of the super urban clusters a more efficient and higher capacity, but connecting them beyond some relatively low capacity service, like we have now is not worth it.
Yeah, "everyone," all few dozen people who live in an average square mile of Kansas or Nebraska or whatever other Great Plains state you could use. Frankly, if you were being consistent with your argument, you would be arguing against Interstates across the Great Plains, also. Local traffic certainly doesn't justify roads with that kind of engineering standard (ergo cost), and cross-continental cargo traffic could just as well go by rail via piggy-back operations or containerized shipping at much lower cost to the government (after all, the rails are already built). Or even just via U.S. highways, again at lower cost to the government (since the federal government pays much less of the cost of building or maintaining them, and they're built to lower standards than Interstates). But it was felt that the overall benefit of having a nationally-integrated system would outweigh the cost of building a lot of deadweight infrastructure in thinly-populated areas and, lo and behold, it worked out.
You like to object to the idea of high-speed rail with the idea that the government shouldn't be subsidizing anything other than extremely heavily-used infrastructure that goes everywhere in at least the lower 48 (because, H1-H3 aside, it's not like the Interstate system is much use to people in Hawai'i or Alaska). But, also guess what, the U.S. does that all the time. There are tons of tiny little airports across the country that get federal money even though hardly anyone actually uses them for commercial travel--if you look at the lists on Wikipedia, for instance, you'll see plenty of airports with less than 36500 enplanements a year, i.e. less than 100 people per day using them on average. There are plenty of dams and canals that have few if any benefits for people across the country as a whole--what good does the Tennessee-Tombigbee do for someone in Oregon? What good does the Grand Coulee Dam do for someone in Alabama? And you could go on and on and on in this vein. If your argument was to be consistently applied, the U.S. government would essentially never fund any infrastructure anywhere in the country. Which, sure, you can argue, but you shouldn't really expect anyone else to follow you.
The fact of the matter is that the federal government subsidizes projects that are expected to directly benefit just one area or region of the country all the time, if for no other reason than to scratch everyone's back or, to put it more nobly, that growing the economy anywhere benefits Americans everywhere. There's no reason to think that high-speed rail networks, regional or not, are or should be different.