Infrastructure WIs

WI the US had a functional HSR system in the '80s?

That depends on what you mean by functional HSR. That did sorta exist in the Northeast with the Metroliners, which regularly got up to 125 miles per hour in revenue service. The problem is that passenger rail got the short end of the stick starting in the 1950s, because the transport focus was aimed at the Interstate Highway system and airports. The first commercial jets, namely the Boeing 707 and DC-8, all but killed passenger rail travel in America across long distances. It's only being revived now because air transport is now very crowded and the pollution concerns of jet airliners are becoming more obvious.

If you want real HSR to survive, Your best bet is to have Washington decide to help the freight rail lines in the 1950s at the same time as they begin building the Interstate Highway System. Justifying that is simple - have Eisenhower say that the railroads carried all the load that could be asked of them on their backs during WWII, and in a war, rail transport would be needed to move such big quantities of goods across the nation. With help coming to them and regulatons on them relaxed, simply have one of the freight railroads take the plunge and build a full-blown high-speed route, or perhaps a few railroads build to a similar standard and specifications, allowing for a longer network - say, Chicago to New York.

Well, if you want to hash out what, exactly, I have an old AH Challenge thread...let me dig that up...Here it is!
 
Last edited:
Here's a crazy What If: What If the government (both Federal and State) actually sufficiently funded infrastructure projects? Railroads and highways, especially bridges, are in dire need of maintanence and overhauling. I guess it's because bridges can't vote, so the politicians just don't care.
 
Here's a crazy What If: What If the government (both Federal and State) actually sufficiently funded infrastructure projects? Railroads and highways, especially bridges, are in dire need of maintanence and overhauling. I guess it's because bridges can't vote, so the politicians just don't care.

Oh yes, that would be lovely. You know, I saw an observation made at another site that it seems the US hasn't actually done anything since the early '70s. As in, almost all of our infrastructure, plant, whatever you want to call it, was done then, and has just been maintained (poorly, as you point out) since.
 
Oh yes, that would be lovely. You know, I saw an observation made at another site that it seems the US hasn't actually done anything since the early '70s. As in, almost all of our infrastructure, plant, whatever you want to call it, was done then, and has just been maintained (poorly, as you point out) since.


Could take it out of the Pentagon's half-trillion dollar budget. After all, roads, rail and power cables could be classified as national defense/security. And (this is just my opinion mind you) just eliminate welfare and spend that money on something useful that will benefit society; like new bridges.
 
Oh yes, that would be lovely. You know, I saw an observation made at another site that it seems the US hasn't actually done anything since the early '70s. As in, almost all of our infrastructure, plant, whatever you want to call it, was done then, and has just been maintained (poorly, as you point out) since.

There is probably a lot in this. If there is perhaps it might be instructive to look at what was different in US society compared to now. I once read that during the 60s the US middle class was proprtionally much bigger than today and relatively better off. Perhaps there is a link between this and the infrastructure boom.
 
Every single day on my way to and from work, I wonder why the UK governments of the 50s and 60s never completed a 3 lane motorway through North East England through to Scotland.

The three lane A1(M) finishes around the Leeds area and after that it's dual carriageway pretty much all the way to Newcastle and north of Newcastle, it's a single carriageway all the way to Edinburgh.

I'm regularly held up in traffic on the A1 in Gateshead. What would North East England be like today if we had a better road artery?
 
I've been reading this site for years on and off, and I guess now's as good a time as any to actually post something. As of late, I've found myself more and more a fan of local-level infrastructure PODs, largely in relation to transportation (as an urban planning student with a heavy interest in transport planning, that's pretty much a given).

Here's two I can think of just off the top of my head. They both relate to the City of Toronto, because that's where I live, so they'll probably be somewhat incomprehensible to anyone who doesn't know the area.

-What if Toronto's second subway line was built along Queen Street, as planned originally, instead of Bloor Street and Danforth Avenue? The POD is simple (just have the province refuse to budge on changing the location of the line, unlike in real life where they caved to the TTC and agreed to allow the line on Bloor-Danforth), but the effects wide-ranging. Extensions to the suburbs would be much harder, as Queen runs into the lake before even reaching Scarborough, and extensions to the west would be much closer to the lake than they are now, leaving people from further north in Etobicoke with a longer ride to the subway. The Queensway (in Etobicoke, anyway) would be much more important and much more urbanized than it is today, since I see it as the most likely route for western extensions to a Queen Subway. In the east, I could see them sending the line up Greenwood or possibly Donlands (maybe even Pape or Coxwell) to serve East York, then east to Scarborough (possibly through Thorncliffe Park and then east along Eglinton, putting today's Kennedy Station in about the same place as TTL's Kennedy Station). Since the University Subway was a part of the Bloor-Danforth project and it really doesn't make that much sense in a world without Bloor-Danforth, I don't see it as likely to exist, which would put far more strain on the downtown section of the Yonge line by today (seeing as how it's already above capacity in OTL, where there's a parallel line a few blocks away). I could see this leading to the construction of a downtown relief line by the 1990s, probably along Bloor and Danforth, especially when you consider how the Bloor Streetcar (assuming the streetcar abandonment policy doesn't go through ITTL, as it didn't in OTL) would be a rough analogue to today's Queen Streetcar (far over capacity, slow, and unreliable).

For the sake of full disclosure, a TL almost exactly like this was done a long time back by someone on a Toronto transit site I know of. It is pretty much the same as what I said up there, but that's more a function of it just seeming like the most likely option to me than any purposeful attempt at copying him. Note that, since this isn't an alternate history site, the butterfly effect isn't very well represented (at least I think not, haven't read it in a long time), but here's the article if anyone wants to read it: http://transit.toronto.on.ca/streetcar/4016.shtml

-What if the Spadina Expressway had been constructed as planned, rather than cut off at Eglinton Avenue? Downtown and the areas to the north-west would probably be in worse shape, since the Annex would have been slashed in half and Spadina Avenue turned into a highway through the U of T campus, then widened significantly down to the lake. Also, this would have a significant impact on public transit: the Spadina Subway (opened 1978 in OTL) was originally placed as a higher priority than the North Yonge extensions (opened 1973 and 1974 in OTL), and if the Spadina Expressway had gotten going earlier (which would be IMO the most surefire way to get this alternate timeline going in the first place) I could see the Spadina line being opened to Wilson before Yonge got past Eglinton. In the modern day, traffic coming into Toronto from the north-west would be far more managable, since people could take the highway right into downtown instead of being dumped onto Eglinton at a signalized intersection and forced to take local streets to downtown. Would the construction of Spadina prevent the death of Toronto's freeway plan? I'm not sure, but it seems to me like the type of citizen's movement that ended freeway expansion in the city was only a matter of time in coming, and if it didn't happen with Spadina, it'd probably happen with the next neighbourhood-dividing expressway plan.

EDIT:

Here's another one that just occurred to me. What if Lyn McLeod's Liberals had won the 1995 provincial election, leading to (among other things on a wider scale, obviously) the Eglinton West Subway not being cancelled? Though I'm not sure what the timetable was on construction (shovels were in the ground when it was cancelled), it would have surely been complete from the Spadina Subway to Black Creek Drive by the new millennium. Without the severe capital cuts that the Mike Harris government ushered in, the construction of the Sheppard Subway may have been accelerated as well, with it opening concurrently with or shortly after the Eglinton West line. Assuming both were open by the year 2002 (the year Sheppard opened in OTL), the city's top three rapid transit priorities would have been Spadina North to York University (or more likely Steeles, I'm not sure if the current planned extension to Vaughan Corporate Centre would go through ITTL due to the presence of not one, but two stub subways in Toronto proper), Sheppard to Scarborough Town Centre (possibly with an intermediate extension to Victoria Park Avenue), and completing Eglinton West (not sure of the staging, but eventually to the airport). In OTL, the subway hasn't expanded at all since 2002 due to a perpetual lack of capital funds, but with the politics of the whole thing being different, it's perhaps possible that completing (or at least extending) Eglinton West would become the top priority for the city. In any case, the Black Creek and Eglinton intersection, by 2010, would definitely be significantly more built up, as the plan was to construct a new downtown for York at that location, served by the subway. Amalgamation could throw a wrench into that, but there would at least be some type of high-density development taking root there, given how it's the end point for a new subway line and a major transportation node as a result.
 
Last edited:
@ Panzerfaust04:

The subway was not built along Queen because of the streetcars that run that route, so unless you are willing to remove the streetcars of Toronto, there is little point. That was why the TTC moved the planned line in the first place, recognizing that at the time the subway was being built it would be better to have the subway lines further north. Not building the Bloor-Danforth line will make the Yonge line absolutely jammed south of Lawrence by the mid 1980s, and it took massive fights to get the NDP to back the Eglinton West subway. The massive cost overruns on the Sheppard route was part of the problem, too.

The Spadina Expressway would have been a disaster, regardless of when and where it was built. Running a highway that would have effectively cut downtown Toronto in half was only a good idea if the commuter routes are not built. There is many problems with that. Most traffic into Toronto from the North runs down the 400 and 404 highway, and the latter runs right into the Don Valley Expressway, which provides a slick route right into downtown. If the Spadina route had been built, it would have added to the massive congestion problems along the 401 from the Spadina expressway to the 400 and Pearson Airport, whereas in OTL most of the airport-bound traffic runs along the Gardiner to the 427 and up to the airport. if you're looking for the most direct way to run traffic from Brampton, Peel and the airport into Toronto, you would want to run the 409 through Etobicoke down towards downtown, but then you'd have to make a run around to get around High Park along the lake, and that butterflies the NIMBYs that Toronto's western neighborhoods will put up in droves.

I think what might be more interesting in terms of Transit is electrifying the GO Transit lines and building a real rapid transit line from Downtown along the CN line to Pearson. This line have virtually no freight traffic (hazardous goods traffic has been banned in Toronto since 1980), so the builders could have easily bought the line and built a real high-speed line, double-tracked, concrete ties and the like. Assuming that you are electrifying in the mid-1970s, one could easily go straight from the aging E and F series diesels GO started with right to electric locomotives, perhaps AEM-7s like those used by Amtrak. These would give better acceleration than the diesels do, and if you upgrade the line's infrastructure (cab signals, heavier rail, concrete ties) one could see higher speeds, thus giving higher train frequencies on the line and better performance, which would help GO particularly on the Lakeshore routes, which at rush period are packed solid. This, along with reduced fueling costs, could perhaps also allow for lower fares and reduce the traffic on Highway 401 from Missassauga and Durham.

Sticking with Toronto, also worth mentioning is the Pickering Airport. Building the Pickering Airport would provide a very strong growth engine for Durham Region, which has traditionally lagged behind the western suburbs, and the Pickering Airport site is located right next to a CP Rail line that is very rarely used in modern times (I drove along Highway 7 from Oshawa to Markham every week or so for years when I was a kid, and never saw a train on that route), so one could easily again use this line for a high-speed passenger route from Pickering to the City Center. This would fuel the building of Highway 407 much faster than in OTL and probably also extend the 407 all the way to Highway 35/115 east of Bowmanville. This would also help out many of Durham's developments later on, because the proposed 407 route runs straight past the under-construction Durham College/UOIT campus in Oshawa. Building Pickering in the 1970s would probably also result on Toronto City Center Airport being closed in the 1980s. If you have the high-speed routes to Pearson and Pickering, then the need for Toronto City Center is kinda limited.

If the airport is closed at that time, I can envision the former airport lands getting new usage. Part of me is thinking that a brand-new stadium on the former island airport as part of an Olympic bid, and one other idea is a revival of the theme parks that were a Toronto Island staple until the 1950s.
 
Could take it out of the Pentagon's half-trillion dollar budget. After all, roads, rail and power cables could be classified as national defense/security. And (this is just my opinion mind you) just eliminate welfare and spend that money on something useful that will benefit society; like new bridges.

That was how Ike got the Interstates built in the first place, IIRC. Frankly, call it a "Homeland Security" issue and you could have all the funds you need.

The hard part will be getting the political will for this as defense contractors make tobacco lobbyists look like pikers. Besides, since "Defense" is the closest thing the US has to major industry anymore there are "economic arguments" against it. A former co-worker (now retired) liked the phrase "white-collar welfare". ;)
 
The hard part will be getting the political will for this as defense contractors make tobacco lobbyists look like pikers. Besides, since "Defense" is the closest thing the US has to major industry anymore there are "economic arguments" against it. A former co-worker (now retired) liked the phrase "white-collar welfare". ;)


Welfare is welfare, be it poor freeloaders or oil tycoons. I'm against ALL welfare. The rails and roads of this nation need the money more than any of them. How many bridges must collapse before the beaurocrats realize 'hey, we better fix it'?
 
A random thought I got. The logistics post D-Day where impressive. They built a harbour on the beach, roads, pipelines. So that's at least some of the infrastructure a city needs. The rest of the infrastructure could be added. Water supply makes sence, a railroad plugging into the French railroad system, and so on.

Could a city somehow be built there for some strange rason? Refugees from somewhere?

Well, St-Lô was so toroughly destroyed that the city authorities seriously considered the idea of leaving the ruins and building a new city...
 
Realistically, there is large portions of the country where it WOULD work, which the naysayers probably know but don't like. If the government could ensure that HSR systems were a good investment and get the freight railways on board, the US would have little trouble assembling a massive HSR network. You won't have any 200mph transcontinentals - the distance is too much, airliners are just faster - but in the Midwest and all the way up both coasts it would work, and probably pretty well in most of those cases. I know from experience that HSR trains are more comfortable than many airliners, particularly on short-haul flights where the airplane hardly gets up to cruise altitude before dropping back down for a landing.

The challenge is figuring out how to have it built.


at what distance does flying become faster than hsr..taking into account security delays etc at the airport??
 
Not only Interstates...

What if Ike also looked to fuel security, admittedly ahead of it's time, to make the trucks run on those Interstates.
Hundreds, thousands of trucks would need a good amount of fuel to keep America defended; fuel that may not be accessible if some areas, Texas for example, are hit in a conflict.

Might this lead to:
An earlier distilled fuel strategic reserve?
Alternate fuel research?
 
at what distance does flying become faster than hsr..taking into account security delays etc at the airport??

300km/h HSR's niche is 200-500 miles and journey times of 4-5 hours, but this depends on the speed of the train and the convenience of the air/road competition.
 
Top