The limits of high-speed rail
mappingignorance.org
mappingignorance.org
Then, in a switch of tone and pacing, admits that profitability potential is likely most important of them all.
This is why networks -- rather than just individual lines -- are critically important. High-speed rail works best when it connects robust local transportation networks that already exist: between cities that they themselves have robust temporal and spatial transport coverage. It works best when faraway cities can be brought within commuting range, or further leisure destinations within daytrip range. Similarly, it works best when it extends the catchment area of an airport, rather than a service positioned to compete against point-to-point flights.
But major infrastructure projects often suffer from messy political and public relations approaches that play up the project's impressiveness and prestige in isolation, while neglecting to emphasize or champion synergistic improvements to other parts of the network. Frequent and punctual "normal-speed" rail isn't as politically energizing, and local transit networks that serve the specific transport needs of a town are hardly exciting to regional audience, but without it, high-speed rail is just an expensive showpiece that doesn't serve a genuinely identifiable transport need. This is a risk with the California HSR as much as it is with ambitious efforts to bring western Europe's successful high-speed services further into the EU's east.
What will kill it is terminating in places not even convenient enough for an airport location.
Many of their routes are very easily done by train -- Birmingham to Glasgow, London to Exeter, London to Newquay, London to Newcastle.
Faster trains would make more places in Scotland a reasonable travel time away from London and Birmingham.
Southampton to Leeds, Manchester to Cornwall, and of course Belfast to anywhere isn’t easy or fast by train
We’re now trying to catch up with HS2, which is sorely needed to free existing tracks for more and reliable services, but we need to use that as a springboard for 50 years of investment. HS2, npr, midland connect, then high speed Birmingham to Bristol/Cardiff, Cambridge, and Leeds-Newcastle-Edinburgh-Glasgow
The key is to ensure we have schemes ready to go once construction winds up on the first parts, so the skills and equipment aren’t lost.
I don't like checking luggage on planes for various reasons but the system is at least set up to accommodate it straightforwardly.
e.g. Cambridge to Edinburgh (I haven't checked the connection time for this).
If when California finishes it's high speed rail line all they need to do for it to be a success is keep the TSA far far away from it.
Munich<>Frankfurt (400km) is 3 hours with ICE, much less than going to the airport, wait for check in, boarding, flight, off the plane and to the city centre. It's around 110e too for returns
Discount airlines are discount mostly because of tax incentive to develop small local airport around the EU. Of course they are popular. In the UK, from London, it is basically cheaper to get anywhere in the EU than anything north of Birmingham.
Remember, Chicago to New York City is almost the same distance as Munich to Moscow! (Note that rail advocates will tell you that Chicago to NYC is just barely in high speed rail range, anything farther even rail advocates don't pretend to be competitive. Chicago to New York City is not very far on the scale of the US, so of course we fly.
Yes I will agree that our rail system in the US isn't great, but flying doesn't compete with the rail system, driving does. A good rail system in the US would only negatively affect some short flying routes, it would however mean less people drove.
>Nobody flies between cities in one state
With some exceptions. Probably most notably SF to LA although there are probably other smaller in-state city pairs that are a long drive from each other especially in the western US.
If you bypass every other city between NYC and Chicago, and basically go through a state-long tunnel in Pennsylvania, you might be able to do it with a conventional railroad, but it definitely won't be cost-effective. To hit the other cities, you have to switch to maglev, which makes it cost-ineffective as well.
A final note: the city pair you're trying to link up is Chicago-NYC. Given the relatively diminutive size of the other cities en route (Pittsburgh is #27 and Cleveland #33, compared to #1 NYC and #3 Chicago), Chicago-NYC is going to make up the bulk of your traffic, so partial portions of the route aren't particularly effective. This is one of the issues CA has as well: the full SF/LA connection is where the market is, and the HSR can't justify its costs until it connects those two cities.
One of the reasons that the Northeast Corridor works so well for Amtrak is that people by and large are not taking the train from Boston to DC. (It's doable and I've done it but it really doesn't make sense versus flying in most cases.) In fact, it's usually a longer stop in NY Penn because most people are either getting on or getting off in Manhattan.
Rather, people are going Boston-NY, NY-DC, or otherwise between cities that make up about half or less of the total route.
DC (#6)
Baltimore (#21)
Philadelphia (#8)
NYC (#1)
Boston (#10)
You're connecting 4 major cities, and 1 in-between city, along the Boston to DC route, and the largest city is smack dab in the middle. In fact, as route pairings, it's less a Boston-DC line and more a DC-NYC and a NYC-Boston line that is through-run. Chicago-NYC only has the in-between cities of Cleveland and Pittsburgh en route (excluding the already-connected Philly).
The NEC is, quite frankly, extremely unusual in being a very dense, very linear corridor. The only other corridor in the world with similar circumstances is the Tokaido Shinkansen.
Exactly. Frankly, if the northern and southern legs of the route split to different rail stations as is the case in Boston, I'd guess that would inconvenience relatively few people.
(Of course, Amtrak has limited service going north out of Boston anyway so the fact that the Downeaster doesn't directly connect to the NEC is less of a problem there than it would be in other cities.)
It's too bad the Amtrak NE Regional (and the very slightly-faster Acela "Express") are so horribly inferior to the Tokaido Shinkansen. Riding on an Amtrak feels like a bad joke after riding on any Shinkansen line, in many ways, including both speed and price.
There is no technical problem getting a train to average 300km/h across the entire stretch. There are lots of political problems though. If we committed to building such a track in 10 years we could get the price of maglev track down a lot - and 10 years is what it would take the get the right of way and dig the tunnels.
These speeds are really not theoretical and we regurarly made use of them during travels in Japan. For example back in 2017 we traveled 1100 km from Beppu to Tokyo in about 8 hours. This contained a normal speed express train segment from Beppu to Fukuoka (1:30 h, max speed 130 km/h) and two train changes.
Also a maglev based line between Tokyo & Nagoya is under construction, which will be 80% underground with a running speed of ~500 km/h.
Another, more extreme, example: Oslo -> Tromsø: 1:50 by plane, no options for train on Google Maps, and 21:10-22:20 by car.
The second most popular route in the US is LA to SF.
That's the core issue. CHSRA never had a credible funded plan for building either crossing, and instead chose to tackle the easy part in the Central Valley first. Unfortunately, HSR in the Central Valley is effectively useless without a mountain crossing at at least one end.
Jesus, you say that with such confidence, Bravo! I’m afraid to tell you how popular the Houston/Dallas route is...
Is this studied or monitored ? something that could give directions to avoid waste or corruption~ for politicians ?
Most articles and papers I've seen on the subject emphasize much more rigorous project-specific cost-benefit analyses. This 2016 CBO paper[0] covers both the history, current situation, and three potential reforms: charging for actual use, cost-benefit analysis, or carefully linking funding to performance metrics. This is a separate Brookings paper discussing the subject as well.[1] Viewing projects less in isolation and more as part of a connected complex system could be more readily captured in cost-benefit analyses, and be more resilient against perverse agency problems.
0. https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/114th-congress-2015-...
1. https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/02_high...
Having lived for 7+ years in both Boston and San Francisco and visited Paris a few times and trains that are 2 minutes apart is life changing in terms overall experience. You've given me a new cause to rally around.
I recently took a 9.5h train trip from Berlin to Switzerland, and although the train does travel at the top speed of the section at several locations, we never reached the top speed of the train set (280km/h), and lots of times we were travelling at under 100km/h for switching tracks or whatever else. I didn't log it, but I'd guess we spent less than 50% of the travel time over 200km/h.
That's where Japan's Shinkansen was so groundbreaking. Sure, they also used this opportunity to migrate from a smaller gauge, but the decision to build a new network from scratch that doesn't interact with other networks at all paid off tenfold over the decades as trains started getting faster and faster.
https://www.dw.com/en/trains-vs-planes-whats-the-real-cost-o...
And look at the differences in carbon footprint in the article. The differences are gigantic.
I think you want to measure travel distance here!
If you've got a comfortable seat, wi-fi, power, and a dining car, spending a few extra hours on the train is not so bad. It beats spending that same time on a metro or regional train with a bunch of luggage. It most definitely beats spending the time going through airport security, walking a kilometer through a giant shopping mall with gates, waiting in a departure lounge, or waiting at baggage claim.
That said, there are reasons for each country's choices. France is much less dense than Germany, so acquiring land to make those straight lines is more feasible. France also has its population concentrated more in bigger cities rather than a lot of smaller ones like Germany, so as long as the TGV goes directly into the bigger cities, most people are happy. Japan is long and skinny, so average trip distances are longer and the speed is more important. Japan also has a big infrastructure budget to prop up the economy, so making straight lines that require loads of tunnels and bridges is not as much of a problem.
Most TGV will stop at city center train stations, if they don’t and drop you in the countryside it’s often for political or demographic reasons, or possibly because the rail lines were really unsuitable (iirc even at low speed tgv is somewhat limited in its ability to bend).
This is why the HS2 project in the UK will free up so much local commuter capacity. By taking all high speed trains off the existing lines, you can run many more trains on them.
(Actually, the only one I can think of is Berlin-Munich. I used it last year between Nuremberg and Erfurt and saw a "290 km/h" display on the info screen.)
Cause Laufthansa a while back to stop flying between Cologne and Frankfurt, instead they’ll sell you a seat on the ICE train (code share) with full protection for your connecting flight.
Compared to Amtrak ticket prices in America, Shinkansen is an excellent value. It doesn't seem out-of-line with German ICE train prices either.
In hindsight the needed new network could have been an advantage, as very little of the current rails is capable of anywhere near the 300km/h operation the ice can do. Would also have avoided all those scheduling problems where slower regional trains are regularly delayed, as they have to let other (also delayed) high speed trains pass.
Planes do this to the extreme, it's always weird noticing the plane roll 45 degrees and still feeling bum firmly in seat.
Maybe they can make something so the train can grip the ground/tracks so it just doesn't fall off when the forces are no longer acting on it.
But in the theoretical banking the original comment was talking about (let's say 30 degrees), the track would probably have to be secured to the surface...
Well, how heavy is a bullet train, where is its center of gravity, and how much banking does it need if it wants to travel, say, 300 km/h in a (how sharp?) a curve?
There are a whole host of reasons why a train may not travel at maximum speed for a given segment, and the rail line still needs to be reasonably comfortable at all of those.
Mag-lev trains seem to reach 'around' the tracks, so that could work. Of course if the levitation stops in a corner (or anywhere, really) on that one it'll cause major damage.
Pendolino:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pendolino
Up to 8-10° , i.e. 1.35 m/s^2 compensation https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pendolino#Caratteristiche_gene...
Even the lates shinkansen transets do it to reach higher speed, especially on older parts of the track with sharper turns: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/N700_Series_Shinkansen
Yes, that is a coordinated turn. It's one of the very first things you learn when you take flying lessons.
Airplanes aren't very good at flying sideways. You can make them do it to some degree, and it is an important technique for landing in a crosswind. But they are better at just climbing or descending - from the plane's point of view.
So the way you turn is to roll the plane in the direction of the turn and simultaneously start "climbing". Climbing straight "up" from the point of view of the airplane, not up according to the ground. The airplane doesn't know about the ground, it only knows about the air.
A coordinated turn is a combination of banking and climbing, such that you always feel like you're being pressed straight down into your seat. And the tighter the turn, the more you are pressed into the seat.
When you make a turn in a car on a flat road, you feel a normal 1G straight down and a force pushing you sideways. But if the road were perfectly banked for the speed you're going, you would feel like you were being pressed straight down in your seat. Instead of feeling a sideways force, that would be added to the downward force you feel inside the car - just like an airplane.
While ordinary horizontal curves are cambered, IIRC the resulting train-vertical acceleration is still one of the limiting factors.
One of the competitive advantages that train travel has over plane travel is that it is significantly more comfortable, and you can get up and walk around or have a coffee on your table whenever you'd like. Train travel would be less able to compete with plane travel if the experience was more akin to sitting in a roller coaster.
It is only where the vehicle has rubber tyres (i.e. trolley buses) where there are two overhead cables.
There's no real reason to switch so long as we are using these fuels for anything else. Let air transport be the very last things changed over, we have a ton of much lower hanging fruit that we can work on first.
I think we've reached a point where a large and growing portion of the population wants a level of amenities/services that can only be realistically provided in areas of sufficient population density.
Now, there could certainly be some shift that changes that, but I'm not sure what it would be.
As I said: remote work.
You are right we need "sufficient population density". I wouldn't want to live in the country side for long term. I want to access things that only cities can provide, but I only moved to London because of job opportunities. I would happy to live in a small city if I have access to the same jobs.
If remote work would be more widespread the countries would be more decentralized.
Another problem is getting an uninterrupted supply of H2 and CO to feed the process. None of the convenient sources for those are carbon neutral, and obtaining either in a carbon neutral way (i.e. renewable electricity powered electrolysis) adds significant additional inefficiencies.
> Synthetic diesel is its own energy storage medium. If the plant was powered at night by burning its own daytime products, and powered in the day by solar, it would still be carbon neutral.
Yes, but why would you power it at night with the syn diesel you created during the day? You'd end up with at best 25% of the syn diesel you started the night with, because the Fischer Tropsch process is only 50% efficient, and running a diesel generator is at best 50%.
On that note, for the price of HS2, I’d rather see:
1/ smoother tracks
2/ a strong, unified, national brand
3/ dead simple smart phone ticketing
4/ tickets checked when you get off the train, not on
5/ tickets purchasable on the train you are actually on, lower prices, and an end to the railcard / discount / split ticket confusopoly
6/ simpler utilitarian rolling stock, again with unified branding, no adverts, and simple monochromatic signing and buttons all following a unified design language
Perhaps a simpler list though would be:
1/ fire everyone
2/ hire from scratch and completely rethink the rail network in terms of being 100% focused on the passenger, instead of an internal market of contracts between infrastructure, train operators, and unions.
(“Simpler”!)
High speed lines are necessarily extremely smooth and with very small tolerances.
French lines come out the factory in rail pieces 200 to 400 meters long and are thermite-welded together after adjustment. They have no expansion joints except around bridges (and even then not necessarily)
Pretty much yes, that's why the rails have to be adjusted very precisely, otherwise they're going to kink / bend in summer (if pressure gets too high) and crack in winter.
Unless it heats up too much, and then it buckles and you get derailments.
Lobbiests for commercial interests who are potentially undermined by effective rail have long managed legal strangleholds on significantly improved rail infrastructure.
A glaring case in point, all passenger rails connecting East and West must go through Chicago -- far north of southern states. (There is one claimed southern line, but it never appears to be available for transport.)
Worse still, the Republican party has bamboozled their members into actually believing trains are not cost effective and therefore just a give-away to the undeserving lazy jobless welfare recipients who use them, because they can't afford cars.
Yes, it's that fracked up here.
This is a matter of geography. Your main eastern market is the DC-Boston corridor--as populated as all of the other states on the Atlantic seaboard combined. So that means that you're mostly looking at terminating there, no matter where on the West Coast you originate. If you start in the Northwest, you have to cross south of Lake Michigan to reach the NEC, so Chicago is en route. If you're in Northern California, you'll emerge from the Front Range near Denver, and you can pick whichever hub you want--might as well pick the one everyone else is using and choose Chicago. Even as far south as Oklahoma City, going to DC via Chicago only adds 100-200 miles to your route. It's not until you get to Dallas that reaching the NEC via Atlanta/Charlotte/Raleigh-Durham makes sense.
Historically, by the latter half of the 1800s, the railroad industry already settled on using Chicago as the main termination of every major railroad, and thus the major transshipment point. Geographically, the logical point is bounded by the southern tip of Lake Michigan and northern bank of the Ohio River (as you have prairies to the north and hills to the south). In principle, a city like St. Louis or Indianapolis could have grown up to be the major transshipment hub instead of Chicago, but you'd still be complaining about the lack of southern East-West lines in that scenario.
It's even crazier than that. It turns out that Amtrak would be profitable were it not for being required to run long distance passenger rail lines through sparsely populated states, usually represented by the senators you mentioned.
(Note that regional state co-financed Amtrak lines like the Capital Corridor in California aren't part of the profitability problem)
The same senators from those low population density states who demand that Amtrak cut losses in order to become profitable also raise hackles when the obvious solution of cutting the unprofitable long-distance routes through their states routes is raised. It turns out that many of their constituents like those unprofitable routes.
See Wendover's YouTube video on the topic: https://youtu.be/dSw7fWCrDk0
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgin_Trains_USA
> a Japanese maglev had set a speed record at 581 km/h. The French managers considered it pointless as well as prudent to force the experiment to exceed that speed, as they could have entered a kind of “international race” that they did not have much chance of winning. Time would prove them right: in 2015, another L0 series maglev reached 603 km/h on the Yamanashi test line.
Chinese maglev seems to run at 431 km/h and brings in losses of more than 1 billion RMBs[1]. So these trains may not be economical.
Fast forward to today, and the network is practically printing money for JR, while forming part of the backbone of Japan's infrastructure.
It takes a long term vision to make this kind of thing work.
- Unlike most rail networks, the Japanese conventional rail network is narrow gauge while the Shinkansen is standard gauge, eliminating any chance of network effects from speeding up conventional trains on the high speed network as well.
- The Chuo route is extremely mountainous, so most of the route is in tunnels, and in tunnels there isn't really an increase in land acquisition costs as you increase curve radii for higher speeds.
It's a bit of a lost opportunity that neither China nor (so far) India tried leapfrogging directly from regular rail to maglev. The costs involved are admittedly staggering, but both countries would have the economies of scale to make them tolerable eventually.
They are not tens of miles experimental lines... It's 18,000mi.
Tokyo-Osaka in an hour vs the current 2.5h, that's far from marginal, especially if you do a round-trip.
Having done that trip a couple of times recently for business, I can't wait for the Chuo Shinkansen to open.
Which is already at capacity. From this March the Tokaido Shinkansen will be able to run up to 16 trains per hour (up from 14 tph right now), which only 4 of them will stop at non-major stations. Tokaido Shinkansen runs roughly along the pacific coast, which is also prone to natural disasters.
Also 16 trains per hour means 3.75 minutes between trains. This is actually not that remarkable & we saw that in action last years in Hiroshima, with three trains scheduled from the same platform with departures 3 minutes apart.
This is doable due to a couple of factors: - passengers are usually quite disciplined and know what to do, eq. people queue at the door before a stop for quick departure - the trains stop exactly in the same place on the station, so the are markers for each card & door on the platform - due to this people can queue on the platform for their car right where the car will be once the train arrives - the are marked areas near the door location on the platform for disembarking passengers, so they don't mix up with people waiting in the queue to get in - no chaotic "fan" of people around a car entrance with some trying to get in and others trying to get out at the same time as you often see on European train stations - all Shinkansen are EMUs with all wheels powered, resulting in rather high yet still comfortable acceleration speed - due to this the tran can quickly stop in the station and the n rapidly speed up again
The end result is a train that comes in rather quickly yet manages to stop on the spot with centimeter precision. Then people disemabark, then people get in and the train can leave & pick up speed again. We timed it once & it all took about 90 seconds.
They do this on Japanese subways too, because many stations have gates that the train has to line up with.
This would be completely impossible in America. Anyone who's ridden the DC Metro would know this: there is absolutely no way you could get American train operators to stop the train that precisely. Trains here stop with variances of many car-lengths.
The Japanese maglev is going to be a full blown commuter alternative to the massively successful tokaido Shinkansen.
I took it once (back in 2006) just to experience it. It is fast, just not when compared to the whole trip being made by a taxi.
https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/china-driverless-maglev-t...
There are many places where 100 mph is sufficiently fast.
But as china situation unfold, the arrangement of such ease to connect has a price to pay. Even airline would have the same issue one may say. But in 2003 when sars did it’s tolls it is mainly via airplane and slow train.
The speed one held the current chaos. No one can stop progress. But are all progress great. Wonder.
Some just minor but important barrier. The join border of the high speed between hk and china meant when the case is found (or at least high temp symptom) instead of sending the patient or blocking him, he comes the index patient in.