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Comment by pirocks | Hacker News Reader

Because going from San Francisco to LA was too expensive(I would assume high nimby density as you get closer to both those cities), but the doing a high speed train thing was already decided. Apparently there will be extensions to SF and LA at some point.

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But the train won't stop at these places I hope?

It probably will be something stupid like the e-bart transfer in Antioch is

It would. The main benefit of trains is that they stop at cities along the way, making many route combinations possible that planes wouldn't be able to service. You don't save much time by not stopping at a a few cities. For example, note that almost every long distance train in every country (I know of) , including the most "express" trains, still stop at smaller cities.

It would be better to give all the cities nonstop advance ticketed service, complete with luggage handling and seat reservations. (just like aircraft)

It's possible with rail. You just need to avoid stopping trains on the main line. Switch off on to a siding to serve the station. Switching should be at the fastest safe speed; slow trains do not belong on the main line.

Because trains take a long distance to brake, distance between trains needs to be pretty high on high-speed lines, which imposes a limit on this. (Not sure why you'd need any luggage handling, you can just bring all your luggage onto the train yourself.)

Approximately nowhere does this. It wastes a lot of the capacity of the line and requires you to build wider right at the most expensive part of the line (the stations, which are hopefully in city centres), plus it sacrifices a lot of the convenience advantages of rail.

What really sacrifices convenience:

a. You show up, only to discover that the train just left. Since it isn't properly scheduled, you just have to get lucky. Enjoy waiting an hour or two for the next train.

b. You show up, only to discover that there are too many people to fit on the train. Since you don't have a seat reservation, the train fills up and you don't get to board. Enjoy waiting an hour or two for the next train.

You can run trains much more frequently than every hour or two because you're running a simple service pattern that makes full use of the lines' capacity.

Train travel is much more pleasant than air travel and being able to just turn up and go, and carry your own luggage, is a big part of that. This goes beyond fixing what's not broken - why are you trying to make the pleasant thing like the less pleasant thing?

Theoretically, they could run more frequently. They could run every 3 minutes.

Reality: that won't happen

It costs money to run trains that might be mostly empty, so they are run less often, which makes them less used, which makes them run less often, and so on.

At best, reality looks more like this: https://www.mbta.com/schedules/CR-Lowell/timetable

That's 21 trains per weekday. Weekend days get only 8 trains.

Amtrak is much much worse. At that service level, you could get 1 train per week, seasonal.

If trains are infrequent then stopping trains on the main line isn't a problem, and you'd really screw over the intermediate towns by skipping them sometimes.

Reliable trains are a good thing. Frequent trains are a good thing. Your proposal doesn't help with either of those things and would waste money that could be spend improving them instead.

I meant: are these places the end of the line or does the train in fact roll over regular track to SF and LA?

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