As I see it, the price of rail tickets will be pretty high.whats stopping the price of flights from being halved in the next couple of decades and killing this train service too?
One advantage of rail is you can put a station in the middle of a metro area, removing travel time to the airport.
Huge supporter of rail but sadly I believe there are a number of mistakes being made. This is a classic example of how projects like this in the US need to be monolithic, self contained, and gold plated to the hilt. The correct action would have been for CA to incrementally acquire and build railways along a number of corridors. Take the SF bay for example. There should be one agency running Caltrain, the Capitol Cor…
Other successful high-speed rail systems (France's TGV, for example) also have dedicated rights-of-way, not shared with older equipment, and rail physically built to different standards (specially welded). You really don't want genuinely high-speed trains (300 km/h) running on the same tracks as anything slower, in normal operation. And if you try to build a high-speed system on earlier rights-of-way, you get something like Acela, in the US Northeast corridor. It can go at ~150 mph on track that can support it, but there are only a few miles of the route between Boston and Washington can support that. Net: it's only half an hour faster than conventional rail on the same route and track -- and something like half the difference is accounted for by the conventional trains making a lot more stops.
As I see it, the price of rail tickets will be pretty high.whats stopping the price of flights from being halved in the next couple of decades and killing this train service too?
My understanding and part of why I support the high speed rail project is this.
Airports in California coastal cities are near max capacity. And expansion is either very expensive[1] or near impossible. And would face even more community objections than the high speed rail project. So the airlines likely wouldn't try to compete with high speed rail. Instead they would try to attract more national and international travelers. Paradoxically to high speed rail would increase the airports area of service. Because one could then take the train + cab to the airport rather than drive 100 miles or take a puddle jumper.
[1] I offhand remember, between 500 million to 2 billion _each_.
And the fastest if you take into consideration the fact that you can come to the train station less than 30 minutes in advance just hop in the train and travel downtown to downtown.
30 minutes in advance for a train? Sometimes I arrive a minutes in advance and just enter the train before it is continuing its journey. Happens when my connecting train had a delay.
In Switzerland, where the train schedule is stunningly efficient, you can do this very reliably. Check in and security procedures make this impossible with airports. Unfortunately, this is also an issue with international high speed trains (TGV) where there are queues and checks.
Eurostar does, and some TGV trainsets do. But some other high speed rail trainsets in Europe don't. If the floor is below the top of the wheels, there has to be a narrow section at the car ends. The wheels have to go someplace. The lost space can be minimized by sharing a bogie between two cars. (If the floor is below the axle line, as with ultra low floor trams, it's really complicated.)
> Eurostar does Eurostar is the exception to every train. It's a monster of complexity because it has to work on three systems. It also does not have 550mm platform height. I think it has 750? > some TGV trainsets But not because of the platform height but because of stability in case of a crash. The TGVs with bogies between the cars has the same general height setup as the traditional ones. > (If the floor is below…
Eurostar is 760mm. The EU TSI requires 550mm or 760mm; the UK rail network has a blanket exemption excluding it from that (platforms are more-or-less universally 915mm in the UK).
> a repeat of the BART mistake. Probably a different mistake but BART uses 5'6" rail gauge. Standard US rail gauge is 4'8.5". This means that every railcar, every everything, has to be custom made with no economies of scale. No one can remember why they did this.
It is pretty common knowledge why they did this. Original plans for the BART had it traveling over the Golden Gate Bridge into Marin County. Due to high winds across the bridge, they wanted a wider gauge to prevent trains from tipping.
Given standard gauge trains transverse plenty of bridges which frequently have high-winds, that seems… dubious.
> 320 kph is the maximum cruising speed. Average speed for a trip is typically much less than that because the trains can only hit 320 kph on certain stretches of track. France and Spain have those tracks in Europe. The newer German tracks with 300km/h are operated at 300km/h with the ICE 3. Even through towns and tunnels. It's not the average speed, but a typical cruising speed on those tracks. France has more and l…
UK HS2 project is being planned for 400km/h operation.
Oh, most new track is designed for operation speeds far beyond what's commercially expected: it's very cheap to do (the primary requirement, after all, is about curve radius, which just affects your choice of route). The signalling, the overhead line equipment, the rolling-stock… all of that is all designed for the initial operational speed, because that does become expensive (or non-existent) if you want to push the speed up.
As I see it, the price of rail tickets will be pretty high.whats stopping the price of flights from being halved in the next couple of decades and killing this train service too?
High speed trains are much better than flights for small commutes, after the expenses are payed, it will be cheaper, it's easier to get on a train than wait hours for flights to take off. High speed rails are the future; flights are the past. Why would you not want to see this work out? Flying is quite annoying because it has constant delays, TSA, and hours of waiting in between.
While I tend to agree, on the right routes, planes can easily run on an hourly shuttle schedule. As happens for some city pairs. And we're one attack away from potentially having increased security for trains.
30 minutes in advance for a train? Sometimes I arrive a minutes in advance and just enter the train before it is continuing its journey. Happens when my connecting train had a delay.
In Switzerland, where the train schedule is stunningly efficient, you can do this very reliably. Check in and security procedures make this impossible with airports. Unfortunately, this is also an issue with international high speed trains (TGV) where there are queues and checks.
Fortunately there are still a few hassle free international high speed trains in Europe. Travel between France and Germany isn't subject to any special security measures. You just get on the train. Sometimes the train stops at the border for a really quick check and that's it.