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How far can you go by train in 5h?

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Re: How far can you go by train in 5h?

#231

Post by brewdad »

AlotOfReading wrote: post #81
secretsatan wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The more rail improves the more I'm tempted to take it, with flying you have the additional time cost of just dealing with the airports, turn up an hour early, then get put in the metal tube where they won't serve you drink till they're up in the air, and you can't bring your own. A train may take longer sometimes, but I find the whole thing much less stressful, you're not strapped to the seat, you have leg room, eve…

It's hard to overstate how different the European rail experience is from the American experience. SF LA is a 50m, $50 flight. It's approx. 9h and $400 by rail. In practice, the last time I attempted that route it took 15h because the train had issues halfway and none of the assigned seats had power or legroom.

Even the Seattle to Portland route, probably the best on the west coast, has issues. A flight takes about 50 mins and can be had for about $60. Alaska Airlines runs flights at least once an hour all day long. From 6am until midnight.

The train takes 3.5 hours (often closer to 4 and I've had it take more than 5 just because of freight priority). The train makes 4 trips a day (one being a longer route that is usually delayed) and the timing means that any business trip will probably require an overnight stay. The train is only $27 though because both states (especially WA) heavily subsidize the route.

In the end, it really comes down to where in the metro areas your trip begins and ends as to which works out best. For us, the train station saves about an hour of ground transport time compared to the airports and we can arrive much closer to departure, so the train works best. For plenty of others, the airport will be faster and probably easier logistically.

Re: How far can you go by train in 5h?

#232

Post by SllX »

cptcobalt wrote: post #196
nickbauman wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it doesn't have a world class freight rail network. The North American rail infra is incredibly primitive. Most of it is "dark territory" (no track sensors), unlike Europe. I used to write rail automation software for a German firm. They were appalled at the state of affairs here. One of the most lucrative rail systems in the US had an average speed of their trains in the single digits MPH!

I'm surprised by the general opposition to your comment. I agree. US transit infrastructure, including rail, is anything but world class. Sure, we move tons of freight, but is that the standard alone? Just because it works doesn't mean it can't be improved better. It's always ok to reject the "don't fix it if it's not broken" mentality.

In the context of freight, it is the lone standard because as another commenter pointed out, throughput is more important than latency in bulk goods transport whereas latency is a much more important variable when passengers are involved.

US rail owners and operators know what the variables are that they care about and their customers care about are, and also what insurance companies care about and as a result, they are adept at moving goods coast to Great Lakes to coast, across the Appalachians, Missouri-Mississippi river system, the Great Plains, the Rockies, the Great Basin, the Sierra Nevadas, the Cascades and the California Coastal Range.

If they’re not using some software package or have complete sensor coverage on their tracks, they probably judged that they don’t need it. If a competitor actually finds advantage with these things tomorrow, then they will all adopt it.

Re: How far can you go by train in 5h?

#233

Post by Kon-Peki »

madcaptenor wrote: post #204
TylerE wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An industry with incredible capital overhead and razor thin margins is no place for symbolism. Times change. In 1860 New Orleans was the 5th largest city in the country. Today it is 52nd.

Levy addresses this, and agrees with you: https://pedestrianobservations.com/2021/03/22/high-speed-rai... Basically, Amtrak started out with the existing rail network, which is going to be oriented to early-20th-century population centers, and so New Orleans is well-served by Amtrak standards. But a modern network in the South would be oriented more towards those parts of the South that have grown - Texas and the Pie…

Levy is wrong. There, I said it.

American growth of the last 80 years is incompatible with the future of the world. You won't save a sprawly mess by putting a high speed rail station in the center of it.

If it was an important city before the age of the automobile, it has a chance. Put the "future" rail network in the cities that have a future.

Point number two, and probably even more important than the first, is the fact that you have to get your plan through a million committees, and through Congress, etc. You need support. His plan won't get it. Too much of it goes through places that hate trains and "socialism". And then it tells the people that have nostalgic memories of a railroad that lifted their family out of the Jim Crow south to go pound sand. His plan will never go further than his blog :)

Would you like an analogy to this situation?

Everybody in tech has incredible ideas for the future. But the startup world is littered with companies that have had no success at all getting from point A to point B despite billions in VC money.

Re: How far can you go by train in 5h?

#234

Post by simongray »

rockostrich wrote: post #201
qalmakka wrote: post #22

As a European it boggles my mind seeing how trains are basically non-existent in the USA (just look at Houston station), given how dominant the whole "Wild West" railroad rush is in everybody's immagination. Railroads are super ubiquitous here, and we've to work with a pretty hostile terrain - Italy has lots of mountains, hills, rivers, and yet has one of the best networks in the world. Most of the USA are basically…

As an American, it doesn't really boggle my mind at all. We have a very car-centric culture. Just look at how we treat cyclists/cycling infrastructure, especially in cities. It's night and day compared to most European cities. To be fair though, the continental US is almost double the size of Europe and Amtrak is actually alright in the areas that it serves (although my experience with trains in Switzerland/Italy was…

> the continental US is almost double the size of Europe

Europe (the continent) is slightly bigger than the entirety of the USA...

I guess you are talking about continental Western Europe where much of the high speed rail is?

Re: How far can you go by train in 5h?

#235

Post by scythe »

Kon-Peki wrote: post #191
scythe wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the cost to build a HSR route to go between population centers is super high The cost is high, but more painfully, the cost per-mile is higher than for the same distance of railroad in Europe or East Asia. That's not a result of pure geography. Also, while the cost is high, it's not actually that large in comparison to the overall DoT budget, which is projected at $142B for FY2023. You could build a lot of train fo…

Toledo directly to Chicago doesn't make a lot of sense. Most of the track would go through Indiana, which is at best indifferent to Amtrak. Consider instead putting Detroit in between the two. The Chicago-Detroit route already operates at 110 mph, Amtrak and the Michigan Dept of Transportation already own the majority of the track and give routing priority to passenger trains. Amtrak and VIA are already talking about…

Oh, yeah, that sounds pretty good. My main point is that you want to connect the long train to short trains.

In theory, if Raleigh and Richmond (both very "blue" cities and maybe open to it) built LRT systems, you could get another route in DC-Richmond-Raleigh-Charlotte-Atlanta, where the other three have existing intracity rail.

Re: How far can you go by train in 5h?

#237

Post by labcomputer »

Gwypaas wrote: post #189
madcaptenor wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. You don't want a line down the entire West Coast, even though it's tempting to draw. But a line from Vancouver to Portland makes sense, as does a "greater California" system - roughly lines from Los Angeles to SF, Sacramento, Vegas, San Diego. The latter is basically the California HSR system that's under construction, plus the proposed privately built line from LA to Vegas. (Levy also proposes LA to Phoenix;…

Why not? The great advantage of high speed rail is that with intermediate stops along the route you can service smaller cities which previously, or as you just did, would be considered flyover country. Thus making the value of the system greater than just the end terminuses. Just looking at the towns between Portland and Sacramento Salem, Eugene and Medford exist. Neither would themselves ever be valuable enough for…

The problem is that TSA isn't as bad as it was right after 9/11, and baggage tracking is much better on all airlines. You no longer need to arrive 2 hours before the scheduled departure and spend an hour collecting your bags.

With TSA PreCheck, I can reliably go from curb to gate in less than 15 minutes. If you're not someone who feels the need to be the first one on the plane, that means you can arrive at the airport 30 minutes before the scheduled departure time.

So, as a practical matter, that means a SJC->SEA flight is at least an hour shorter than the hypothetical train.

I'm also very skeptical that a train could reach Seattle in 3.5 hours from the Bay Area. That would require an average speed of over 200 mph on the great-circle path.

California High-Speed Rail only promises an average speed of 150 mph between LA and San Francisco (w/ a world-class top speed of 220 mph). Additionally, geography dictates a more circuitous route. CAHSR route-miles between LA and the SFBA (similar terrain) are 25% greater than the straight-line distance.

Realistically, the train would take almost 6 hours, and a plane would be less than half.

Re: How far can you go by train in 5h?

#238

Post by tomjakubowski »

throwaway0a5e wrote: post #177
redtexture wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The sense is that the Northeast corridor has too many curves and roadbed issues to be able to go faster. There would have to be constructed a new corridor, not in the same path as existing railroad rights of way, for not a small amount of money, and going through expensive real estate. The political will for that is not in existence, so far.

Easy to complain on the internet. Hard to change a hard left into a sweeping arc in the middle of New Haven. Even ignoring the money, if you try and do a project like that you are going to get slapped in the face by all the same "cutting apart muh neighborhood" rhetoric that gets used against highways. Grade separation and "just paying those people to go away" are both expensive enough to be non-starters.

Highways and rail create different kinds of disruption in neighborhoods. Highways constantly have traffic, creating noise and pollution all the time. Railroads are mostly quiet, with loud traffic in short bursts.

Passenger railroads are narrower than urban highways. The US-101 freeway cuts through Echo Park and Westlake in Los Angeles, taking up as much as 330 feet of width, counting on/off ramps. California HSR has trench sections specced as narrow as 72 feet[1], and most of its urban rights-of-way are under 100 feet wide.

Walking next to the 101 in Echo Park you can see how it so starkly divides what was once a single connected neighborhood. The light rail lines (about ~40-50 ft to cross) in other neighborhoods don't give that impression.

[1]: https://www.hsr.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/docs/programs/eir_...

Re: How far can you go by train in 5h?

#239

Post by _delirium »

bluGill wrote: post #194
ant6n wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They kind of are if you consider how many goods are still shipped by trucks. The US is perfect for rail - lots of long trips, with lots of goods. It could probably have more market share if goods could move more quickly and flexibly.

While there is a lot US rail could do to get more freight, the fact is we send a lot more freight by rail than Europe.

Just to add some numbers, the freight modal splits as of 2018 (most recent year with complete data), measured in tonne-kilometers, for a few countries [1] and the EU taken as a whole [2]:

US: 45% road, 38% rail, 17% other (water/pipeline)

France: 75% road, 15% rail, 10% other

Germany: 62% road, 25% rail, 18% other

Spain: 92% road, 4% rail, 4% other

EU: 76% road, 19% rail, 5% other

[1] https://stats.oecd.org/BrandedView.aspx?oecd_bv_id=trsprt-da...

[2] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...

Re: How far can you go by train in 5h?

#240

Post by Bubble_Pop_22 »

eloisant wrote: post #197
Robotbeat wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact the US is basically empty means the cost to build a HSR route to go between population centers is super high because of the sheer distances involved. You’re talking like 1000 miles, not 200. The places which are closer together, like the East Coast, do have some passenger rail but they’re also much denser, like Europe, and so they have the same kind of constraints (or worse). The US has a lot of freight rail…

We're not talking about doing NYC - SF by train, but there are a lot of places where it makes sense. As I used to live in the Bay Area, it really surprised me that there was no bullet train between San Francisco and Los Angeles. Yes, apparently it's planned but it boggles my mind that they waited so much before building it. Americans don't realize how much nicer train is compared to plane for medium distances (up to…

> without check-in or security

The biggest break for trains in the last 20 years hasn't been Maglevs or Japan's bullet. Matter of fact it has been OBL fixation on attacking America in a spectacular and televised fashion.

The lack of security abord trains is shocking honestly. Trains are special, there is something about them which calms people even the most evil, because ill intentioned people like terrorists and mentally deranged domestic shooters just ignore them.

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