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Plans develop for high-speed rail in the PNW

southseattleemerald.com

1–10 of 311 posts

Re: Plans develop for high-speed rail in the PNW

#3
Amtrak Cascade has trains that can do 125 mph but are throttled to 78 mph because of low quality tracks, as I understand it. Amtrak also recently just started running many more trains per day between Seattle and Portland. High speed rail is great, but maybe a good starting point would just be… fixing the tracks. Get 3 1/2 hours from SEA to PDX down closer to 2…

Re: Plans develop for high-speed rail in the PNW

#5

It would be useful if you could drive your car onto the rail and it carried you and your car at 300 mph.

If done right the stations will be in locations where having a car is more of a liability than a convenience (i.e. downtowns with lots of traffic and expensive parking).

Re: Plans develop for high-speed rail in the PNW

#6

Extremely unlikely. The population density just isn't there. There are 12m people in Washington and Oregon combined, a substantial portion of whom are not on the I-5 corridor. The corridor in general is about 800km long. Compare to ~70m within 500 km of Paris.

Did you know there are nice and fast trains in Europe outside of the Paris region?

Re: Plans develop for high-speed rail in the PNW

#7
post #3

Amtrak Cascade has trains that can do 125 mph but are throttled to 78 mph because of low quality tracks, as I understand it. Amtrak also recently just started running many more trains per day between Seattle and Portland. High speed rail is great, but maybe a good starting point would just be… fixing the tracks. Get 3 1/2 hours from SEA to PDX down closer to 2…

Even just reliability, I regularly make this drive for visiting family and it would be preferable to be able to kick back and relax instead of driving, but currently it’s just too snow and infrequent to be a viable option for me.

Re: Plans develop for high-speed rail in the PNW

#8

Extremely unlikely. The population density just isn't there. There are 12m people in Washington and Oregon combined, a substantial portion of whom are not on the I-5 corridor. The corridor in general is about 800km long. Compare to ~70m within 500 km of Paris.

Now compare to Spain.

Re: Plans develop for high-speed rail in the PNW

#9

Extremely unlikely. The population density just isn't there. There are 12m people in Washington and Oregon combined, a substantial portion of whom are not on the I-5 corridor. The corridor in general is about 800km long. Compare to ~70m within 500 km of Paris.

Did you know there are nice and fast trains in Europe outside of the Paris region?

Which carry all those people mentioned, around? Europe is crazily, densely populated.

Re: Plans develop for high-speed rail in the PNW

#10
> If a rail is built successfully, there will be an extraordinary increase in transportation abilities — saving commuters time while reducing environmental harm.

This high-speed rail is intended for people getting between home and workplace on a daily basis?

Edit: I'm not asking whether it can be used for daily commutes, but is daily commutes the reason for building this? Or what is the reason?

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