Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

New York to London in an hour - by train

smartplanet.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 146 posts

Re: New York to London in an hour - by train

#51

Post by ChuckMcM »

Eliezer wrote: post #42
ChuckMcM wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would love to see how they costed that out. Given that I don't know of a single engineering company that can build straight up light rail track for at $2.5M/mile even if you give them the land for free. Edit: add this update -- Interestingly this link: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/843626/posts claims that the ET3 bid was 1.2B$ which is $12.5M/mile which is a lot more credible (still low though since the s…

How the hell does light rail track cost $2.5M/mile? How did people build railroad tracks back in the days of horses and buggys?

That is a great question, I wish I could reasonably answer it. I'm a big fan of rail, and while San Jose was celebrating their first 4 miles of light rail (in just 10 years from the start of the project!) I was looking that the marker in the Sacramento Rail museum (recommended) commemorating the laying of 10 miles of the Union Pacific rail line in one day.

Part of it is that some folks really hate rail, so much so that they will continually sue anyone who is working to build it. They will argue wildlife endangerment, habitat destruction, cancer risk, suicide risk, traffic risk, earthquake/disaster risk, global epidemic risk, job preservation/creation/destruction risk, you name it. Anything to get back in court and have a judge temporarily suspend work. Because you hire someone to work on a project, and they can't because of some court order, you still have to pay them. So what happens is these projects have 'burn rates' (which is the cost of renting equipment (or depreciating it if you own it) and labor and materials (some of which degrade over time if not used)) and then you have 'able to work' days. Actual work days might be 90 for a mile of track, but time actually passed is like a year. So the other 275 days people sat on their hands while expensive lawyers argued to get work restarted.

Its one of the things I bring up at town hall meetings with politicians. The tax payer, and the 'NIMBY' [1] folks, fight a very asymmetric kind of warfare. No court challenges until funds are committed, and then six. You need look no further than the maneuvering around the California High Speed Rail project to see it play out in all of its ugliness.

[1] NIMBY -acronym Not In My Back Yard for people who are opposed to any new infrastructure near where they live.

Re: New York to London in an hour - by train

#52

Post by nowarninglabel »

Alex3917 wrote: post #47
usaar333 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really shouldn't be that bad. The cost is mainly due to it being in a dense city and having to deal with endless environmental (broad sense) concern. A better comparison is an actual underwater tube: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transbay_Tube 3.6 miles cost about $1 billion in 2012 dollars. Closer to $55k/foot. Don't get me wrong. This is still impossibly expensive even at that lower rate: $22 trillion. Even at us…

"Even at using costs of the propsed high speed rail in California ($80M/mile), nyc-london would cost $280 billion." Which is roughly 1 / 14th the cost of the Iraq war. Not bad if you think about it.

It begs of a cost-study, I mean, I'd gladly pay 4x the current cost of an economy flight from NYC->London if I could take a train of equal comfort that only took an hour or two.

Re: New York to London in an hour - by train

#54

Post by kaffeinecoma »

My first reaction to this was that they'd never be able to engineer a sturdy/safe tube across the ocean. Then I thought about the transatlantic telegraph cable (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transatlantic_telegraph_cable)- it was first built way back in 1858. That blows my mind.

Re: New York to London in an hour - by train

#55

Post by melling »

I live in NJ, about 4 miles away from my office in Manhattan and I have a 45 commute. Can anyone figure out how to solve that problem? It's a lot of fun to kill the afternoon talking about something that's never gonna happen. In the meantime, millions of people are wasting days a year crawling to and from work.

Re: New York to London in an hour - by train

#57

Post by DanBC »

melling wrote: post #55

I live in NJ, about 4 miles away from my office in Manhattan and I have a 45 commute. Can anyone figure out how to solve that problem? It's a lot of fun to kill the afternoon talking about something that's never gonna happen. In the meantime, millions of people are wasting days a year crawling to and from work.

Get a pushbike. Persuade everyone you know to get a pushbike. Make them persuade everyone they know to get a pushbike.

Start a campaign for people to only use their cars if they i) Have to or ii) are travelling over 10 miles.

Make workplaces have facilities for cyclists. (Perhaps going as far as treating car-parking spaces as a taxable perk). Make schools have facilities for cyclists. Make shops have facilities for cyclists.

Persuade the bad cyclists to stop being idiots. etc.

Re: New York to London in an hour - by train

#58

Post by gojomo »

drudru11 wrote: post #24

This is just like Gene Roddenberry's old show Genesis II from 1973. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genesis_II_(film) I saw it when I was a kid and I thought it was awesome!

Yep, globe-spanning underground maglev/vactrains, which in the future-history of Genesis II (1973) and Planet Earth (1974) had been built in the late 20th-century and survived world war to be still working over a hundred years later.

The sci-fi of the past was way too optimistic about giant-scale engineering projects at the same time it was blind to advances and trends in communications and computer-mediated collaboration.

Re: New York to London in an hour - by train

#59

Post by psyklic »

mostly_harmless wrote: post #46
Eliezer wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How the hell does light rail track cost $2.5M/mile? How did people build railroad tracks back in the days of horses and buggys?

I feel that most of the cost is for tunneling and the difficulties of working in such a space as a subway system. as for normal railroads, a quick googling shows that the cost is much more conservative, with a 1995 estimate[1] stating about $250,000 per mile to rehabilitate an existing railroad. [1] http://tacnet.missouri.org/history/railroads/rrcosts.html

Light rail is above ground, often operating alongside street traffic.

Re: New York to London in an hour - by train

#60

Post by jimworm »

usaar333 wrote: post #30
United857 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, there's already a vacuum we already have above our heads that could be used for this purpose... i.e., suborbital space flight. I can't imagine it'd be more expensive than tunneling 3000 miles under an ocean.

I doubt it is a tunnel. I imagine it'd be more like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immersed_tube (San Francisco's rail connection across the bay uses this technique)

At a fixed depth, so probably more like this: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Submerged_flo...
Post reply on HN