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Amtrak's New Acela Trains Are Here. They're Moving Slower Than the Old Ones

wsj.com

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Re: Amtrak's New Acela Trains Are Here. They're Moving Slower Than the Old Ones

#71

Post by bombcar »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #65
bombcar wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A passenger train in the USA weighs about 1000 tons, plus another 150 or so tons of locomotive, before we add the passengers (seating 80 per car and about 11 cars for 880 passengers). That’s about a ton per passenger.

To be fair an EV would be at least two tons per passenger. I guess a 1990s honda civic is still one if the most efficient means of vehicular travel.

It's pretty hard to beat those 90s cars - you could fit five adults in them, and they didn't even weigh 2 tons.

Re: Amtrak's New Acela Trains Are Here. They're Moving Slower Than the Old Ones

#72

Post by wenc »

gbhdrew wrote: post #66
dc396 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, US rail is pathetic, at least for passenger travel. However, a quick search on Google Flights shows a one-way ticket from LA to DC costs $98.00 on Frontier via Atlanta (YMMV) so I don't think it's correct to say there isn't cheap, easy, high speed travel across the country.

What serious person is pitching LA -> DC as a city pair for HSR? The best routes are the ones that replace short-haul flights that are currently really inconvenient in terms of driving and rail service. A route like New York to Toronto would make plenty of sense, where you have two major population centers that are very close together, but a huge headache to travel between by rail today (at 12+ hours total on Amtrak…

NY to Toronto actually doesn't make sense because there is a border. I took that train ride and it took 2 hours to clear the border. Even today the guideline is 90 mins - 2 hours. The whole trip took 15 hours. Never again.

I could have flown it in less than 2 hours, security included. The flight would have cost less too!

The only way it would work is PreClearance on both sides (but then again, Canada has never been interested in staffing PreClearance in the US, even though they had reciprocal rights to do it). They only started their first one this year in rural NY.

Re: Amtrak's New Acela Trains Are Here. They're Moving Slower Than the Old Ones

#73

Post by JumpCrisscross »

craftkiller wrote: post #34
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the new schedule is only about 15 mins longer than the old one...this is a big nothingburger Then why the new cars? Are they cheaper to run? If so, the real price of a ticket (or losses [1]) should go down. [1] https://www.amtrak.com/content/dam/projects/dotcom/english/p...

Quoting from the brief article you didn't read: > Amtrak previously has said the new trains could potentially shave 20 minutes off the travel time between New York City and Washington, D.C., reducing the duration to around 2½ hours > because of Amtrak’s old infrastructure, the new trains can only travel at top speed during certain portions of the journey [...] Infrastructure upgrades planned over the coming years wil…

Not faster, per the article. And again, more capacity should mean lower ticket prices or lower projected losses. We have neither.

Re: Amtrak's New Acela Trains Are Here. They're Moving Slower Than the Old Ones

#74

Post by SilverElfin »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #10
bobbylarrybobby wrote: post #8

US rail is so pathetic. Not the rail’s fault per se, but it's pretty embarrassing for a a supposedly wealthy country to not be able to offer its citizens cheap, easy, high speed travel across the country.

> US rail is so pathetic National passenger rail. We still have the world's largest rail network [1]. It's just focussed on freight. (We also have world-class municipal and regional rail in the New York area.) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_rail_tran...

I wonder what the cost would be to build a passenger rail network that simply parallels the freight network, even if low speed. Amtrak is terrible mostly because freight trains get priority and it screws up the schedules.

Re: Amtrak's New Acela Trains Are Here. They're Moving Slower Than the Old Ones

#75

Post by SilverElfin »

pempem wrote: post #41

This is so intensely misleading. The trains are new. The wires etc they run on aren't. When there's funding to update those, the trains will run faster. If this was done in the opposite way, we likely would still be working on infrastructure (it's a bigger project) and the trains would still not run faster cuz they would be old. We need to hold the fourth estate to better account.

Fourth estate?

Re: Amtrak's New Acela Trains Are Here. They're Moving Slower Than the Old Ones

#76

Post by samtheDamned »

SilverElfin wrote: post #75
pempem wrote: post #41

This is so intensely misleading. The trains are new. The wires etc they run on aren't. When there's funding to update those, the trains will run faster. If this was done in the opposite way, we likely would still be working on infrastructure (it's a bigger project) and the trains would still not run faster cuz they would be old. We need to hold the fourth estate to better account.

Fourth estate?

From Oxford: "the profession of journalism"
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