High speed trains are racing across the world. But not in America

[Saint Guinefort]

Our current freight rail system is highly efficient and profitable. It doesn't need more speed. Passenger train service in the US is a very limited proposition mostly to the highest population density areas on the two coasts. Outside of that, it's a massive loser.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, we get it: MOAR TRUX! Your mantra seems to be one of "If it doesn't burn a fuckton of petroleum I ain't havin' none of it!"

 

[Saint Guinefort]

Modern high speed rail? Here?

We're on the way to bypassing third world status and introducing the planet to the fourth world,

Americans reject public transportation.

It's as simple as that.

We're not the shiniest pennies in this planet's roll.

It's arguable that we are even pennies.

 

[T. A. Gardner]

That's an overgeneralization

Yes, the majority of business should be owned and operated by private concerns, which they are, however, there does exist many things in our society that private interests, due to the profit motive, can not deliver as well as the Government can and does.

What businesses would those be?

 

[T. A. Gardner]

Modern high speed rail? Here?

We're on the way to bypassing third world status and introducing the planet to the fourth world,

Americans reject public transportation.

It's as simple as that.

We're not the shiniest pennies in this planet's roll.

Why shouldn't Americans reject public transit? Americans can and do afford private transportation. Our cities aren't overcrowded with people forced to live in tiny apartments. The private car has given America something virtually no other nation has, personal mobility. People can go far more places, choose where to work and live far more freely, and it allows them greater choice in destinations to visit.

 

[Hawkeye10]

Why shouldn't Americans reject public transit? Americans can and do afford private transportation. Our cities aren't overcrowded with people forced to live in tiny apartments. The private car has given America something virtually no other nation has, personal mobility. People can go far more places, choose where to work and live far more freely, and it allows them greater choice in destinations to visit.

What the American people want/need is no longer relevant, as we see for instance with the Revolution dissolving the Southern border and their massive program to encourage foreigners to cross the former border.

Your brain is hopelessly out of date.

 

[T. A. Gardner]

It's a loser because nobody goes to many of those places, but as urbanization spreads and cities get bigger, mass transit is the way of the future

The most likely future model for public transit is the self-driving car using a smart grid that allows people flexibility and efficiency in getting around. I'd say the public bus system is a dinosaur that doesn't have much of a future. Light rail, likewise, is far to expensive until you hit urban densities the US likely will never see except possibly in a few limited locations. The emergence of remote working only reinforces all of that. The paperwork factories of the industrial revolution are already dead.

Word processor circa 1930 - 1960

Word processor and so much more circa 2022

The mass transit systems of the industrial age are dinosaurs. Let them go extinct gracefully.

 

[T. A. Gardner]

What the American people want/need is no longer relevant, as we see for instance with the Revolution dissolving the Southern border and their massive program to encourage foreigners to cross the former border.

Your brain is hopelessly out of date.

Well, that is starting to look true. It doesn't change the stupidity of what is being forced on us by radical Leftist retards however.

 

[signalmankenneth]

High Speed Trains make a lot of sense in America.

And not just for people- but also for moving Freight!

But, at 300 miles per hour, they can be very dangerous if something should go wrong.

But if they were built in tunnels the infrastructure would be quite the investment.

Open canals would be safe and less expensive, as bridges could be easily built above them, and there would be no interruption of highway traffic.

As for passenger trains, I don't think they should stop at every city in between, as they should be mainly EXPRESS commuter trains from point A to B with only a few stops in between. Just the major city stops.

High speed rail runs on their on tracks, and they would have to be built too?!! A high speed rail system would run between major cites?!! It would cost a lot, because America is late into the game?!! You don't run high speed rail on freight tracks either?!!

 

[ptif219]

I don't think I will live to see high speed rail in this country?!! All of does tax cuts for the rich over the years, might have paid for a high speed rail system too?!! My favorite high speed train is France’s TGV, at over 300mph, you drink a glass of champagne on a table and there is no spillage, it's that smooth?!!

CNN —
High speed trains have proved their worth across the world over the past 50 years.

It’s not just in reducing journey times, but more importantly, it’s in driving economic growth, creating jobs and bringing communities closer together. China, Japan and Europe lead the way.

So why doesn’t the United States have a high-speed rail network like those?

For the richest and most economically successful nation on the planet, with an increasingly urbanized population of more than 300 million, it’s a position that is becoming more difficult to justify.

Although Japan started the trend with its Shinkansen “Bullet Trains” in 1964, it was the advent of France’s TGV in the early 1980s that really kick-started a global high-speed train revolution that continues to gather pace.

But it’s a revolution that has so far bypassed the United States. Americans are still almost entirely reliant on congested highways or the headache-inducing stress of an airport and airline network prone to meltdowns.

China has built around 26,000 miles (42,000 kilometers) of dedicated high-speed railways since 2008 and plans to top 43,000 miles (70,000 kilometers) by 2035.

Meanwhile, the United States has just 375 route-miles of track cleared for operation at more than 100 mph.

“Many Americans have no concept of high-speed rail and fail to see its value. They are hopelessly stuck with a highway and airline mindset,” says William C. Vantuono, editor-in-chief of Railway Age, North America’s oldest railroad industry publication.

Cars and airliners have dominated long-distance travel in the United States since the 1950s, rapidly usurping a network of luxurious passenger trains with evocative names such as “The Empire Builder,” “Super Chief” and “Silver Comet.”

Deserted by Hollywood movie stars and business travelers, famous railroads such as the New York Central were largely bankrupt by the early 1970s, handing over their loss-making trains to Amtrak, the national passenger train operator founded in 1971.

In the decades since that traumatic retrenchment, US freight railroads have largely flourished. Passenger rail seems to have been a very low priority for US lawmakers.

Powerful airline, oil and auto industry lobbies in Washington have spent millions maintaining that superiority, but their position is weakening in the face of environmental concerns and worsening congestion.

US President Joe Biden’s $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill includes an unprecedented $170 billion for improving railroads.
Some of this will be invested in repairing Amtrak’s crumbling Northeast Corridor (NEC) linking Boston, New York and Washington.

There are also big plans to bring passenger trains back to many more cities across the nation – providing fast, sustainable travel to cities and regions that have not seen a passenger train for decades.

Add to this the success of the privately funded Brightline operation in Florida, which has been given the green light to build a $10 billion high-speed rail link between Los Angeles and Las Vegas by 2027, plus schemes in California, Texas and the proposed Cascadia route linking Portland, Oregon, with Seattle and Vancouver, and the United States at last appears to be on the cusp of a passenger rail revolution.

https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/high-speed-rail-us/index.html

We have them in Florida

https://www.hsrail.org/brightline-florida/

 

[Hawkeye10]

We have them in Florida

https://www.hsrail.org/brightline-florida/

No, not really....they are expensive to ride want to be's. Eventually they will maybe have a few miles of 125 mph.....HSR is 150+.

 

[ptif219]

No, not really....they are expensive to ride want to be's. Eventually they will maybe have a few miles of 125 mph.....HSR is 150+.

They are still expanding here

 

[Hawkeye10]

They are still expanding here

Will never be HSR, will stay very expensive to use, and will be bankrupt soon is my expectation. The business plan was an obvious fraud from the jump.

 

[ptif219]

Will never be HSR, will stay very expensive to use, and will be bankrupt soon is my expectation. The business plan was an obvious fraud from the jump.

It is doing fine and growing

 

[Hawkeye10]

Amtrak’s New Acela Fleet Is Languishing in a Rail Yard

Amtrak’s new, high-speed Acela fleet is one of the country’s largest-ever public-transportation investments, ringing up at $2 billion. But over the last three years, as each of the 28 new Acela train sets rolled off the Hornell, New York, assembly line, they have been languishing in a rail yard, all dressed up with nowhere on the Northeast Corridor to go. Now the major Acela upgrade, once planned for 2021, might not be on track until sometime in 2024.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the new Acela cars are being held up by requirements that mandate the trains are run in a range of real-world conditions before boarding passengers. The problem is, unlike their siblings in other countries that have their own dedicated rights-of-way, the new Acela trains — like all the service Amtrak runs — have to share tracks with existing freight and passenger trains, severely limiting what track is available for testing. And among the greatest concerns for the new rolling stock is how it will navigate those antiquated 100-year-old rails, including how trains designed for France’s stick-straight TGV routes negotiate our curvier stretches. (The answer: slowly.) Right now, Amtrak is still using computer modeling to replicate various scenarios that the new cars might encounter during their trips up and down the Eastern Seaboard; so far, the supposedly superfast trains haven’t seen speeds faster than 90 mph

https://www.curbed.com/2023/05/amtrak-acela-fleet-delayed-testing-2024.html

I believe that the truth is that it turns out that these trains can not be safely run on the shit quality NEC, which Amtrak has a long history of mismanaging even though it has been given lots of money to keep it in repair. Apparently the "experts" are trying to figure out what to do about this.

America 2023, par for the course.

 

[Hawkeye10]

HSR trainsets were bought even though the NEC is not remotely HSR because they wanted to sell the lie that America like the rest of the modern world has HSR.

It was always idiotic.

 

[Hawkeye10]

The NEC can never be HSR because of all of the curves and where they are, it would cost trillions to remove them.

But our leaders go on pretending and selling lies to the people, so we are here.

Deeply idiotic purchasing decisions.

 

[Hawkeye10]

https://twitter.com/x/status/1700360354340220968

 

[Into Тhe Night]

Well, could it be that the entirety of France fits inside the state of Texas? A 300 mph train running the 2800 miles from LA to NYC would take a minimum of roughly 10 hours to make the trip non-stop. Of course, crossing the Pacific coastal range, then the Rocky Mountains, then the Appalachians, on top of making at least some stops along the way, and definitely not being able to make 300 mph continuously, would make the trip more like 3 or 4 days in length. The cost would be equal to or much higher-- likely much higher--than air travel.

Given those figures, NOBODY would take the train when they can fly. Four or five hours in the air and you're there is preferable to an interminable trip on a choo choo train. That's why passenger train service died out in the US decades ago. China is losing their ass in money on their high-speed rail system. It is unsustainable.

Why take a train from LA to Vegas when a flight takes one hour with similar wait times at both ends compared to using high-speed rail. Spending a whole day, effectively, on a train to get to Vegas makes ZERO sense for say, someone going there for a three-day weekend. Flying lets you spend three days in Vegas versus say maybe--MAYBE--two if you take the train.

California's high speed rail program has already exceeded $100 billion and it hasn't moved a single passenger. That's somewhere between 3 and 4 times the original estimate, and my bet is that's only a fraction of the real cost. In fact, the $100 billion estimate moved to $105 billion this year.

Japan is roughly the same size as California. Again, high speed rail for the entire US is absurd. China has spent nearly a trillion dollars on their system, and it isn't making a cent of profit.

High speed rail makes ZERO sense for America.

It does make sense for America for logistics transportation. In a vacuum sealed tube, a maglev train can conceivably travel thousands of miles per hour.

https://web.archive.org/web/20110927014656/http://dsc.discovery.com/convergence/engineering/transatlantictunnel/interactive/interactive.html

 

[Into the Night]

I don't think I will live to see high speed rail in this country?!! All of does tax cuts for the rich over the years, might have paid for a high speed rail system too?!! My favorite high speed train is France’s TGV, at over 300mph, you drink a glass of champagne on a table and there is no spillage, it's that smooth?!!

CNN —
High speed trains have proved their worth across the world over the past 50 years.

It’s not just in reducing journey times, but more importantly, it’s in driving economic growth, creating jobs and bringing communities closer together. China, Japan and Europe lead the way.

So why doesn’t the United States have a high-speed rail network like those?

For the richest and most economically successful nation on the planet, with an increasingly urbanized population of more than 300 million, it’s a position that is becoming more difficult to justify.

Although Japan started the trend with its Shinkansen “Bullet Trains” in 1964, it was the advent of France’s TGV in the early 1980s that really kick-started a global high-speed train revolution that continues to gather pace.

But it’s a revolution that has so far bypassed the United States. Americans are still almost entirely reliant on congested highways or the headache-inducing stress of an airport and airline network prone to meltdowns.

China has built around 26,000 miles (42,000 kilometers) of dedicated high-speed railways since 2008 and plans to top 43,000 miles (70,000 kilometers) by 2035.

Meanwhile, the United States has just 375 route-miles of track cleared for operation at more than 100 mph.

“Many Americans have no concept of high-speed rail and fail to see its value. They are hopelessly stuck with a highway and airline mindset,” says William C. Vantuono, editor-in-chief of Railway Age, North America’s oldest railroad industry publication.

Cars and airliners have dominated long-distance travel in the United States since the 1950s, rapidly usurping a network of luxurious passenger trains with evocative names such as “The Empire Builder,” “Super Chief” and “Silver Comet.”

Deserted by Hollywood movie stars and business travelers, famous railroads such as the New York Central were largely bankrupt by the early 1970s, handing over their loss-making trains to Amtrak, the national passenger train operator founded in 1971.

In the decades since that traumatic retrenchment, US freight railroads have largely flourished. Passenger rail seems to have been a very low priority for US lawmakers.

Powerful airline, oil and auto industry lobbies in Washington have spent millions maintaining that superiority, but their position is weakening in the face of environmental concerns and worsening congestion.

US President Joe Biden’s $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill includes an unprecedented $170 billion for improving railroads.
Some of this will be invested in repairing Amtrak’s crumbling Northeast Corridor (NEC) linking Boston, New York and Washington.

There are also big plans to bring passenger trains back to many more cities across the nation – providing fast, sustainable travel to cities and regions that have not seen a passenger train for decades.

Add to this the success of the privately funded Brightline operation in Florida, which has been given the green light to build a $10 billion high-speed rail link between Los Angeles and Las Vegas by 2027, plus schemes in California, Texas and the proposed Cascadia route linking Portland, Oregon, with Seattle and Vancouver, and the United States at last appears to be on the cusp of a passenger rail revolution.

https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/high-speed-rail-us/index.html

There's a reason for that.

Airplanes and freeways.

 

[Into the Night]

Your argument is obvious garbage given how much sense HSR makes in China. The purpose of rail is not to make money, it is to move people in a sensible way, it is to allow the society to work.

The purpose of rail is to not make money??????????!?