Given recent comments in some posts, I thought I would address a certain topic: high-speed rail.
Some people often criticize America for not having high-speed rail like other advanced nations.
They claim that we are too uneducated, corrupt, stupid, poorly governed, or just too much of a shithole to have a beautifully clean and efficient rail system like Japan.
The real reason America does not and will not have high-speed rail in my lifetime is because of a document that starts with these words: We the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union…
For a Japanese bullet train to operate efficiently and comfortably at 200 mph, it accelerated and decelerates slowly and has to travel at high speed for an extended distance in a fairly straight line on very even track.
If you look at a map of Japan’s high-speed rail line with only a couple of exceptions near major population hubs like Tokyo and Kyoto, it only connects cities that are far apart.
It’s not that America can’t do this from a technical standpoint, it’s that when Japan wants to bulldoze a swath of land on which to pour a concrete slab and lay track, right through your home or farmland, they can. Fuck you.
In the US, if some quasi-public corporation like Amtrack wanted to run a high-speed rail from DC to NYC with no stops in between, or maybe one stop in Philadelphia, in order to keep the train moving efficiently, and needed to bulldoze a swath and pour concrete and lay track through your property to do so, they can’t. They either have to buy your land or use eminent domain to force you to sell it.
The fact is, our nation respects individual and property rights too much to make a high-speed rail feasible.
Personally, I’d rather it be this way than not.
Any government powerful enough to run a high-speed rail through your land against your will is powerful enough to put you in a cattle car for not wanting a high-speed rail run through your land.
This is why Leftists love rail so much, in the backs of their minds they always have a group of people they would like to force onto cattle cars to make the system run more efficiently.
There’s a bit more to it than that, actually.
Strictly from a technical standpoint, the United States is too large and too spread out for high speed rail to be a viable alternative to air travel. The fastest commercial passenger service in the world is roundabout 265 mph. And that’s a MagLev: conventional trains top out around 220. Compare that to the cruising speed of the average airliner.
I can’t find the source anymore, but I remember reading that inside a travel distance of about 300-350 miles, high speed rail can keep up with airliners in terms of overall travel time, but outside that the jet has it beat by an hour at minimum.
So high speed rail works great when cities are relatively close together, like in Europe or Japan, but outside of the coastal corridors (one of which already has high speed rail capability), just straight-up isn’t viable at all here in the States.
Expense and competition is another issue. Americas existing Rail ways can be converted to a higher speed system of 80-100 mph using existing engines but it would be very expensive and would put the existing lines out of order until the project was finished. With semi trailer and air shipping being so cheap and prevailaint the existing lines cant afford to finance a upgrade of the old lines.
And the US actually has one of the best freight rail systems in the world.
Trains are fantastic for moving large masses over long distances at low cost… as long as you don’t need them there very fast. Probably the only means of moving cargo at a better return on energy per unit of freight moved is a ship. But that has the limit of needing to have a large body of water.
Factory to port via freight train, port to port via container ship, port to warehouse via truck. It’s cheap, it’s efficient, and it’s reliable as hell. But it ain’t quick. (Although it’s a heck of a lot faster now than it used to be only a few decades ago, god bless the ISO container.)
I love to travel by train. When my family moved from
Detroit to Portland, I came via Amtrak… three days on the rails versus four hours in the air. Roughly the same price too. But I wanted to enjoy the traveling.
I like trains, but if you want them to be efficient they can’t be fast.
How about terrorism?
Air travel is the most vulnerable at airports from missiles (rare) or from bombs planted aboard. These sites can be hardened and good security (not the TSA) can do a lot to deter. Forget hijackings. That dog won’t hunt anymore. The crew and passengers will stop that nonsense.
High speed rail lines would be hundreds of miles long, so lots of places to seek a derailment. Getting a bomb on board could be devastating. Damaging the track ahead or getting a substantial obstacle on the track could be catastrophic due to the slow deceleration of a train. It is a lot to try to protect just so we can be like the Euroweenies.
Geography is destiny.
Very few things have had more impact on human evolution, cultural development, the history of our societies, and our habitation patterns than geography. Sure, a rival empire living next door that decides to squish you into a slave state is going to impact the development of your society… But it was probably geography that made them a neighbor to begin with, some river or mountain range that kept them over there. It’s probably geography that makes them turn a greedy eye to you, some resource you have and they lack maybe.
The geography of North America does not lend itself well to high speed rail. Our largest urban centers, having been founded during the Age of Sail, are coastal or on large navigable rivers. Large mountain ranges separate them from the interior (Sierra Madres, Appalachians), one of the worlds largest rivers bisects our country (the Mississippi), and one of the worlds largest mountain ranges (the Rockies) bisects one of those halves.
North-South routes would have to either bulldoze some of our oldest and most densely populated cities (Seattle to San Diego? You’ve got to level L.A., San Fran, Portland, and blow up the Golden Gate Bridge) (NYC to Miami? You got to level Philly, Boston, and DC) But not just the cities, oh no, you’ve also got to level the mansions and golf courses of the wealthy elite that live just outside the cities. Alternatively, you move them into the interior, but they’ll need to be on the western side of the Appalachians / eastern side of the Sierras… Which defeats their purpose of being a way to move between cities quickly.
East-West routes gave mountains, rivers, forests, deserts, and the sheer fucking length… Straight line distance from NYC to LA is 3,944 km. The Shanghai Maglev Train holds the speed record for commercial train service: 430 km/h… On its lone 30 km maglev track purpose built for it that no other train uses. Even if we “assume spherical cows in a frictionless vacuum” and assume we could get that exact speed across the entirety of a NYC to LA run, that’s still a nine hour trip. JetBlue will get you there in under six hours.
We’ve already got a fantastic way to move large numbers of people across long distances in short times. They’re called AIRPLANES. They work.
Take it from an European – high speed rails are prestige projects, monuments to the politicians in charge but are really not that feasible.
The modern railway is for goods.
Because you either have tracks that are suitable for high speed and thus are pretty straight and connect just a few big cities – which makes them uninteresting for a big part of the people – or you have finer net of rails that connect more people and cities – which makes them for a big part unusable for high speed transportation.
Also: freight trains are heavier, which makes some routes not feasible for them which would then exist solely for regional trains (those can handler steeper slopes and tighter curves). But if a train has to stop and accelerate every couple miles it becomes wildly uneconomical – and if a railway connects a city even trains that do not stop need to slow down because they can’t go withe full speed trough a train station.
Also one can’t ignore the political reality: Who decides which city gets a connection to the new “modern” high speed railways and which get left out? The resulting lines would look more like a drunk zigzag, thus negating the high speed capability (we do have this problem in Germany with the ICE – in theory it can go over 300km/h but in praxis it idles with less than 160km/h for the most part and rarely reaches 200km/h.
Also public transportation is never cost effective. That’s makes them so well liked by “big government” types because the resulting subsidizations are a great way to get their cronies in well paid jobs. 😉
Trains are nice and practical if used right. But we live in the 2000s not the 1850s – they are not a sign of civilization.
A lot of small towns use to be connected by freight line but most of those lines have been decommissioned and ripped out. Those freight lines used to be the life blood of small towns shipping out grain, livestock and manufactured goods( a factory could be successful in a small town as long as you had a railway stop.) Globalization killed that, small farms died as only mega farms( family or corporate based) could compete with the necessary economy of scale and small town factories were driven out of business competing with 3rd world wages. With the family farms gone( population density use to be 4-16 families per square mile) the service industry that served the area around each small town(car dealerships, auto part stores , gun stores, hardware, cafes, lawyers, farm implement, doctors, hospitals dentists, ect.) dried up causing the influx of shipping to go away as well. By the mid to late 90’s most railways started tearing out and scrapping those lines rather than maintaining them as the business there was gone. At this point you are doing good to find 1-2 families per square mile and most of those families are pretty old.
Funny thing about liberals where I live- they scream like monkeys in favor of the latest leftist idea( wind power ect) then when they get it they scream like monkeys cause it suks. The rail roads we have here would never go hi speed. The tracks and terrain wont support it. One rr has tracks right now limited to 10mph they are so badly maintained.
The other thing that planes have over trains is flexibility. If you need to carry another 1000 people from city A to city B by train you either need another train or a longer train.
Since rails are tightly scheduled it is difficult to add more trains per day. There are seldom extra power units. And limited cars.
So if there is a need for extra capacity and there is already rails then you can increase capacity in a week or so.
On the other hand sending an extra plane is much easier and adding flights is easy.
If there is suddenly a new destination, adding an airport or increasing the capacity of an existing airport is much easier than laying new track.
I am surprised that no one has mentioned that darling of liberal pols the California SF to LA debacle. Only made possible due to federal money provided by the Obama administration. Cali is spending billions of dollars on ever shrinking mileage goals and ever expanding completion dates. It has become a cash cow for politicians, consultants, unions and the dems pet contractors. If completed (yeah right), it will run between two small towns in central CA with almost zero ridership.
Even in Europe — even in Holland where the population density is among the highest in the world — passenger trains are government enterprises, not profitable businesses. I don’t know if any passenger train in the world has run at a profit since 1900 or so.
Speaking of Holland, some years ago the government decided it wanted high speed rail (the French TGV bullet train) rather than just their respectably fast express trains that do 80 mph or so. That required all new tracks from the southern border, right through the densest part of the country. The uproar was immense. I don’t remember if the plan ever came off or if they had to abandon it. They do run the TGV into Holland, but I think it’s like the Acela — a fancy looking train that doesn’t really go all that fast because it is still running on regular tracks with regular curves.