CAHSR phase 1 is merced to bakersfield and the current design for SF-LA throws in the towel on the last mile. if you think what they're doing now is silly, just wait until the laypeople get their hands on the altamont/pacheco palmdale/tehachapi discourse.
Which is to say they're being smart about it. LA is huge and sprawling, there's no guarantee that where you wanted to go was downtown. Build your HSR station somewhere on the metro network (and if it works out then just having the HSR station there will ultimately make it grow into a place worth going), let that take care of the rest.
Rancho Cucamonga is not Los Angeles. Victorville is not Los Angeles. How the hell are you supposed to get to Rancho Cucamonga without a car? For Las Vegas people going to LA, what the hell are you supposed to do when the train dumps you in the middle of Rancho Cucamonga?
If you want real ridership, public transit in both LA and LV needs to be functional.
Connect it to Union Station and LAX if you want some ridership. On the Las Vegas end make it stop smack in the middle of the strip.
Otherwise this thing is useless.
Also 125mph is not high speed rail. LA-LV in 2 hours + time spent getting to the train station + buffer time to avoid missing the train + long slow car rental line on the other end while 15 people ahead of you each have a chit chat with the one employee dealing with the rentals would be more time than just driving end to end. These people just don't get it.
Try LA-LV in 1 hour and maybe we're talking. But really, fix public transit in both cities first.
>Connect it to Union Station and LAX if you want some ridership.
FTA:
>Brightline West [...] aims to lay 218 miles (351 kilometers) of new track almost all in the median of Interstate 15 between Las Vegas and Rancho Cucamonga, California. It would link there with a commuter rail connection to downtown Los Angeles
I hope they can run a more frequent service, or at least alter the times to match up with the HSR, once service begins. It's currently only hourly after the morning, and doesn't run after 7pm.
> It would link there with a commuter rail connection to downtown Los Angeles
So cut the commuter rail crap and just send the bullet trains to downtown Los Angeles?
Put another way, they've cut 4 hours of driving into 3 hours of train riding where you can't even get 3 hours of sleep and have to haul your luggage to another platform, likely up and down some stairs, 2 hours into it. And you still need to deal with transit once you arrive, so add another hour to get wherever you're actually going in LA (if you're lucky with the traffic). Time savings is zero.
Yup, just like flying between SF and LA. It takes the same amount of time as driving once you factor in all the other BS that airports entail. Charter planes are definitely faster but an order of magnitude more expensive. JSX is a decent alternative if you live near OAK and want to go to BUR. JSX out of SJC would be awesome, but not as awesome as a $50 high-speed train ride to LA that took the same time door-to-door as JSX.
We peaked with the west coast and east coast mainlines. HS1 was suffered in its ambitions thanks to low cost airlines (the infrastructure is underutilised today). HS2 got gutted. The Transpennine electrification is going at a snail's pace and isn't ambitious in the slightest.
The UK is finished with ambitious infrastructure (and house building), as we are a populous country of rich and influential NIMBYs with a party often in power that panders to them
There's a lot of anecdotal evidence that some American steam locomotives went >120 mph in passenger service (the Milwaukee Road's F7's and the Pennsylvania Railroad's S1's, for example). I believe if you look at the PRR timetables, they had some routes that averaged 80 mph between stops, meaning they almost certainly hit a max speed at least over 100 mph. The US didn't have the same speed record contests that the Brits did though, so there's no official record.
In 1947 a law was passed requiring trains above 79mph to have some kind of automatic train stop system, so that ended most of the high speed steam service.
The UK's record-setting locomotives were pre-war. The HSTs were only a moderate increment over the existing "deltics", but it gets much harder to add that extra bit of speed for true high-speed rail (and there's no real evidence that US steam trains ever achieved 125mph, even though 100mph+ running was routine on some routes).
For those interested, this is a good video that summarizes the US's high speed steam locomotives, from a YouTuber who works on steam locomotives (despite the title, it's fact oriented and there's not too much flag waving). There is some evidence, but it's not conclusive.
Great Western Railway locomotives had automatic stop long before the end of steam. Why would having to have that automated put an end to high speed steam service?
In the US, it was only required in 1952 (due to the aforementioned law passed in 1947), and there was very little experience with it before then. By 1947, it was clear that diesel was going to replace steam due to steam's significantly higher maintenance costs (and the lack of MU). If you're running a mainline railroad in 1947, you already know that you're gonna be replacing almost all your steam locomotives within the next 10 years, so why bother upgrading them?
They've started on the parts they could get land rights quickly, non-contentiously. The other bit, the (sub)urban runs each end will demand much more capex, and probably horrendous NIMBY pushback. Once this is done, the rest will follow.
The speed claims are good: going in saying it will be shinkansen fast, 350kph would be suicidal when it can't do it. Going to market on 125MPH means when they exceed it (and they will) it will be better for them.
I think they have made savvy financial choices. I get your pushback, it will suck living the commute delays either side. You think it kills it. I think it's a forcing function.
Thing is, I'm really a big public transit fan. I see time and time again that the US just doesn't get how to build a public transit system that the middle class wants to use, and would prefer to use when they already have a car.
In countries where it works, it's a non-issue to get to/from the train station on both sides, and the train stations have ample good food options (real food; not a Dunkin Donuts), clean restrooms, direct connections to subways without having to even exit the building. It's an all-around pleasant experience.
I suppose, if they can go to market on 125mph, fine, but I'm rather pessimistic that anyone who lives in LV or LA (especially) would use it considering the sad state of public transit in both cities.
To be honest, faster rail between Boston - NYC - Washington (on the order of 1.5 hours between Boston-NYC and 1.5 hours between NYC-Washington, which is doable at Shinkansen/CRH speeds) would be a better market in my opinion until the west coast can get their shit together with public transit (if ever). There's plenty of business need on the east coast for faster trains, the space for the rails is already carved out by Amtrak's stupidly-slow Acela Express, and all 3 cities have excellent public transit, good enough that a significant chunk of the population of all 3 actually lives car-free.
Tons, I mean TONS of people drinking alcohol and or consuming THC will want to use that service. There will be piss all over the train if they don't put in a bathroom. which they wont because they never do...
Yeah the bathroom thing is another thing I don't get. Why is the US so stingy with public bathrooms? I don't even drink alcohol and I've actually had to pee on the road multiple times because I couldn't find a bathroom, and the only bathrooms within walking distance were "customers only" (at least for men; women usually get to use them in anecdotal experience).
In Europe and Asia I've never had a situation in an urban area where there wasn't an easily accessible public bathroom within a couple blocks.
People in SF complain about piss on the ground. Yet I've had to piss on the ground waiting 45 minutes for the Caltrain because the goddamn Caltrain bathrooms were closed for the rest of the night and the Panera next door wouldn't let me use theirs. What do you expect?
Don't they realize that human bodies need to excrete waste and if you don't give them a designated place to do it, it's going to come out on the street? And then the same people who refuse restroom access complain about shit and pee on the street?
Someone has to clean them too and you clearly don’t realize how trashy people ruin things. And for some reason we seem to tolerate those breaking social contracts and homeless drug users messing things up instead of dealing with it.
It sucks but it’s not a young minimum wage worker’s primary job.
In Europe and Asia, there's always a toilet (usually one per carriage) on a middle or longer distance train. It's only urban trains and metros that don't have them — on these, the expectation is that you use a toilet in the station, and the train is so frequent it doesn't matter if you miss one.
The Brightline website says their trains in Florida have toilets, I don't see why California would be any different.
i’m currently in paris where the only “public” WC in the train stations still require payment and none of the stops between terminals on the RER seem to have had public restrooms on the platforms. it feels quite similar to my home city in the US.
i find there to be quite a few things to love about Europe over the US, but the idea of toileting as superior in Europe than in the US strikes me as odd. colloquially, i chalk it up to travel/cultural anxiety and stress because i can find a place/way to toilet in SF, NYC, or Orlando far more easily than in Paris, Florence, or Frankfurt
Come to Japan if you want to see truly superior public toileting. Not only are public toilets numerous and easily accessible (even in parks), they're free, clean, and usually have washlets installed.
As someone living in Germany, I have no idea what you're talking about. Paid public toilets are the norm overwhelmingly here, and even then the offer is minimal. The famous Berlin new main station, while gorgeous and modern, has 1 (one) facility, with 5 or 6 stalls per gender. Many train stations have nothing.
I found plenty of free toilets in Amsterdam and Copenhagen and plenty of pay toilets in Stockholm and Oslo. In Germany I usually looked for supermarkets, train stations, fast food restaurants, but come to think of it, Germany was harder.
> If you want real ridership, public transit in both LA and LV needs to be functional
Perfect is the enemy of the good. Even if everyone who takes the train drives from Los Angeles to Rancho Cucamonga (or takes an Uber), they're still offsetting less-efficient transportation modes.
It's approximately a 4 hour drive by car. The train might be able to do it in 2 hours, but of course there's the overhead you mention.
The drive costs around $40 in gas one-way. If this train is indeed $80 per ticket one-way, then I fail to see how it will be competitive with driving. A group of 5 going to Vegas would pay 10X the cost of driving and lose a lot of flexibility.
> A group of 5 going to Vegas would pay 10X the cost of driving and lose a lot of flexibility
But they'd gain back the time they would have spent driving. Pretty much everyone I know in Los Angeles flies to Las Vegas, though it's an admittedly biased sample.
> Pretty much everyone I know in Los Angeles flies to Las Vegas
Huh what? Almost everyone I know in LA drives to Las Vegas just to avoid having to deal with airports. And when you arrive in Las Vegas you already have your favorite car filled with your favorite snacks.
And so the train will avoid the hassle and comfort issues of airport/airlines and you’re not screwed paying for parking (which you left out of your example for some reason).
> long slow car rental line on the other end while 15 people ahead of you each have a chit chat with the one employee dealing with the rentals
it will be a fast line of ubers and yellow taxis
but okay 2005 called.
jokes aside, Brightline has delivered before. It has potential for grift but I think they’ll pull this one off. They already plan to use metrolink from downtown LA Union Station. not perfect but decent coordination.
My understanding is that it will share with the Metrolink station already in Cucamonga.
Also there are already plan for a major bus hub for the regional area in Cucamonga as well.
The magic that makes this work is that the right of way is down the middle of the existing I15 freeway. No real impact studies are likely necessary for that route, and once they hit Barstow, it’s quite flat.
Friday commute traffic out of LA and OC to the area at the bottom of the pass is absolutely impacted by the crush of traffic heading over the Cajun pass into the high desert. Not all of it is Vegas bound, but much of it is.
I am curious how they will get through the pass. I’m assuming they’ll lease ROW from either UP or BNSF, as they own the two sets of tracks currently over the pass.
Its not just the smell--its harassment, ranting, screaming, and even violence. Women especially don't feel safe. These are people with serious mental illness.
I can't wait for the return of private train cars. Imagine the casinos hitching up private cars to the Brightline, thereby improving their experience while subsidising everyone else.
That's highly unlikely. High speed rail doesn't work like old school rail used to - you have full electric trainsets where all the cars are tightly coupled together (often even sharing bogies) so coupling/decoupling is only possible in a maintenance yard. Also, depending on the model, often all or at least many of the cars are also powered and provide distributed traction.
Having branded luxury cars would be he fairly easy and could easily be a hit; private cars are unlikely to be feasible with your regular high speed electric multiple units.
most EMUs have standard couplers at the end of the trainset, the problem is more so that the rail-wheel and bogie suspension dynamics of high speed cars are highly engineered and derailments at 300km/h are catastrophic
A private train car to vegas would be amazing actually. Especially if on the inside they went with an old-fashioned interior design with lots of oak paneling.
Private train cars never went away, as far as I'm aware. Amtrak has (always?) allowed folks to couple private cars to the end of their trains (for an eye-watering price, of course).
My understanding is that while they generally have, and there may be some form of legal requirement that they provide service to private cars, in the last six years or so Amtrak has been increasingly restrictive, with some suggesting that they are trying to make private cars practically infeasible to use. There seems to have been a battle between Amtrak and private car owners that started in 2018 [1], and it's unclear if there has been any resolution to that.
Hard to see this as anything other than big-time grift.
This is estimated to be a $12B project. $6.5B raised so far: $3B grant and $3.5B in tax-exempt, "private activity" bonds. Does anyone actually think the rest will come from investors? Of course not, the government will see a half-finished project that it supported and provide the funding to finish the job, including the inevitable overruns.
A private company receiving 6.5B (and likely, eventually $12+) of government money... no pressure or expectations to make any profit. Great deal if you can get it!
It lost $192 million in the first 9 months of 2023. $201 million same period of 2022. It also lowered its passenger forecast to Orlando from 7 to 5.5 million.
That's why I believe public infrastructure should be publicly-owned. It's rare to find a profitable metro system...it should be run by the government as a benefit for citizens, not as a business like Brightline.
The rail infrastructure is publicly owned. But the rail infrastructure is open access that private companies can pay for. As far as I understand you can even have a public carrier but it must bid for access like its private counterparts do.
This has already led to an explosion of high quality high speed rail service in countries like Italy and Spain.
To rephrase, some things are not directly profitable but tend to have outsized profitable effects. E.g., the education budget doesn't directly generate profits, but educated people go on to get good jobs and pay a lot of taxes, refunding the cost of their education by many multiples.
The same goes for roads, highways, and rail. Not directly profitable, but they enable a lot of free movement that boosts the economy and, in turn, taxes.
$6.5B to demonstrate it is in fact possible to build HSR on budget and on time in the states and that CAHSR is just run by a consultant mafioso in a trenchcoat sounds like a great deal!
I've done plenty of research. The Florida operation is backed by Fortress Investment Group. It is not involved in funding the California-Nevada project. As I've already pointed out, all the money raised so far comes from government sources.
The regulations of rail in the US are slightly perverted (freight rail interests dominate the discussion, usually). The economics of passenger rail in the western US are also difficult when large densities of people are so spread out and the only "primary" reasons for going from A to B are for recreation, not work/industry.
Having experienced the post-privatization decline of public services a few times I'm of the opinion that public transport, being a societal good, should be publicly funded, publicly owned and funded well. Rail is especially expensive to maintain and profit from. Private companies tend to reduce maintenance to a bare minimum or less in the name of efficiency, resulting in the infrastructure declining whilst profits rise. Then the government steps back in to fund repairs to a critical service, indirectly funding the profits. That's definitely a typical capitalist grift for "too big to fail" companies. For those that don't like public money spent on infrastructure its a not a binary choice of to spend the money or not, it's inevitably when to spend it and how.
In the UK there was for a while the private finance initiative, where the government contracted private companies to provide services or development. The result, as concluded by the very private business friendly right wing government, was that is was a total waste of money, with no measurable benefit but costing billions extra than if the government had provided services directly.
This. The $12B represents about 0.2% of the total US outlays for FY 2023. People tend to see the big number without considering the rest of public spending. You have to crack an egg to make an omelette. As a result the general population will tend to vote against these kinds of investments and then look back in 50-100 years and wonder why other countries seem to have all of the nice public infrastructure.
Honestly LA to LV is probably not bad it’s the right distance, it’s mostly desert so most of the HS2 issues will be avoided. If it’s actually high speed eg 200mph+ then I could see it working.
Edit: oh it’s 100mph, and it stops 37 miles outside of LA. Should rename it HS3
I wish it was public instead of private. Brightline in Miami was obviously a line rich people take around the area for select events. I'm glad the Musk's line from O'Hare to the Loop failed when it was obvious that CTA just needed an express lane on the Blue line
As an outside/non-American observer: yeah, it'd make total sense, but it seems like there's no political will in the US to build publicly-owned transport infrastructure beyond:
- Maintaining what's already there
- Select state-level projects, in some states
- Select municipal-level projects, in some cities
This means there's been a huge deficit in this kind of project at the federal level.
In saying that, I don't want to give the impression that I'm on some ivory tower. Via Rail, a crown corp, is our national rail operator, and it's riddled with issues with little in the way of meaningful solutions.
It's kinda the same problem we have in the EU though. High speed rail is mostly state level. France wants their TGV serving mostly French travellers. Same with the Spanish AVE and German ICE.
It would be amazing to book a high speed train from Amsterdam to Barcelona at prices competing with Aviation. But nobody cares about this at a pan-EU level.
Isn't some of this due to different use cases? The need for the German government to have a train from Berlin to Bremen makes sense in a way that probably doesn't matter if you're not living in Germany, but having a train that connects on the various borders in a compatible way is harder to fund and requires all the other countries to generally agree to do it at the same time.
The likely outcome of a whole-EU train system is something like the US system where Amtrak generally hits the major population centers, but leaves a ton of the US behind because when you talk about Federal priorities, a train from Denver to Dallas isn't a huge priority compared to LA to SF or Boston to NYC. Obviously the EU system would fare better because it's starting from a better base, but it's emblematic of the tradeoff between bottom-up and top-down planning and investment for something like this.
The problem in EU is that most of the funding comes from the states so they want their own taxpayers to benefit first.
So there's not really any interest in selling tickets from Country A to Country C. Because country B has to put up with the traffic which is already resource-restricted. And they prefer their internal customers to get priority.
This way it will never end up as a reasonable alternative for flying. What's really missing in the EU is the ability to bypass cities. A train from Amsterdam to Barcelona has to cross right through the center of Antwerp, Brussels, Lyon (or a transfer in Paris through a horrible metro connection). It's not possible to have a direct train that bypasses all the cities straight to its destination. That would be a real alternative to flying. Considering the amount of flights between Amsterdam and Barcelona daily it's easily possible to fill a few direct trains. It's that stopping in every city center (without in-city facilities for high-speed tracks) that make it so horrible.
But anyway the EU really doesn't care about this at all and considering the huge construction durations they're too late for this to make a difference in climate change anyway.
"no political will in the US to build publicly-owned transport"
There's little faith that public projects have the expertise to actually get it done and make it work. It's hard for me to imagine the federal government succeeding at that for any reasonable cost, and I suppose you could blame some of that on partisan bickering. But I also can't imagine California succeeding for any reasonable cost, and it's a one-party state, so there's no excuse.
At the end of the day you need some people who actually know how to do the job rather than just argue over plans and subcontract twelve levels deep. My guess is that Birghtline found a few such people and that's their competitive advantage as a business.
> There's little faith that public projects have the expertise to actually get it done and make it work.
This ends up being self-fulfilling. People don't trust the government, so they suffocate the project in fixed payscales and low-bid rules and endless reviews, and so the government can't get anything done, and so people don't trust the government...
> At the end of the day you need some people who actually know how to do the job rather than just argue over plans and subcontract twelve levels deep.
Right - so you need to be able to hire those people and pay them something close to what they're worth, or build up that expertise over the long term by having a steady pipeline of projects and training people as you go. But voters don't trust these governments enough to empower them to do that.
Perhaps. But once the expertise is lost, you can't get it back by throwing more money at the problem. You have incompetent people hiring people who check all the right boxes but still can't do it, and then you have a huge sunk cost that you don't want to cancel so it drags on forever, eroding trust even further.
Private companies have some advantages here. If they don't think the project will succeed, they will stop, because they know there's no payday. If it's due to bad laws, they will lobby (a bad word, I know) to change them. They'll fire people who don't perform. They'll look in all kinds of creative ways to find people who can get the job done. They'll stop and think about who might actually ride it, because they need the ticket revenue, so they will build the lines in the right places with the right stops.
Maybe all of that could be true for some governments. But there's a long way to go before the US or the California government is able to do any of those things.
> But once the expertise is lost, you can't get it back by throwing more money at the problem. You have incompetent people hiring people who check all the right boxes but still can't do it
Maybe. Maybe there's no alternative to doing a pipeline of progressively bigger projects with in-house management and accepting that the first few will suck. But if you're not willing to pay what the expertise costs then there's no way you'll make it work, you need to get that level of expertise in house. I'd think that if you're willing to pay top dollar then you have at least a chance of hiring the right people.
> Brightline in Miami was obviously a line rich people take around the area for select events.
Aeroplanes used to be something just for rich people too. Heck, go back far enough and so were cars, or even bicycles. You've gotta build a bunch before it becomes something mass-population.
I understand that California High Speed Rail isn't a popular project on HN, but to claim that it hasn't broken ground is just wrong. There are numerous completed structures and a clear plan to get high-speed trains running from Merced to Bakersfield by 2030.
It's ironic that Merced and Bakersfield get shit on when it's the coastal Bay Area and LA people that are the actual problems standing in the way of making the rail...
I don't know much about Merced, but the reasons that Bakersfield gets shit on have nothing to do with high speed rail and more to do with its reputation for meth, crime, and generally being a shithole to live in or even pass through. I suppose one might find this “ironic”, for very interesting definitions of “ironic”.
I'm well aware of Bakersfield's problems. And yet, the area was able to handle implementing the initial steps of high speed rail, and the Bay and LA weren't (for whatever eminent domain / NIMBY reasons). So it's funny to me to see LA/Bay people give Bakersfield crap: "ugh why is the rail over there". Well, because you LA/Bay people couldn't.
Yes, that annoyed me. What they really mean is that they claim this rail line will be in operation before CA High-Speed Rail. I find that hard to believe, but I would be happy to be surprised.
While construction only just now broke ground formally, this project has been around (under different companies) since before Prop 1A for CA HSR was passed, and has already done all route planning, environmental clearance, and right-of-way acquisition, on a simpler route with fewer stations (even compared to the CA HSR Early Operating Segment, though Brightline West is longer.)
Will that segment of CAHSR be able to run at full speed? The plans have changed so much that it's hard to find a good and up to date source, but my understanding was that to save money a good chunk of phase 1 isn't going to be running at "HSR" speeds. e.g. it'll be sharing track with freight trains, and some routes were made windy-er to save money (with the side effect of limiting speeds)
I'm in the bay area and literally nothing they've designed around here is going 220mph unless they a going to be banking the tracks 40 degrees and doing a TON of ground breaking engineering around safety to run at 220 mph safely while sharing with Caltrain and other users.
That’s 50% faster than Acela (150mph) which isn’t nothing, but doesn’t make much of a difference on its own. What’s actually important is maintaining high speed for most of the trip which is where Acela fails (~70.3 mph).
> What’s actually important is maintaining high speed for most of the trip which is where Acela fails (~70.3 mph).
Reminds me of high-speed rail in France vs high-speed rail in Germany. To the point that newer Siemens trains will have a lower top-speed, because "there is no demand for it".
In France, it depends a lot on the lines : Paris-Lyon has average of 270 km/h (167 mph); Paris-Bordeaux clock at around 300 km/h (186 mph) while Paris-Brest is more at 200 (124 mph).
It is interesting to note that it often seems ti correlate to the age of the line, with Paris-Bordeaux being the most recent.
Yes, but they are limited by the technology used to build the line, and by how the lines were traced, but not because their high-speed trains need to stop at every city center or run on "winding" tracks, as is the case in Germany.
The Paris-Lyon line is by far the oldest, and is top-speed limited because of how it was traced. (And also because of its out-dated security system that is in the process of being changed)
The Paris-Brest line stops being a high-speed track in Rennes, so even if the first part is fast, it's still a long way to Brest on conventional tracks.
The newer lines are faster, as they are designed for theoretical operational speeds of 350 km/h, with a current operational top speed of 320. (LGV Sud Europe Atlantique, LGV Rhin-Rhone, LGV Est, and even the LGV Bretagne Pays-de-Loire going to Brest)
If I understand it correctly the definition of high speed rail in the UK is above 125mph. Apparently that's the fastest you can safely use conventional line side signalling (traffic lights).
That Merced to Bakersfield line is characterizes as from nowhere to nowhere in How Big Projects Get Done. It’s one of the few negative examples in the book that stuck with me. It’s embarrassing.
I know next to nothing about this project but isn’t this a way to build a train line somewhat cost effective? Once it exists, the land around both stations will increase in utility until it’s no longer a “nowhere”. If you build downtown to downtown you have to either dig a massive, expensive tunnel or buy up a lot of high value land or both.
Perhaps it’s won’t break even for half a century but if it eventually does, it will be a success.
Build it and they'll come? At least one end has to be somewhere people want to be, right? A line from London into the countryside makes sense. You can live in the countryside and work in London. A line from nowhere to nowhere is a chicken/egg problem. Now if one end is an Airport and another is a new community who will have jobs at the airport, that might work.
They both are university towns (UC Merced and Cal State Bakersfield); given that academics are generally positively inclined towards public transit a line could encourage collaborations, I suppose.
It's my theory partly why China has smashed out so many thousands of km of HSR and what appear to be excessively wide highways (other than prestige and a general vibe of governance=more, bigger infrastructure). In 100 years when the ossification and NIMBYism is the norm, the rail corridor land is already there. Renovating a line that already exists may not be easy, but it's easier than prizing land out plot by plot, and even in China that's a huge hassle. Plus the hard physical bits like blasting tunnels and digging cuttings is already done before labour costs succumb to spiraling cost disease.
Then again, at about $45 million per mile, it's actually not even that much more expensive that Chinese HSR: to build the current 45000km of rail at the LV-LA price would be $1.25 trillion, which isn't vastly more than the Chinese system has cost so far. In fact it's very roughly about as much as the US spends, per year, on healthcare on top of what European countries pay for the same outcomes (total annual spending: 4.2 trillion and a bit, or 12.5k per person, vs global number two, Switzerland, at 8k: about 1/3, not far from 1.25/4.2!)
I agree. I can imagine tourists traveling to Merced to see the high speed rail in all its glory. Bakersfield is already a hot tourist destination because of Buck Owens and The Hag, but adding high speed rail will make it even more attractive as a “must see” attraction when visiting the golden state.
There's also a plan to connect to SF and LA eventually.
Those will be built as (if) they are funded. The only funding currently secured is the bakersfield to merced leg.
The problem is, that leg is nowhere to nowhere and is going to cost over 100B dollars. Most people take that to mean that it's incredibly unlikely that the more costly portions of the route (the ones that make it useful) will ever get built as they will be absurdly expensive.
_Presuming_ that the rest of it gets done, it likely makes a lot of sense; you get the difficult bit (starting up high speed rail construction and operation in a country, and indeed a continent, which has never done it before) out of the way in a presumably _relatively_ low-stakes section; if you're going to have teething problems, and you will, better to have them there than when you're trying to go through a mountain range.
Merced to Bakersfield is exactly right. Build it there first, figure out how to build it, fuckup where it's cheaper and gain the experience so when you have to tear up downtown LA and SF you know what the fuck you're doing and can get in, get it done right the first time, and then get out. No one wants to live in a construction zone, but it's worse when something goes wrong and the construction zone lasts 3x longer than it has to.
This, exactly. We Americans have very little knowledge base on how to build HSR, so it's as much a workforce training and proving ground as it is a functional line.
I wouldn't say there's a technical knowledge gap insomuch as there are regulatory and political issues in the cities that need more time to resolve than building a line through farm country & desert do.
You would think we would just hire the dutch/swiss/italians (take your pick out of europe) to come build our HSR, similar but opposite of how we destroyed their cities when they brought in our 'traffic engineers' in the 60s and 70s.
On the other hand, how many additional people would be served by the infrastructure if they would just be brave and take a risk on an imperfect solution rather than bickering about it for X years or decades?
I was just looking up the LA to SF high speed rail project because the headline sounded so wrong. It's so sad that the official website has a giant photo of their progress: a short section of clean, straight overpass over a country road, with nothing connected to either end, an island of rail infrastructure plonked down in the middle of California. Sigh.
That's the first stage of any rail project - in California they have literally build hundreds of these unconnected bridges, viaducts and embankments. Same thing with HS2 in the UK.
Connecting them all up with rails and catenary is the (relatively) cheap, quick and easy bit, and it's done at the end - it's exactly all these structures (and the stations, which will likely be the next phase) that take all the time and money.
I will admit to never visiting either city, but my impression is that they are car dependent without major subway service? Probably some bus line with very local service?
It’s like 2-3 hr drive between the two cities, and at both end you have to navigate auto transport, most likely a rental though maybe Uber would work out but at greater cost for anything beyond a single destination. I would imagine most people would just opt to drive, since they need a car at either end of that line?
Yup. And the station in Los Angeles will be far east of downtown. So if you take Amtrak into LA you'll have to take a taxi or a bus to further transfer to Los Vegas.
the CAHSR station is at LA's Union station, which I think is the context of this set of comments. The line to Vegas (brightline west) does indeed end (for now) in Rancho Cucamonga with plans to continue on to LA's Union Station
Also, for the Las Vegas link, the terminus is on the Metrolink line so you can take a commuter train from Union Station. People taking Amtrak from points east could get off at the Ontario station and it’s a relatively short taxi/bus ride to the RC terminal (Amtrak uses a different set of tracks coming into L.A. from the east than the Metrolink station serving RC). I suppose it would be feasible to extend the line a little further south to connect with Amtrak should there be demand (if they went to the Ontario station, then the Ontario airport could also be integrated into the service).
The ultimate plan is LA->SJ, which is a reasonable compromise and avoids a lot of the reasons why connecting to SF directly via HSR is impractical (it would essentially require a complete reworking of Caltrain to accommodate HSR trains, because there's no alternative anyone would accept to build another parallel rail line up the peninsula).
Not sure what you mean - California HSR trains will go into San Francisco as part of Phase 1 (which is really the second phase, the Initial Operating Segment (IOS) I guess is like Phase 0). They're doing electrification and upgrades of Caltrain there to accommodate it.
Between Sacramento and Merced, and LA and Bakersfield, there will be a "high speed rail bus service". For other parts there will be regional commuter train and bus services.
Nobody will use it. A majority of the demographic see it as a Washington disaster Trump stopped but Biden turned the construction back on.
Everyone owns a car and carpooling is trivial. Most homes have one car per adult.
There’s nothing of interest between Merced and Bakersfield. These were towns that grew from the old 99 freeway from Sacramento to Bakersfield and then on to LA.
Operative phrase: "see it as". I can anecdotally confirm that central-valley relatives of mine bring up HSR as a reason not to vote for Biden. The Democrat = Democrat logic is strong, I suppose, even if the ignorance about federal structure is profound.
> high-speed trains running from Merced to Bakersfield
I lived in CA for 15 years. I've been all over it (incl central ca). This would be such a pyrrhic victory, that I lack words! Who the hell needs to commute enough between those two god-forsaken places to justify the billions spent on this?
So it's an important commercial route but with no passenger demand? What a geographic oddity! I bet you'd be hard-pressed to find any other examples of that, anywhere.
Not really. Cargo uses very different routes than people commonly. How many people travel from Shenzhen to the port of Oakland? Now how many cargo containers?
NOBODY CARES ABOUT MERCED TO BAKERSFIELD.
that's 100k people connected to 400k people. who cares. and it will not be ready by 2030, it'll be 2033. and that means SF to LA will be at least 2040. its absolutely insane and everyone managing that project should be fired and sentenced to 10 years of hard labor.
You can get high speed rail built for people from SoCal to lose their asses at a backgammon table in Vegas faster but if you want to, idk, travel for non-recreational reasons within the Midwest and you don't want to sprint through O'Hare for a flight between where you're from and where you're going, you'll probably be driving despite years of asking for Amtrak to find a way to go above 79 MPH.
I mean, first of all, doesn't it make more sense that there's more money to extract from the LA<->Vegas line? And second, Amtrak can't force CSX to upgrade its rail, and Amtrak sure as hell ain't paying.
There's loads of billionaires out there now with more money than sense. Get together a PAC, lobby them to fund high-speed rail upgrades, name a rail station after them or something.
> We should nationalize the rail infrastructure and upgrade it to make passenger traffic a first-class citizen of the rails
Your response to the first high-speed rail line America is likely to see completed, being built by a private operator, is to propose effectively banning it?
If rails are to be nationalized in the future, why would a private operator build one now? If you believe the inability to profit from the build on a recurring basis will happen, that’s an effective ban on construction of then by private operators now.
Yea but I wouldn't be so happy with nationalized rail tbh.
We have the MTA in NY, they run the railroads and subways. The agency is massively bloated by costs not just where it costs $1.5 billion per mile to expand the subway, but even the railways are bleeding billions per year.
I understand that GP commenter is referring to nationalisation of existing rail infrastructure, particularly given that the intent would be to "upgrade it to make passenger traffic a first-class citizen of the rails". That would not apply to the first high-speed rail line in America, as it already has by its very nature passenger traffic as a first-class citizen — indeed, it will almost certainly have passenger traffic as its only citizen.
"the United States is the world's largest consumer market for a reason: its rivers. Transporting goods by water is 12 times cheaper than by land (which is why civilizations have always flourished around rivers). And the United States, Zeihan calculates, has more navigable waterways — 17,600 miles' worth — than the rest of the world. By comparison, he notes, China and Germany each have about 2,000 miles. And all of the Arab world has 120 miles."
To be fair, Germany is fairly small (by US/China) standards.
The continental US (no Alaska or Hawaii) is > 22.5 times as big as Germany but has only 8.8 times as many miles of "navigable waterways." (However, it's not clear if the US numbers include the Great Lakes or the oceans; LA to Seattle and Miami to NYC goes by ocean, not some river.)
But, that doesn't leave much for the rest of Europe.
The US rail system carries a lot more cargo than in Europe. On the order of 3 times more freight per mile of track. It is an also much cheaper to send freight by rail in the US compared to Europe. Reconfiguring the US rail system to even slightly more passenger friendly would seriously lower the amount of freight that can be transported by rail, as well as raising the price, and most of that would end up on trucks.
The other aspect is how the rail infrastructure is financed in the US vs Europe. In the US the infrastructure is to a large extent funded by the freight companies themselves, and in return their needs get priority. Take away that incentive and they'll stop funding the rail infrastructure meaning that much of that cost will end up pack on either the local or federal government, with all that that entails.
One of the heaviest rail, if not the heaviest rail in Europe, is a 500km combined freight and passenger rail that goes between Sweden and Norway (The Iron Ore Line). It alone carries more than the combined weight of all rail freight transportation in Norway, and close to 50% of all rail freight transportation in Sweden. It also happens to be one of the worlds oldest railways, built in 1888.
The biggest issue is speed. The maximum speed is just slightly above that of maximum highway speed, with freight speed limited to less than half of that.
That line is fantastic for freight (unless they've derailed an ore train again...), but the passenger service it offers would feel right at home in the US when it comes to both speed and number of departures. The passenger service to Norway leaves 0-2 times a day
The line between Kiruna and Narvik is so beautiful I’m not sure why you’d want it to go faster. The speed is heavily dictated by the number of tunnels and turns due to mountainous terrain. It couldn’t be much faster without very expensive kilometer long tunnels.
Population density in North Sweden and Norway is low enough that a few times a day is probably sufficient for most local travel. I haven’t been during peak tourist seasons when that number of trains might not be enough.
A fun fact is that since the ore trains travel mostly downhill, braking generates enough electricity that the ore empty trains can return to Kiruna effectively energy free.
It's worth noting that talking about the 'European' rail infrastructure is a bit of a misnomer since there is no standardisation of the rail system of regulations between countries and as such moving freight across multiple countries is basically never done.
Even for passenger transport the historical legacy of national rail networks means that travel across the continent hasn't been a priority. Recently EU initiatives seek to remedy this:
We have the largest rail system of any country (USA 220k km vs EU 200k km). If you include the connections we use with Mexico and Canada it’s even larger. It’s almost all entirely freight. Trains can be 2000m long compared to 700m in the EU. It’s all built for freight.
2 km long trains are not long in the US anymore; in the west 3-4 km lengths are being seen more and more often. Turns out slower, longer trains filled with bulk commodities are better for business since they don't have tight delivery deadlines. There are towns where the train comes through for 45 minutes+.
Rail operators have also discovered a really nice side effect of ultra long trains: you don't have to pull into a siding to let a passenger train by as required by law if your train is longer than the siding.
Supposedly 10% of trains in the USA are about 10,000 feet or longer. Duckduckgo tells me that's about 3km. Supposedly there's at least one train 14,000 feet or longer.
Can you name a system that moves roughly the same amount of freight as the US while still having excellent passenger service on the same rail infrastructure? Genuinely curious.
80% of freight is done by rail in Sweden I know nothing about logistics so this is just first hit on Google, I do not make the point to contradict you. I think the issue here is how you split up the big numbers into managable percentages for easy statistics, I'm guessing there is a lot of issues when you are talking about this. The biggest is that the US has spent 70 years of lobbying from car manufacturers and oil companies to make people use cars, that has left a scar all over the world. Not only in the freight vs. passenger statistics.
Another aspect that needs to be taken into account is that a large part (perhaps 40%) of any number you see on total tonnes of rail freight in Sweden, is made up of handful of short rail lines doing nothing but transporting iron ore from a few large mines to the nearest harbour.
On literally the same rails, I suspect that doesn't happen that much. China moves more tonnage by rail freight than anywhere else in the world, and it has an immature-but-excellent-where-it-exists high speed system, but it doesn't generally share lines with the freight.
It's true that the US moves more freight by rail compared to for example EU. But that doesn't mean the reason for this is the mostly excellent passenger rail system in the EU. I'm not an expert here at all, but for example this article cites a few plausible reasons: https://www.freightwaves.com/news/why-is-europe-so-absurdly-...
As your link shows, money that is spent on making a good freight rail system is mostly money that doesn't help with passenger traffic.
You claimed that there were "many" countries that had both good freight and passenger rail, but have yet to come up with one. (Sweden isn't an example - its "good freight" service (mines to ports) is where there's insignificant passenger service.)
1. The federal government is not noted for running passenger traffic well.
2. We don't want 40% more trucks on the roads, so we need the system to still be able to carry large amounts of freight. The federal government is also not known for doing that well, still less for balancing that with #1.
3. In this country, we don't just get to nationalize things. We have to pay for them. Given the pathetic rate at which Amtrak is funded, do you really think that Congress is going to spring for the kind of money to buy all the freight railroads?
4. Speaking of Congress, it's going to take continual funding to pay for keeping the system maintained. Do you want the annual maintenance budget for this (including the freight portion) to be at the annual whims of Congress?
It has more to do with land. Land is cheap and easy to acquire out there. Where as anywhere in CA it is expensive. And more so if they find out you need the land to build high speed rail.
Brightline itself is basically a property play. They buy up land around the proposed stations and then the train service makes that land more valuable and it's either leased or sold off for profit. The train is really a loss leader or breakeven proposition.
Moving people around tends to not be that great a business in general. Providing them services once they are there is a money printing machine.
There is a 50 mile stretch of the Acela that reaches over 150MPH that qualifies as "high speed" rail, so technically this is the second high-speed rail in the US.
Third or more, because there's a small stretch of Brightline that qualifies (just the part from Orlando to the coast). I assume that's why Buttigieg said "first operating high-speed rail line", a nuance that seems to have been lost in the headline.
> Brightline's maximum operating speed is 125 mph (200 km/h)
This is a definitional thing; for whatever reason US regulators define this as 'high-speed', but no-where which operates actually high-speed (ie pushing 300km/h) lines does. The LA-Las Vegas project, and the California high speed rail project, are high-speed by international standards, at least in parts.
> This is a definitional thing; for whatever reason US regulators define this as 'high-speed', but no-where which operates actually high-speed (ie pushing 300km/h) lines does.
To be truly pedantic: there is no single international standard[1] of "high speed" rail, but in general, new lines up to 155mph, or upgraded lines up to 125mph, are usually considered "high speed".
In the United States, "higher-speed" rail has been the term used for trains up to 125mph.[2]
> The federal government is increasingly embracing private business collaboration in its space missions, space-based projects and to power the new US Space Force as it ramps up in Los Angeles. This is creating a lot of activity and opportunity for LA-based aerospace companies.
> Jacobsen, a contributing editor and investigative reporter at the Los Angeles Times Magazine, interviewed the former Area 51 employees in 2008 and 2009, shortly after the CIA declassified much of the work they had done.. Jacobsen reveals some of the wild research that went on in the 1970s at Area 51 -- where the military built the U-2 spy plane
High speed rail can shorten commute between Los Angeles privately-funded aerospace and Las Vegas publicly-funded aerospace ecosystems, supporting commercialization that can benefit CA, NV and USA.
> could zoom travelers between Las Vegas and Los Angeles in just under two hours by the end of the decade
Just to be clear, this is to the "greater Los Angeles area", ending at Rancho Cucamonga station, a 48 minute drive (1h15m by public transit) to downtown LA, and a 1h15m drive (2h30m by public transit) to LAX.
Nice clue. If this was being built in Europe it would probably have a number of stops within the city area including opposite outskirts, the center and the airport.
Totally honest question - have there been recent expansions of train lines into cities in Europe? In the last 20 years?
My default assumption right now is that this sort of grand construction is generally infeasible in countries outside of China where they generally don't care who they displace or the environmental damage, and often are building the cities from the ground up in the first place with the trains as a part of the urban planning.
I've been peripheral to a few urban light/heavy rail expansion projects in the US and the consistent issue is that even cities with a lot of urban sprawl are still dense enough that you have to displace a lot of people/businesses to build a new line and the stations around it. It's the sort of thing that's a lot easier to do when the city is young, or the train line got built in an era where you could just force people to sell their houses and move.
I'd be honestly curious if anywhere in the EU has managed to put in a totally net-new line like this outside of existing tracks that included a stop at the city center and various stops on the way into town. Almost every city-center train station I've ever been to in Europe was over 100 years old (even if the building had been upgraded) and seemingly using most of the same lines.
The recipe is really simple: don't do megaprojects. Individual projects must be of appropriate size for the level of government that is making the decisions. When there are several projects of similar size in the pipeline all the time, the government can develop and maintain the expertise needed to build the infrastructure.
We absolutely know how to do megaprojects, but unless you _really_ have to, you don't want to do a megaproject. They've _always_ been a bit fraught; it's not like there was a golden age where they were easy and had a low failure rate.
Yea, I suppose I should have been more specific - it's also obviously easier to "upgrade" a line you already have the land and space for. It's not trivial, since you have to sacrifice some of the throughput in the meantime to support the construction, but it's easier than building an entirely new line.
Also, kinda tough reading that Stuttgart link where it seems like it was generally unpopular and the police did crimes to suppress dissent. I don't really know the details to have an opinion on if they're right, but still.
Section 2 finished in 2007 (just within your 20 year cutoff!)
It links the channel tunnel with London St Pancras. Much of the London part is in tunnels and it is 100% grade separated.
The uk High Speed 2 route was also going to do this and build a new high speed rail line and station into London, but the exact issues you describe seem to mean that it will be halting at a point outside London instead possibly using existing tracks.
Overall though, High speed rail doesn't need new tracks into cities unless all the existing lines are full (or they are too slow)
It's much easier to build high speed line in the countryside and link it to the existing lines that run to existing stations in cities.
(Also the Elizabeth line in London, but's more like a metro really, even if it is 'heavy' rail)
That's good to hear! I suppose some of the sale for it is that the tunnel was already done, so the value was very clear. People were already taking that train on a slower version for business/tourism, so there was obvious value to be made expanding it.
Though, somewhat funny to me that it seems like it all got paid for by Canadian pensions?
You need an investor that's looking for something that will pay off over a long time period. Big pension funds are a natural fit. And the UK and Canada have a good relationship and a history of rail-related cooperation (e.g. a lot of UK trains are made by Bombardier).
Yes, it's happened. Even the UK, which has an arguably worse NIMBY problem than California, managed it (though it's getting close to your 20-year deadline):
> Totally honest question - have there been recent expansions of train lines into cities in Europe? In the last 20 years?
Yes, absolutely. London's Crossrail opened a few years ago. Paris has been building new RER lines almost continuously.
> I'd be honestly curious if anywhere in the EU has managed to put in a totally net-new line like this outside of existing tracks that included a stop at the city center and various stops on the way into town. Almost every city-center train station I've ever been to in Europe was over 100 years old (even if the building had been upgraded) and seemingly using most of the same lines.
Upgrading the existing station and existing lines, or building new lines along the same right-of-way, usually makes sense - the station is already in the right place and connects up to the existing network. E.g. Roma Tiburtina was basically completely flattened and rebuilt, but it's technically an "upgrade".
You're mostly right though, to build a new station in a city you absolutely do need a large block that you can reasonably demolish - e.g. in London the planned next high-speed rail station at "Old Oak Common" will be accommodated by demolishing a big prison (Wormwood Scrubs), and it's not exactly central. Or you build completely underground, but that's expensive and you still need to demolish stuff to make a worksite.
Frankly building a new station somewhere somewhat out of town is perfectly reasonable as a way of saving money, and generally a new business district will gradually spring up around the station - see e.g. Saint-Pierre-des-Corps, or Shin-Osaka. But you need good metro connections with the CBD, at least to start with, otherwise you end up like Haute-Picardie. IMO a lot of people who want high-speed rail in the US are putting the cart before the horse: you need to build a decent metro in a city before having high-speed rail to that city makes sense, and this kind of thing is exactly why - and one of the reasons this line works is exactly that it can go to a more "outlying" station because LA is one of the few cities in the US that has been building new metro lines over the last few decades.
I can't see a Wikipedia category for recent extensions.
It will very often make sense to connect the hundred year old station to a new major line, but as with Leipzig and Malmö they also build additional stations in the centre of the city.
As I understand it, east-west lines in the Baltic countries are being left in Russian gauge while new north-south lines will (of course!) be in standard gauge. Which is totally excellent until they finally get around (in some future century) to building the rail tunnel to Finland, whereupon they (i.e. Finland) will have to make some choices.
Grand Paris Express will be 200 km of new track to provide massive new connectivity to the Paris suburbs. Some extends existing lines, most is completely new lines adding connectivity between RER lines much further from central Paris to enable many trips to avoid the centre of the city. It's a combination of new tunnels and elevated guideway to be fully grade separated.
Closer to home I'd point to Montreal REM which will be 67 km of track in new elevated guideway when it's all done using automated trains. Phase 1 opened last summer. They did re-use an existing tunnel through downtown, but it needed extensive repairs and reconditioning as it hadn't been is use for nearly a century.
If you're interested in what systems around the world look like and what's been possible to build I'd highly recommend RMTransit. Canadian like me, so many videos are focused here, but he has tons of explainers on metro and train systems all over the world.
Depends where in Europe; high speed rail having a bunch of stops in a single city is a _little_ unusual, I think. However, the station would likely at least be linked into the local transport system in most countries.
Ok, but folks are perfectly willing to drive to Rancho Cucamonga if it means avoiding the 200-mile long traffic jam on I-15 on Sunday afternoon. A full transit system for everyone in LA would dwarf the cost of this rail line and it would take so long for people to return home they just would drive instead.
I think the parent commenter's point that it would have been much more useful to extend the main line itself into LA city centre rather than stop ~75 km away in the middle of nowhere. The good thing about railway stations is that they take up much less space than an airport—they're about the size of a large condominium complex—so cities could actually fit them inside, without having to do the whole airport thing and put the terminal tens of kilometres away.
And many cities even build office blocks and hotels on top of their railway stations. See London, Paris, Berlin, etc.
The problem is the space for the tracks running to the station, not the space for the station itself. Taking enough land by eminent domain to run tracks to downtown (or anywhere else dense) is prohibitively costly. And digging tunnels is even more expensive.
Rancho Cucamonga isn't near downtown LA, but it also isn't in the middle of nowhere. The whole stretch along I-210/I-10 from downtown LA to Rancho, and further past to San Bernardino, is contiguous suburbia (urban in some places). There are existing commuter rail lines between them too.
The size of the train station isn't the issue, it's the space taken by the tracks. This is when Tunnel Boring Machines (TBMs) are supposed to step in and save the day, but the cost of going underground is still too high to make it feasible.
There is planning to eventually connect into CA HSR at Palmdale via the High Desert Corridor project (a separate intercity high-speed rail project), and CA HSR and Brightline have, IIRC, discussed this as opening up single-seat travel (for the whole SF/LA/LV network.
In European terms, this is like moving King's Cross to Stevenage. Or moving Gare de Lyon to Paris Disneyland. The only difference is that both Stevenage and Paris Disneyland are already well-connected to rail: Stevenage is on the East Coast Main Line to Edinburgh and LNER stops there anyway, and Paris Disneyland is a TGV stop.
Why America is allergic to having a big central railway station in the middle of a city, I will never understand.
LA has a big central railway station in the middle of the city. Brightline isn't initially going to connect to it because reasons.
What reasons? They're building new right-of-way from Rancho Cucamonga to Las Vegas; doing that from Rancho Cucamonga to downtown LA is much harder, because there's all this city in the way. Now, there's existing rail there, but it's heavily used, and negotiating access won't be cheap. (Building an additional track along it also won't be cheap.)
Is there any country or international line on the entire planet that attempts to have a serious discussion about the merits of a 6-12 hour+ train ride versus flying? High speed trains reduce the need for any other form of transportation where someone could reasonably waste a full day in the car. Nobody is trying to justify a train trip over one of the widest countries in the world.
It takes just over 3 days to travel from the Bay Area to NYC. The price is $281 [1].
Now if you throw in some rooms, you are talking about first-class travel that includes all meals free. You need to consider how much money a few days of hotel and restaurants would cost, so the comparison is complex. Also the room cost is not really per-person unless you are traveling alone.
> It takes just over 3 days to travel from the Bay Area to NYC. The price is $281 [1].
How many days does it take to fly from SF to NYC?
> Now if you throw in some rooms, you are talking about first-class travel that includes all meals free.
First class? I've done the trip in a room and there's nothing first class about it. The bedding was suspect. Everything in the room felt old and dirty. In the dining car, you don't even get your own table. They cram you with other passengers. And for much of the trip, your view consists of corn fields and miles long CSX trains slowly chugging alongside your train. And to add insult to injury they was hours late ( 9 hours if memory serves ) so if you have friends or family waiting to pick you up, make sure to tell them to set aside the whole day. If you are a light sleeper, then you are not going to have a good time because the train wheels on the tracks are very loud. If you have cash to burn, then try it out for the experience. But it's not a trip I'd recommend or take again.
My comment was in response to someone who was an order of magnitude off on price and time. Wasn't really meant as a review of the experience.
Regarding your bad experience on the train... it seems to me that a lot of quality went downhill during the pandemic, and I'm wondering if you went before or after the pandemic started.
On your comments about lateness and how hard it is for light sleepers. Your comments there are very true, and people who would be concerned with either of those should think twice before riding.
I love riding long-distance trains. But I don't kid myself: it is way longer and more expensive than flying. There is a reputation on Amtrak for severe lateness. And the pandemic has made some things onboard worse. People should definitely read negative reviews and look for common issues; if the common problems would be a problem for them, that should be a deal-breaker.
> My comment was in response to someone who was an order of magnitude off on price and time.
I agreed with you there. That commenter exaggerated the costs. My response was directed to the 'first class' portion of your comment.
> And the pandemic has made some things onboard worse.
My trip was many years ago. Before the pandemic. I personally don't think the 'first class' amtrak experience is worth the money unless amtrak upgrades everything about the experience.
Awesome! Now I can drive an hour+ to Rancho Cucamonga, park, wait for the train, pay the equivalent of four plane tickets for my family, then take a 2 hour+ train ride, instead of driving for 4 hours from my house for the cost of half a tank of gas ($35). So cool!
Amtrak from NYC to DC fluctuates in pricing but can be $35 each way, if booked booked far enough in advance. That’s about the same distance from Rancho Cucamonga to Las Vegas. So I think it’s a similar ballpark to a plane ticket.
The real way to do this should be like Japan shinkansen, no floating pricing where you have to do some speculative game.
Flat pricing + make ticket good for something like 2 weeks to ride whenever.
If there was such predictability and flexibility, they'd immediately significantly increase their ridership.
There's a dead reply below that says "shinkansen are cheaper when bought in advance" --- I was led to believe otherwise, good to know as I ride it a few times a year.
Commercial rail operations will try to maximise revenue, doing airline style pricing. Very visible in the UK where last minute or peak time train tickets are crazy expensive. (All their train lines are commercial)
Compared to trains being run as a semi government provided utility, like the Netherlands, where pricing is flat based only on route. Makes the train a more relevant alternative, which helps with road congestion. But tax money is used to build railways and stations, the tickets only pay for operating the train itself.
I just looked up air fare. Seems like you can get a $27 ticket from la to las vegas. Takes about an hour and a half. That's always the real competitor with trains, even in europe where trains supposedly rule.
There are a lot of indirect subsidies going into air travel. To me this has always seemed rather perverse, and the money should have been invested in proper rail infrastructure instead, from a climate standpoint as well as for convenience (a proper rail network deposits you in the middle of a city without the need for a car, you don't have endless security controls etc.).
That's not really a subsidy for air travel, in fact it's a cost. People here are talking about how they would prefer rail so that they don't need to go through security at the airport. That's bad for airlines.
In practise the flight is much slower due to security etc, and having to get to and from the airport.
For example, I wouldn't consider taking a flight from Copenhagen to Århus (40 minutes vs 2¼ hrs) as the saving is wasted on waiting, and flying is much less comfortable.
(That's an extreme example for the distance, as it crosses a sea.)
It's certainly a competitor, but definitely not the preferred option.
In practise the flight is much slower due to security etc
Only for very specific routes. If I want go to from here to the one of the maybe 4 closest large cities, I'm definitely taking the train. If I want to to go from here to just about any other major city in Europe flying is almost always much faster. A bunch of people from work where going to a conference in Amsterdam a few years ago and some of them wanted to take the train for environmental reasons, and the train was literally 20+ hours door to door from the midsized European city I live in. Directly flights are under 2 hours.
Trains don't rule Europe on cost, airline prices are usually lower if you're willing to fly Ryanair or similar.
But the train is much faster if you want to go from city center to city center for a distance that's a relatively short flight. Like London to Paris or Amsterdam to Frankfurt. If you want to go across Europe from one side to the other, the plane is much faster.
Yeah, if you already have a car-based life then cars will win out. The point of projects like this is to expand the number of people who don't need a car, and that's probably going to be single people or no-kids couples to start with. The good news is that getting those people out of cars will free up road space, so even if the train doesn't work for you personally you still benefit.
> When it’s completed, the train will travel at 186 miles per hour
If China can push 286 mph in Shanghai, which means the tech exists, then why isn't this comparable? This is not snark; I am just curious what makes the Chinese train capable of such speeds, but the US train can't.
>Average speed: 224 km/h (139 mph) (duration: 8 minutes and 10 seconds)
The bigger issue is likely:
>According to Chinese media's report, however, due to the huge costs of operating and the lack of the passenger flow, Shanghai Maglev Transportation Company would lose 500 million to 700 million RMB every year
I’m not fussed with top speeds. Average travel speed that takes into account waiting for the next departure is a more practical measure. A high speed train that stops in every town has a lower effective speed than the top speed suggests. A high speed train with hourly departures instead of every 30 or 15 min means you wait more.
And of course high speed means higher cost. The average person is very price sensitive on transportation costs.
It is pretty impressive and they're looking at building an extension. however oddly its operation speed has been significantly reduced from 268mph to 186mph.
The basic problem is that Maglev is on average more expensive to build and operate
and cannot (unlike ordinary high speed rail trains) ever operate on ordinary (non high speed) rail track.
It's also still pretty experimental, the Shanghai one is operational and high speed, all other operational systems are either low speed or experimental test beds.
Typical PRC HSR is 200-220 mph but routes are getting speed upgrades. Infra wise, expensive elevated tracks designed for trains to operate at high speeds unobstructed. Seperate from ground traffic so no worrying about hitting cars and most importantly people. Brightline has highest death rate due to suicides. Someone crunched math of Brightline death per unit of track relative to PRC, if PRC HSR network wasn't elevated theyd have 30000k deaths per year. IMO more important consideration.
comparing China's high speed transportation is a low bar. they absolutely do not give a crap about derailment, in fact they straight up buried it, literally
instead you should see Japan's shinkansen as a measure of standards. They built that in the sixties
Was just in Japan for the first time and Shinkansen is such a treat. Quiet, fast, clean, spacious. I'd sooo much rather train than take small 1-2 hour flights.
That has absolutely nothing to do with it: these projects are mostly through rural areas. The Tokaido shinkansen line is largely underground, in tunnels through mountains. The new Chuo shinkansen maglev line currently being built is 90% underground.
What's missing in America is national unity and political will.
Europe has a very similar rail setup. Both France and Germany have very good high speed rail connections with their TGV and ICE. You connect into those from London, Brussels and Amsterdam via Eurostar and the German ICE.
Yes the Shinkansen is such a civilised experience! I basically travelled direct to Tokyo from Nozawaonsen straight from the slopes and it was comfortable and not stressful in a way flying could never be.
It's one the highest bars in the world, safer than Euro HSR. Wenzhou was the only large accident. Safety record after has been Shinkansen tier, except on largest network in the world. Crippled speed Brightline is already a deathtrap, US HSR would be fortunate to be a fraction as safe as PRC HSR.
That's all of 30km of maglev track. It opened over 20 years ago, and there doesn't seem to be much interest in doing any more. By contrast, there's about _60,000km_ of 'normal' (~300km/h max) high-speed rail. It would really be pretty _weird_ for the US to try beyond-cutting-edge for its first attempt at a real high-speed rail system, and would probably end badly.
what does it mean "new track almost all in the median of Interstate 15"? Do they plan to run a train in the middle of highway? Is there is enough width there for a train?
Does a drunk driver tearing across the median mean 20 hour delays while they clear the wreckage? Or are they going to barricade both sides of the tracks the entire way?
Good stuff! I hope Americans start again to invest on cutting edge projects. In the last 30 or so years, all the really big projects happened in the Middle East and East Asia. You visit China, Singapore or Dubai and if feels like you step into the future.
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[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 127 ms ] threadCalifornia's HSR is very far from last-mile connectivity being a problem, mostly due to the geometry of starting in the middle.
CA HSR Phase 1 is SF to LA with a spur up to Merced.
CA HSR Early Operating Segment is Merced to Bakersfield.
If you want real ridership, public transit in both LA and LV needs to be functional.
Connect it to Union Station and LAX if you want some ridership. On the Las Vegas end make it stop smack in the middle of the strip.
Otherwise this thing is useless.
Also 125mph is not high speed rail. LA-LV in 2 hours + time spent getting to the train station + buffer time to avoid missing the train + long slow car rental line on the other end while 15 people ahead of you each have a chit chat with the one employee dealing with the rentals would be more time than just driving end to end. These people just don't get it.
Try LA-LV in 1 hour and maybe we're talking. But really, fix public transit in both cities first.
FTA:
>Brightline West [...] aims to lay 218 miles (351 kilometers) of new track almost all in the median of Interstate 15 between Las Vegas and Rancho Cucamonga, California. It would link there with a commuter rail connection to downtown Los Angeles
https://metrolinktrains.com/schedules/?type=station&originId...
So cut the commuter rail crap and just send the bullet trains to downtown Los Angeles?
Put another way, they've cut 4 hours of driving into 3 hours of train riding where you can't even get 3 hours of sleep and have to haul your luggage to another platform, likely up and down some stairs, 2 hours into it. And you still need to deal with transit once you arrive, so add another hour to get wherever you're actually going in LA (if you're lucky with the traffic). Time savings is zero.
The US is only fifty years late.
The UK is finished with ambitious infrastructure (and house building), as we are a populous country of rich and influential NIMBYs with a party often in power that panders to them
In 1947 a law was passed requiring trains above 79mph to have some kind of automatic train stop system, so that ended most of the high speed steam service.
https://youtu.be/hVtVk3T80hA?si=Y8PYYt4IRakKLRDg
The speed claims are good: going in saying it will be shinkansen fast, 350kph would be suicidal when it can't do it. Going to market on 125MPH means when they exceed it (and they will) it will be better for them.
I think they have made savvy financial choices. I get your pushback, it will suck living the commute delays either side. You think it kills it. I think it's a forcing function.
In countries where it works, it's a non-issue to get to/from the train station on both sides, and the train stations have ample good food options (real food; not a Dunkin Donuts), clean restrooms, direct connections to subways without having to even exit the building. It's an all-around pleasant experience.
I suppose, if they can go to market on 125mph, fine, but I'm rather pessimistic that anyone who lives in LV or LA (especially) would use it considering the sad state of public transit in both cities.
To be honest, faster rail between Boston - NYC - Washington (on the order of 1.5 hours between Boston-NYC and 1.5 hours between NYC-Washington, which is doable at Shinkansen/CRH speeds) would be a better market in my opinion until the west coast can get their shit together with public transit (if ever). There's plenty of business need on the east coast for faster trains, the space for the rails is already carved out by Amtrak's stupidly-slow Acela Express, and all 3 cities have excellent public transit, good enough that a significant chunk of the population of all 3 actually lives car-free.
In Europe and Asia I've never had a situation in an urban area where there wasn't an easily accessible public bathroom within a couple blocks.
People in SF complain about piss on the ground. Yet I've had to piss on the ground waiting 45 minutes for the Caltrain because the goddamn Caltrain bathrooms were closed for the rest of the night and the Panera next door wouldn't let me use theirs. What do you expect?
They don't want homeless people using them.
This isn't rocket science.
It sucks but it’s not a young minimum wage worker’s primary job.
The Brightline website says their trains in Florida have toilets, I don't see why California would be any different.
i find there to be quite a few things to love about Europe over the US, but the idea of toileting as superior in Europe than in the US strikes me as odd. colloquially, i chalk it up to travel/cultural anxiety and stress because i can find a place/way to toilet in SF, NYC, or Orlando far more easily than in Paris, Florence, or Frankfurt
https://www.paris.fr/pages/les-sanisettes-2396
https://www.maps.stadt-zuerich.ch/zueriplan3/Stadtplan.aspx?...
I found plenty of free toilets in Amsterdam and Copenhagen and plenty of pay toilets in Stockholm and Oslo. In Germany I usually looked for supermarkets, train stations, fast food restaurants, but come to think of it, Germany was harder.
Perfect is the enemy of the good. Even if everyone who takes the train drives from Los Angeles to Rancho Cucamonga (or takes an Uber), they're still offsetting less-efficient transportation modes.
The drive costs around $40 in gas one-way. If this train is indeed $80 per ticket one-way, then I fail to see how it will be competitive with driving. A group of 5 going to Vegas would pay 10X the cost of driving and lose a lot of flexibility.
But they'd gain back the time they would have spent driving. Pretty much everyone I know in Los Angeles flies to Las Vegas, though it's an admittedly biased sample.
Huh what? Almost everyone I know in LA drives to Las Vegas just to avoid having to deal with airports. And when you arrive in Las Vegas you already have your favorite car filled with your favorite snacks.
I’ve probably driven 100+ days in Vegas over the years and doubt I’ve paid more than $100 in total for parking over that span.
it will be a fast line of ubers and yellow taxis
but okay 2005 called.
jokes aside, Brightline has delivered before. It has potential for grift but I think they’ll pull this one off. They already plan to use metrolink from downtown LA Union Station. not perfect but decent coordination.
Also there are already plan for a major bus hub for the regional area in Cucamonga as well.
The magic that makes this work is that the right of way is down the middle of the existing I15 freeway. No real impact studies are likely necessary for that route, and once they hit Barstow, it’s quite flat.
Friday commute traffic out of LA and OC to the area at the bottom of the pass is absolutely impacted by the crush of traffic heading over the Cajun pass into the high desert. Not all of it is Vegas bound, but much of it is.
I am curious how they will get through the pass. I’m assuming they’ll lease ROW from either UP or BNSF, as they own the two sets of tracks currently over the pass.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWHYRjYYLqY
I think if there were more free bathing facilities around, this would be a non-issue
I can only guess either you know homeless people that can afford such tickets, or you simply didn't RTFA.
Nice positive attitude btw.
Having branded luxury cars would be he fairly easy and could easily be a hit; private cars are unlikely to be feasible with your regular high speed electric multiple units.
[1]: https://www.trains.com/trn/news-reviews/news-wire/28-amtrak-...
This is estimated to be a $12B project. $6.5B raised so far: $3B grant and $3.5B in tax-exempt, "private activity" bonds. Does anyone actually think the rest will come from investors? Of course not, the government will see a half-finished project that it supported and provide the funding to finish the job, including the inevitable overruns.
A private company receiving 6.5B (and likely, eventually $12+) of government money... no pressure or expectations to make any profit. Great deal if you can get it!
https://www.palmbeachpost.com/story/news/2024/03/08/brightli...
The rail infrastructure is publicly owned. But the rail infrastructure is open access that private companies can pay for. As far as I understand you can even have a public carrier but it must bid for access like its private counterparts do.
This has already led to an explosion of high quality high speed rail service in countries like Italy and Spain.
To rephrase, some things are not directly profitable but tend to have outsized profitable effects. E.g., the education budget doesn't directly generate profits, but educated people go on to get good jobs and pay a lot of taxes, refunding the cost of their education by many multiples.
The same goes for roads, highways, and rail. Not directly profitable, but they enable a lot of free movement that boosts the economy and, in turn, taxes.
I’m not in support of private companies receiving subsidies, but at least do some research before reacting..
1- https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2023/08/04/how-brightline-is-changi...
The regulations of rail in the US are slightly perverted (freight rail interests dominate the discussion, usually). The economics of passenger rail in the western US are also difficult when large densities of people are so spread out and the only "primary" reasons for going from A to B are for recreation, not work/industry.
Honestly LA to LV is probably not bad it’s the right distance, it’s mostly desert so most of the HS2 issues will be avoided. If it’s actually high speed eg 200mph+ then I could see it working.
Edit: oh it’s 100mph, and it stops 37 miles outside of LA. Should rename it HS3
- Maintaining what's already there
- Select state-level projects, in some states
- Select municipal-level projects, in some cities
This means there's been a huge deficit in this kind of project at the federal level.
In saying that, I don't want to give the impression that I'm on some ivory tower. Via Rail, a crown corp, is our national rail operator, and it's riddled with issues with little in the way of meaningful solutions.
It would be amazing to book a high speed train from Amsterdam to Barcelona at prices competing with Aviation. But nobody cares about this at a pan-EU level.
The likely outcome of a whole-EU train system is something like the US system where Amtrak generally hits the major population centers, but leaves a ton of the US behind because when you talk about Federal priorities, a train from Denver to Dallas isn't a huge priority compared to LA to SF or Boston to NYC. Obviously the EU system would fare better because it's starting from a better base, but it's emblematic of the tradeoff between bottom-up and top-down planning and investment for something like this.
So there's not really any interest in selling tickets from Country A to Country C. Because country B has to put up with the traffic which is already resource-restricted. And they prefer their internal customers to get priority.
This way it will never end up as a reasonable alternative for flying. What's really missing in the EU is the ability to bypass cities. A train from Amsterdam to Barcelona has to cross right through the center of Antwerp, Brussels, Lyon (or a transfer in Paris through a horrible metro connection). It's not possible to have a direct train that bypasses all the cities straight to its destination. That would be a real alternative to flying. Considering the amount of flights between Amsterdam and Barcelona daily it's easily possible to fill a few direct trains. It's that stopping in every city center (without in-city facilities for high-speed tracks) that make it so horrible.
But anyway the EU really doesn't care about this at all and considering the huge construction durations they're too late for this to make a difference in climate change anyway.
There's little faith that public projects have the expertise to actually get it done and make it work. It's hard for me to imagine the federal government succeeding at that for any reasonable cost, and I suppose you could blame some of that on partisan bickering. But I also can't imagine California succeeding for any reasonable cost, and it's a one-party state, so there's no excuse.
At the end of the day you need some people who actually know how to do the job rather than just argue over plans and subcontract twelve levels deep. My guess is that Birghtline found a few such people and that's their competitive advantage as a business.
This ends up being self-fulfilling. People don't trust the government, so they suffocate the project in fixed payscales and low-bid rules and endless reviews, and so the government can't get anything done, and so people don't trust the government...
> At the end of the day you need some people who actually know how to do the job rather than just argue over plans and subcontract twelve levels deep.
Right - so you need to be able to hire those people and pay them something close to what they're worth, or build up that expertise over the long term by having a steady pipeline of projects and training people as you go. But voters don't trust these governments enough to empower them to do that.
Perhaps. But once the expertise is lost, you can't get it back by throwing more money at the problem. You have incompetent people hiring people who check all the right boxes but still can't do it, and then you have a huge sunk cost that you don't want to cancel so it drags on forever, eroding trust even further.
Private companies have some advantages here. If they don't think the project will succeed, they will stop, because they know there's no payday. If it's due to bad laws, they will lobby (a bad word, I know) to change them. They'll fire people who don't perform. They'll look in all kinds of creative ways to find people who can get the job done. They'll stop and think about who might actually ride it, because they need the ticket revenue, so they will build the lines in the right places with the right stops.
Maybe all of that could be true for some governments. But there's a long way to go before the US or the California government is able to do any of those things.
Maybe. Maybe there's no alternative to doing a pipeline of progressively bigger projects with in-house management and accepting that the first few will suck. But if you're not willing to pay what the expertise costs then there's no way you'll make it work, you need to get that level of expertise in house. I'd think that if you're willing to pay top dollar then you have at least a chance of hiring the right people.
Aeroplanes used to be something just for rich people too. Heck, go back far enough and so were cars, or even bicycles. You've gotta build a bunch before it becomes something mass-population.
“and, by gum, it put them on the map!”
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bakersfield_sound
It would be more embarrassing if that gets built than if it doesn’t. Echos of Ted Stevens’ bridge to nowhere.
[1]: https://hsr.ca.gov/high-speed-rail-in-california/project-sec...
That's a lie.
> windy-er to save money
The opposite: some segments are longer, more complex, and more expensive to gratify some NIMBYs and influential congressmen.
Isn't that going to be the world's slowest "hi-speed" train ?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acela
Reminds me of high-speed rail in France vs high-speed rail in Germany. To the point that newer Siemens trains will have a lower top-speed, because "there is no demand for it".
The Paris-Lyon line is by far the oldest, and is top-speed limited because of how it was traced. (And also because of its out-dated security system that is in the process of being changed)
The Paris-Brest line stops being a high-speed track in Rennes, so even if the first part is fast, it's still a long way to Brest on conventional tracks.
The newer lines are faster, as they are designed for theoretical operational speeds of 350 km/h, with a current operational top speed of 320. (LGV Sud Europe Atlantique, LGV Rhin-Rhone, LGV Est, and even the LGV Bretagne Pays-de-Loire going to Brest)
Then again, at about $45 million per mile, it's actually not even that much more expensive that Chinese HSR: to build the current 45000km of rail at the LV-LA price would be $1.25 trillion, which isn't vastly more than the Chinese system has cost so far. In fact it's very roughly about as much as the US spends, per year, on healthcare on top of what European countries pay for the same outcomes (total annual spending: 4.2 trillion and a bit, or 12.5k per person, vs global number two, Switzerland, at 8k: about 1/3, not far from 1.25/4.2!)
Those will be built as (if) they are funded. The only funding currently secured is the bakersfield to merced leg.
The problem is, that leg is nowhere to nowhere and is going to cost over 100B dollars. Most people take that to mean that it's incredibly unlikely that the more costly portions of the route (the ones that make it useful) will ever get built as they will be absurdly expensive.
https://hsr.ca.gov/
I know that there are many factors affecting progress, but it's depressing that we can't get to consensus on building infrastructure.
Connecting them all up with rails and catenary is the (relatively) cheap, quick and easy bit, and it's done at the end - it's exactly all these structures (and the stations, which will likely be the next phase) that take all the time and money.
It’s like 2-3 hr drive between the two cities, and at both end you have to navigate auto transport, most likely a rental though maybe Uber would work out but at greater cost for anything beyond a single destination. I would imagine most people would just opt to drive, since they need a car at either end of that line?
Also, for the Las Vegas link, the terminus is on the Metrolink line so you can take a commuter train from Union Station. People taking Amtrak from points east could get off at the Ontario station and it’s a relatively short taxi/bus ride to the RC terminal (Amtrak uses a different set of tracks coming into L.A. from the east than the Metrolink station serving RC). I suppose it would be feasible to extend the line a little further south to connect with Amtrak should there be demand (if they went to the Ontario station, then the Ontario airport could also be integrated into the service).
LA to SFO would be worthwhile but probably much harder.
Between Sacramento and Merced, and LA and Bakersfield, there will be a "high speed rail bus service". For other parts there will be regional commuter train and bus services.
Then, eventually, it'll become: https://hsr.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Business_Plan_...
Everyone owns a car and carpooling is trivial. Most homes have one car per adult.
There’s nothing of interest between Merced and Bakersfield. These were towns that grew from the old 99 freeway from Sacramento to Bakersfield and then on to LA.
I lived in CA for 15 years. I've been all over it (incl central ca). This would be such a pyrrhic victory, that I lack words! Who the hell needs to commute enough between those two god-forsaken places to justify the billions spent on this?
You can get high speed rail built for people from SoCal to lose their asses at a backgammon table in Vegas faster but if you want to, idk, travel for non-recreational reasons within the Midwest and you don't want to sprint through O'Hare for a flight between where you're from and where you're going, you'll probably be driving despite years of asking for Amtrak to find a way to go above 79 MPH.
There's loads of billionaires out there now with more money than sense. Get together a PAC, lobby them to fund high-speed rail upgrades, name a rail station after them or something.
if they don't want the tax they can hurry up and build the nice shit first.
Your response to the first high-speed rail line America is likely to see completed, being built by a private operator, is to propose effectively banning it?
Nationalisation in a country like the US generally means getting bought out at a fair, even generous, price.
We have the MTA in NY, they run the railroads and subways. The agency is massively bloated by costs not just where it costs $1.5 billion per mile to expand the subway, but even the railways are bleeding billions per year.
Can you show me one example from the post-War era where we nationalised something that wasn’t about to fail?
If we don't nationalise things that aren't about to fail then why should anyone be scared of being nationalised?
Nobody is currently afraid of it, probably because no one is seriously contemplating it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brightline
The US system is optimized for freight.
It's not obvious that passenger is a better choice.
I mean, sure, you can get to Kansas City and Omaha via the Missouri. You can't get to Denver, though, or Phoenix, or Salt Lake, or...
-- https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/fareed-zakaria-ameri...
The continental US (no Alaska or Hawaii) is > 22.5 times as big as Germany but has only 8.8 times as many miles of "navigable waterways." (However, it's not clear if the US numbers include the Great Lakes or the oceans; LA to Seattle and Miami to NYC goes by ocean, not some river.)
But, that doesn't leave much for the rest of Europe.
The other aspect is how the rail infrastructure is financed in the US vs Europe. In the US the infrastructure is to a large extent funded by the freight companies themselves, and in return their needs get priority. Take away that incentive and they'll stop funding the rail infrastructure meaning that much of that cost will end up pack on either the local or federal government, with all that that entails.
The biggest issue is speed. The maximum speed is just slightly above that of maximum highway speed, with freight speed limited to less than half of that.
Population density in North Sweden and Norway is low enough that a few times a day is probably sufficient for most local travel. I haven’t been during peak tourist seasons when that number of trains might not be enough.
A fun fact is that since the ore trains travel mostly downhill, braking generates enough electricity that the ore empty trains can return to Kiruna effectively energy free.
That makes it a tourist line, not a transit line.
There's nothing wrong with tourism, but it isn't transit.
The Us transports nearly 10 times as much freight-km as the EU and far more than 10 times tons/person.
https://transport.ec.europa.eu/news-events/news/action-plan-...
Rail operators have also discovered a really nice side effect of ultra long trains: you don't have to pull into a siding to let a passenger train by as required by law if your train is longer than the siding.
https://www.aar.org/issue/freight-train-length/
I find that very unlikely and this link seems to contradict that: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
Another aspect that needs to be taken into account is that a large part (perhaps 40%) of any number you see on total tonnes of rail freight in Sweden, is made up of handful of short rail lines doing nothing but transporting iron ore from a few large mines to the nearest harbour.
You claimed that there were "many" countries that had both good freight and passenger rail, but have yet to come up with one. (Sweden isn't an example - its "good freight" service (mines to ports) is where there's insignificant passenger service.)
2. We don't want 40% more trucks on the roads, so we need the system to still be able to carry large amounts of freight. The federal government is also not known for doing that well, still less for balancing that with #1.
3. In this country, we don't just get to nationalize things. We have to pay for them. Given the pathetic rate at which Amtrak is funded, do you really think that Congress is going to spring for the kind of money to buy all the freight railroads?
4. Speaking of Congress, it's going to take continual funding to pay for keeping the system maintained. Do you want the annual maintenance budget for this (including the freight portion) to be at the annual whims of Congress?
All around, this is a terrible idea.
Moving people around tends to not be that great a business in general. Providing them services once they are there is a money printing machine.
This is a definitional thing; for whatever reason US regulators define this as 'high-speed', but no-where which operates actually high-speed (ie pushing 300km/h) lines does. The LA-Las Vegas project, and the California high speed rail project, are high-speed by international standards, at least in parts.
No, 125mph/200kph is the standard international definition of high-speed rail. See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_rail_in_Europe#/med...
In the United States, "higher-speed" rail has been the term used for trains up to 125mph.[2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_rail#Definitions [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higher-speed_rail
> The federal government is increasingly embracing private business collaboration in its space missions, space-based projects and to power the new US Space Force as it ramps up in Los Angeles. This is creating a lot of activity and opportunity for LA-based aerospace companies.
https://www.foxnews.com/tech/exclusive-inside-area-51-the-se...
> Jacobsen, a contributing editor and investigative reporter at the Los Angeles Times Magazine, interviewed the former Area 51 employees in 2008 and 2009, shortly after the CIA declassified much of the work they had done.. Jacobsen reveals some of the wild research that went on in the 1970s at Area 51 -- where the military built the U-2 spy plane
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Area_51
> Area 51 is located in the southern portion of Nevada, 83 miles (134 km) north-northwest of Las Vegas.
Just to be clear, this is to the "greater Los Angeles area", ending at Rancho Cucamonga station, a 48 minute drive (1h15m by public transit) to downtown LA, and a 1h15m drive (2h30m by public transit) to LAX.
My default assumption right now is that this sort of grand construction is generally infeasible in countries outside of China where they generally don't care who they displace or the environmental damage, and often are building the cities from the ground up in the first place with the trains as a part of the urban planning.
I've been peripheral to a few urban light/heavy rail expansion projects in the US and the consistent issue is that even cities with a lot of urban sprawl are still dense enough that you have to displace a lot of people/businesses to build a new line and the stations around it. It's the sort of thing that's a lot easier to do when the city is young, or the train line got built in an era where you could just force people to sell their houses and move.
I'd be honestly curious if anywhere in the EU has managed to put in a totally net-new line like this outside of existing tracks that included a stop at the city center and various stops on the way into town. Almost every city-center train station I've ever been to in Europe was over 100 years old (even if the building had been upgraded) and seemingly using most of the same lines.
The recipe is really simple: don't do megaprojects. Individual projects must be of appropriate size for the level of government that is making the decisions. When there are several projects of similar size in the pipeline all the time, the government can develop and maintain the expertise needed to build the infrastructure.
Do you see a lot of unity in the US or Europe these days?
It's why all the rail megaprojects are happening in Asia these days.
There's a lot of ongoing extensions, but into existing train station.
Eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuttgart_21
https://www.zvv.ch/zvv/en/about-us/projects/in-betrieb/cross...
https://company.sbb.ch/en/the-company/projects/german-speaki...
(Switzerland has bunch of those since they typically expand capacity with 20-30y horizon)
Also, kinda tough reading that Stuttgart link where it seems like it was generally unpopular and the police did crimes to suppress dissent. I don't really know the details to have an opinion on if they're right, but still.
But given it's Switzerland they just decide to do it all underground.
Section 2 finished in 2007 (just within your 20 year cutoff!) It links the channel tunnel with London St Pancras. Much of the London part is in tunnels and it is 100% grade separated.
The uk High Speed 2 route was also going to do this and build a new high speed rail line and station into London, but the exact issues you describe seem to mean that it will be halting at a point outside London instead possibly using existing tracks.
Overall though, High speed rail doesn't need new tracks into cities unless all the existing lines are full (or they are too slow)
It's much easier to build high speed line in the countryside and link it to the existing lines that run to existing stations in cities.
(Also the Elizabeth line in London, but's more like a metro really, even if it is 'heavy' rail)
Though, somewhat funny to me that it seems like it all got paid for by Canadian pensions?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Speed_1
There have of course also been several urban rail projects within Greater London during that time.
Other examples of relevance:
* LGV Sud Europe Atlantique * Wendlingen–Ulm high-speed railway * pretty much all of Spain's high-speed rail network.
Yes, absolutely. London's Crossrail opened a few years ago. Paris has been building new RER lines almost continuously.
> I'd be honestly curious if anywhere in the EU has managed to put in a totally net-new line like this outside of existing tracks that included a stop at the city center and various stops on the way into town. Almost every city-center train station I've ever been to in Europe was over 100 years old (even if the building had been upgraded) and seemingly using most of the same lines.
Upgrading the existing station and existing lines, or building new lines along the same right-of-way, usually makes sense - the station is already in the right place and connects up to the existing network. E.g. Roma Tiburtina was basically completely flattened and rebuilt, but it's technically an "upgrade".
You're mostly right though, to build a new station in a city you absolutely do need a large block that you can reasonably demolish - e.g. in London the planned next high-speed rail station at "Old Oak Common" will be accommodated by demolishing a big prison (Wormwood Scrubs), and it's not exactly central. Or you build completely underground, but that's expensive and you still need to demolish stuff to make a worksite.
Frankly building a new station somewhere somewhat out of town is perfectly reasonable as a way of saving money, and generally a new business district will gradually spring up around the station - see e.g. Saint-Pierre-des-Corps, or Shin-Osaka. But you need good metro connections with the CBD, at least to start with, otherwise you end up like Haute-Picardie. IMO a lot of people who want high-speed rail in the US are putting the cart before the horse: you need to build a decent metro in a city before having high-speed rail to that city makes sense, and this kind of thing is exactly why - and one of the reasons this line works is exactly that it can go to a more "outlying" station because LA is one of the few cities in the US that has been building new metro lines over the last few decades.
Malmö: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_Tunnel_(Malm%C3%B6)
Proposed lines: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Proposed_rail_infrast...
I can't see a Wikipedia category for recent extensions.
It will very often make sense to connect the hundred year old station to a new major line, but as with Leipzig and Malmö they also build additional stations in the centre of the city.
Closer to home I'd point to Montreal REM which will be 67 km of track in new elevated guideway when it's all done using automated trains. Phase 1 opened last summer. They did re-use an existing tunnel through downtown, but it needed extensive repairs and reconditioning as it hadn't been is use for nearly a century.
If you're interested in what systems around the world look like and what's been possible to build I'd highly recommend RMTransit. Canadian like me, so many videos are focused here, but he has tons of explainers on metro and train systems all over the world.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Paris_Express
https://www.youtube.com/@RMTransit
And many cities even build office blocks and hotels on top of their railway stations. See London, Paris, Berlin, etc.
Why America is allergic to having a big central railway station in the middle of a city, I will never understand.
What reasons? They're building new right-of-way from Rancho Cucamonga to Las Vegas; doing that from Rancho Cucamonga to downtown LA is much harder, because there's all this city in the way. Now, there's existing rail there, but it's heavily used, and negotiating access won't be cheap. (Building an additional track along it also won't be cheap.)
What would be the cost of a high-speed rail version of this?
EDIT: I stand corrected. I looked at the Coast to Coast "Vacation". https://www.amtrakvacations.com/trips/america-coast-to-coast
Currently searching on amtrak.com (they don't seem to make PDF schedules anymore, sadly!):
449 Lake Shore Limited BOS - CHI 22 h 22 m
5 California Zephyr CHI - EMY 52 h 57 m
Scheduled transfer time in Chicago Union Station is about 4 hours.
So this should take a total of about 79 hours.
It takes just over 3 days to travel from the Bay Area to NYC. The price is $281 [1].
Now if you throw in some rooms, you are talking about first-class travel that includes all meals free. You need to consider how much money a few days of hotel and restaurants would cost, so the comparison is complex. Also the room cost is not really per-person unless you are traveling alone.
[1] I looked up the price for June 11th.
It's important to note that that's 3 days in a coach seat. 3 days.
The food is terrible, like truly terrible.
We brought a bottle of Jack and had a decent enough time. Wouldn't choose it again.
It looks like the sleeper version is indeed quite expensive nowadays if you're doing it as one person.
How many days does it take to fly from SF to NYC?
> Now if you throw in some rooms, you are talking about first-class travel that includes all meals free.
First class? I've done the trip in a room and there's nothing first class about it. The bedding was suspect. Everything in the room felt old and dirty. In the dining car, you don't even get your own table. They cram you with other passengers. And for much of the trip, your view consists of corn fields and miles long CSX trains slowly chugging alongside your train. And to add insult to injury they was hours late ( 9 hours if memory serves ) so if you have friends or family waiting to pick you up, make sure to tell them to set aside the whole day. If you are a light sleeper, then you are not going to have a good time because the train wheels on the tracks are very loud. If you have cash to burn, then try it out for the experience. But it's not a trip I'd recommend or take again.
Regarding your bad experience on the train... it seems to me that a lot of quality went downhill during the pandemic, and I'm wondering if you went before or after the pandemic started.
On your comments about lateness and how hard it is for light sleepers. Your comments there are very true, and people who would be concerned with either of those should think twice before riding.
I love riding long-distance trains. But I don't kid myself: it is way longer and more expensive than flying. There is a reputation on Amtrak for severe lateness. And the pandemic has made some things onboard worse. People should definitely read negative reviews and look for common issues; if the common problems would be a problem for them, that should be a deal-breaker.
I agreed with you there. That commenter exaggerated the costs. My response was directed to the 'first class' portion of your comment.
> And the pandemic has made some things onboard worse.
My trip was many years ago. Before the pandemic. I personally don't think the 'first class' amtrak experience is worth the money unless amtrak upgrades everything about the experience.
I don't know how much these rail tickets will cost, but I find the math on that to be unlikely.
4x plane tickets, assuming rock bottom minimum $60 a head to basically anywhere, $180-240...
Hmm
Flat pricing + make ticket good for something like 2 weeks to ride whenever.
If there was such predictability and flexibility, they'd immediately significantly increase their ridership.
There's a dead reply below that says "shinkansen are cheaper when bought in advance" --- I was led to believe otherwise, good to know as I ride it a few times a year.
Compared to trains being run as a semi government provided utility, like the Netherlands, where pricing is flat based only on route. Makes the train a more relevant alternative, which helps with road congestion. But tax money is used to build railways and stations, the tickets only pay for operating the train itself.
This can only possibly work with low ridership numbers. Imagine getting to the railway station with your bags and all seats are spoken for.
Aircraft fuel isn't taxed, but train 'fuel' (electric or diesel) is taxed.
Airlines can base their staff in a cheap country and pay lower wages, avoid unions etc.
Local governments subsidise airports to attract tourists/business. The railway already exists and doesn't get this subsidy.
For example, I wouldn't consider taking a flight from Copenhagen to Århus (40 minutes vs 2¼ hrs) as the saving is wasted on waiting, and flying is much less comfortable.
(That's an extreme example for the distance, as it crosses a sea.)
It's certainly a competitor, but definitely not the preferred option.
Only for very specific routes. If I want go to from here to the one of the maybe 4 closest large cities, I'm definitely taking the train. If I want to to go from here to just about any other major city in Europe flying is almost always much faster. A bunch of people from work where going to a conference in Amsterdam a few years ago and some of them wanted to take the train for environmental reasons, and the train was literally 20+ hours door to door from the midsized European city I live in. Directly flights are under 2 hours.
Two hours flight time from Amsterdam is Italy or beyond, that's quite different.
But the train is much faster if you want to go from city center to city center for a distance that's a relatively short flight. Like London to Paris or Amsterdam to Frankfurt. If you want to go across Europe from one side to the other, the plane is much faster.
If China can push 286 mph in Shanghai, which means the tech exists, then why isn't this comparable? This is not snark; I am just curious what makes the Chinese train capable of such speeds, but the US train can't.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghai_maglev_train
>After May 2021:
>Cruising speed: 300 km/h (186 mph)
>Average speed: 224 km/h (139 mph) (duration: 8 minutes and 10 seconds)
The bigger issue is likely:
>According to Chinese media's report, however, due to the huge costs of operating and the lack of the passenger flow, Shanghai Maglev Transportation Company would lose 500 million to 700 million RMB every year
And of course high speed means higher cost. The average person is very price sensitive on transportation costs.
It is pretty impressive and they're looking at building an extension. however oddly its operation speed has been significantly reduced from 268mph to 186mph.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghai_maglev_train
The basic problem is that Maglev is on average more expensive to build and operate and cannot (unlike ordinary high speed rail trains) ever operate on ordinary (non high speed) rail track.
It's also still pretty experimental, the Shanghai one is operational and high speed, all other operational systems are either low speed or experimental test beds.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maglev
Regular high speed rail is a fairly routine thing and all the parts are well understood.
Are you talking about the Maglev train connecting Longyang Road Station on the Shanghai Subway Line 2, to Pudong International Airport?
If so, it is only 30km (19mi) long…
instead you should see Japan's shinkansen as a measure of standards. They built that in the sixties
What's missing in America is national unity and political will.
I mean, most of Europe has, China has, it's not really a case of "nobody else" doing it.
It's one the highest bars in the world, safer than Euro HSR. Wenzhou was the only large accident. Safety record after has been Shinkansen tier, except on largest network in the world. Crippled speed Brightline is already a deathtrap, US HSR would be fortunate to be a fraction as safe as PRC HSR.
https://maps.app.goo.gl/bU7Ut84EPpipnLqA6
The line connecting NorCal to SoCal is so much more productive that any other line being prioritized is crazy to me.