“I have to see a man about a horse.”
The OP makes a strong case, I don’t see Ogdenville, North Haverbrook, or Brockway on the map.
And… it seems like High Speed Rail is back on the agenda. From yesterday:
Los Angeles to New York is a five hour flight. It’s also 2800 miles. Japan is currently building the fastest bullet train in the world, expected to go online in 2030. It goes 224 mph. If one of those was built in a straight ljne between the coasts and it went non-stop, it would take 12.5 hours. But trains don’t travel in straight lines, and any bullet train across the country is going to stop in several major cities along the way.
In the real world, HSR isn’t nearly that fast. The Skinkasen train has an average real-world speed of 145 miles per hour. France’s TGV can go over 300 kph, but its average speed on a real route is 121 mph. Trains do not run flat-out all the time. They slow down for many reasons, and it takes a long time to slow down and speed up.
Let’s give the benefit of the doubt and say an American train could achieve average speeds as high as the Shinkasen, the current fastest train in the world. In that case, it would take roughly 20 hours to make a trip a plane can do in 5.
And in the messy world of train building and politics, the chances are that it will be a mess.
So the original promise of California’s HSR was that it would be able to make a 430 mile trip in two hours and forty minutes. It’s unlikely to meet that humber.
The belief that you can take a train across the country at anywhere near the time it takes to fly is nuts. Joe Biden is either lying, or he is grossly misinformed about the real world performance of trains. For someone who has described himself as a real train afficionado, that seems unlikely. So lying it is.
Biden said “imagine…” followed by some hyperbole. “Imagine Americans being the first to land on Mars…” is not a lie. It’s an aspiration – maybe a foolish aspiration, or an unrealistic aspiration, but an aspiration.
This wasn’t a lie, it was an aspiration. Maybe an unrealistic, hyperbolic one. But aspirations like that are pretty much bread and butter for politicians.
He’s building support for a massive infrastructure program by lying about what it will do. That’s about as ‘aspirational’ as Trump’s ‘beautiful’ wall which will stop everyone, be paid for by Mexico, and be finished in four years.
The difference between ‘aspirational’ and ‘liar’ appears to be whether they have a D or an R after their name.
He’s trying to build support with aspirational language. Also known as politics.
I didn’t fault Trump for saying “imagine if China didn’t eat our lunch” or “imagine if Mexico paid for the wall”. I faulted him for lying – for saying “Mexico’s paying for the wall!” or “we’ve been owning China” or whatever factually false nonsense he was spreading. Those are very different things.
There are surely reasonable criticisms of Biden and this infrastructure plan, but using aspirational language and hyperbole is not it.
Really? ‘Aspirational’ language that’s flat-out impossible? In the same speech he also aaid that we will have hypersonic airplanes flying 21,000 miles per hour that can span the globe in an hour.
No, no we won’t. Hypersonic airplanes fly anywhere from Mach 3 to Mach 5. Max speed maybe 3,000 mph or so. 21,000 mph is near orbital speed. The only way you are doing that is with point-to-point rockets, and that’s a SpaceX pipe dream. And anyway, they are the only people with a vehicle that could, maybe, one day make that trip, and it’s a totally private system that has nothing to do with Biden and his daft infrastructure plans. In fact, corporations like SpaceX are the ones who will be taxed to pay for Joe’s vision.
As a reminder, he said this crap in a speech to build support for his infrastructure plan. Talking about 600 mph trains and 21,000 mile per hour aircraft to build support for a plan that offers neither is spreading misinformation.
If Trump had uttered ahy of this nonsense you would have gone crazy.
Zero placement error, probably. If you think aspirational language that’s a bit sci-fi, and a zero placement error, is at all equivalent to Trump’s thousands upon thousands of lies, then we live in such different universes that there’s no possibility of mutual understanding.
That makes it sound so much worse when you use different units.
300 kph=186 mph
Cool, do that math, then do the math to put a fleet of Teslas on the road and build out the charging infrastructure and maintain a top-notch global military presence in Africa so that China doesn’t poach the rare-earth metal mines worked by African child slaves.
Then do the math on building out that rail system one single time, versus the CO2 output of burning 30 megawatts of fossil fuels per airline passenger.
You have a point about capacity being a factor, and I think the answer to that is to take an incremental approach on the absolute most heavily trafficked routes between airports that are close to capacity. We don’t have to build a train across the Rockies now. We might never need to. Just build short, large high-speed trunks between the highest demand cities, and run just enough trains to stay loaded. Demand will become apparent once more and more people come to appreciate avoiding the hassle of airports.
There’s really no good way to evaluate demand for passenger rail in the US based on the freight-privileged system we’ve had since the Nixon administration. Yes, Amtrak sucks right now, and that’s because it sucks hind tit after freight trains, and this was a conscious choice to allow the rail corporations to sacrifice passenger service in the name of profit. Passenger rail is never going to look attractive as long as we keep the policies that ensure it will fail.
I am 100% sure that if we peel back the covers of these screeds like the OP that claim trains cause global warming, we’ll find a person who is convinced that global warming is an overhyped threat and we absolutely shouldn’t cut fossil fuel production to mitigate it.
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It’s not; it’s typically about 6 - 6 1/2 hours nonstop from New York to LAX. Eastbound is a little faster (thank the jet stream), but most flights are still scheduled at around 5 1/2 hours. The flights are scheduled to last longer now than they were in the 1960s (and they still have only about 80% of flights arriving on time or within 15 minutes of scheduled time). Airport and flight network congestion are real problems. Time spent actually flying from point A to point B may not be any different, but time spent in holding patterns in the air and sitting on the tarmac or waiting for a gate is longer now, and probably will continue to increase.
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Time spent actually in the plane is only part of the journey: getting to the airport, standing in line for TSA, etc., will consume several additional hours.
Meanwhile, the Chuo Shinkasen now under construction is expected to make the 178 miles between Tokyo and Nagoya in 40 minutes, for an average speed of over 250mph. (In test runs, they’ve gotten over 300mph average.) That puts a 2800-mile journey at around 11-12 hours, which is indeed close to as fast as actual travel time by airplane.
NASA calls planes flying between Mach 5 and 10 “low hypersonic”; there’s an engine in development that could someday run at Mach 25, or about 16,500mph.
Yes, and the real world speed is 121, like I said. Maximum speeds do not equal real world speeds. When I rode the TGV it hit some number over 300 kph for a while, but spent most of the time significantly slower.
Not all track can handle those speeds. At HSR speeds, all curves have to be banked and extremely wide. For practical reasons, those specifications cannot always be met, so the trains can only hit max speeds on long straight stretches of excellently maintained track. And they take a fair bit of time to accelerate back up to speed when they slow down.
This is one of the problems with California’s HSR. Optimal track routes are often compromised by practical and political compromises, so you have to slow the train down.
Wow. You just nitpicked me over a half hour difference in travel time due to the jet stream, then ended by saying that 11-12 hours is ‘indeed close’ to 5.5-6 hours.
It is not close. It’s double. And the numbers you used are for a freaking Maglev train over a short distance.
The examples I used of the speeds of current bullet trains like the TGV and operational Shinkasen are much more reasonable. Even the next generation of Shinkasen trains due in 2030 do not go much faster than the current ones. No one is building a continent-spanning Maglev train in America.
No, I talked about overall travel time. If you want to fly from New York to LA, you have to get to LaGuardia (an hour from midtown Manhattan), stand in line for TSA and wait for boarding and the rest (it’s generally recommended to allow AT LEAST 90 minutes for that, better two to two and a half hours at LaGuardia), then you’ve got a six to six and a half hour flight, and then you’ve got to get from LAX to downtown Los Angeles. (Substitute JFK or Newark, Burbank or Orange County, etc.–it won’t make much difference overall.)
That makes your Manhattan to Los Angeles travel journey more like 10-11 hours, which is not half of 11-12 hours from, say, Grand Central Terminal to LA Union Station.
If we’re going to use only EXISTING train technology, then to make it a fair comparison you have to use EXISTING automotive technology, which means none of this fancy “coming soon” autonomous vehicle technology: you want to travel by car, then you have to be actively driving and paying attention, or paying chauffeur wages to somebody who is.
And here’s a good reason all by itself to not build continent spanning passenger HSR:
The attemps at derailing are accelerating. They are successful 42% of the time, and derailed passenger trains are a mass casualty event.
Energy goes up with the square of speed. A train derailing at 200 mph is a whole different thing than one derailing at 75. The day that train goes online it will become the biggest terrorist target in the world. And you’re going to have to somehow protect thousands of miles of track.
The first time one of these things derails due to a terrorist attack, people will stop riding it, and TSA will have a whole new infrastructure to hobble with security theater.
That’s another reason why, in a world where terror is a thing, cars make much more sense. Distributed is better than concentrated. Trains are brittle infrastructure. Roads are fault tolerant and antifragile. Blow up a road, and we’ll just take another one. Blow up an HSR track and you cripple key infrastructure and stop all the trains.
That train was going 125 mph. If the train was going at the top speed of the TGV or Skinkasen, It would have had FOUR times the destructive energy.
And you think it’s a good idea to run these across 2800 miles of mostly unprotected track.
You didn’t mention any of that in your post, so now you are moving the goal posts. Yes, when you fly you have to go to the airport. And when you take the train, you have to go to the train station. Yes, you have security theater at the airport, but there’s no guarantee you won’t have it at the train station either.
And if we are going to start nitpicking details, let’s consider that any continent-spanning train is going to stop many times at cities along the way. The last time we did the HSR dance in 2009, the New York to San Fran line was to stop in Philadelphia, Pittsburg, Cleveland, Chicago, Omaha, Denver, Reno, Salt Lake City and Sacramento. If each stop eats up half an hour what with slowdown, speed up, slow travel through the cities and time spent at the station, you can add 4.5 hours for stops. And that’s being very generous.
Have you run the numbers on the kinetic energy, possible damages, and losses due to plane crashes?
If you’re going to use the Eschede derailment, which was due to a fatigue crack, then let’s tally up the airframes lost due to metal fatigue, faulty repairs, fuel tank problems, etc.
If we want to concentrate on roads, the I-35W bridge collapse is a good example of how fragile the road system can be.
From my original post:
Yes, I did mention it, so no, this isn’t moving the goalposts. Sorry you overlooked or chose to ignore part of what I wrote.
And a lot more people live near or have easy access to Grand Central Station than LaGuardia. Airports are deliberately positioned AWAY from downtowns and population centers, for obvious reasons; train stations historically are not.
Especially regarding a continental high speed rail, even if you can use the existing right of ways and to build new track, you still have to go (say LA to NYC) through the routing that is the Southwest Chief through Chicago and then something like the Cardinal or the Lake Shore Limited to get to New York. Geography exists, the barriers that were there 150+ years ago still exist when it comes to routing, and can you imagine the environmental impact statements alone from doing new blasting and work to lay high speed rail tracking?
Anyway, yes, it’d probably actually use the Southern Transcon and not the alignment through the Raton Pass.