We certainly did. The passenger trains were operated by the various railroad companies, which ran both passenger and freight trains on the same tracks.
By the 1960s, mid- to long-distance passenger rail service was dying, having been supplanted by airliners and personal automobiles, and the railroads were losing money at it. In 1971, the U.S. government took over essentially all mid- and long-distance passenger train service, with the establishment of Amtrak.
Amtrak has managed to survive for over five decades, but with the notable exception of the Northeast Corridor, it’s essentially a niche service, largely appealing to tourists and railfans, who don’t mind the relative slowness of Amtrak service, compared to flying or even driving – it doesn’t help that most Amtrak trains are running on trackage that is still owned by the freight railroads, and interference from freight trains frequently causes delays for Amtrak trains.
The northeast corridor has some places with four tracks, and some with two.
When on tocals in the Philadelphia area, the local is often held until the express passes, even though they are on different tracks in the same roadbed. This must be because of safety issues.
In Taiwan, the local tracks are some distance (a mile or so?) from the express tracks. No such issue.
Try to run local and express on the same tracks, and both will be slowed down.
I’m pretty sure the answer to your question will end up being “it depends.”
Illinois is already working on a high-speed route between Chicago and St. Louis. This is just about perfect for high-speed rail.-- the two cities are about 300 miles apart, Illinois is pretty flat, the right-of-ways are big enough in many parts that they can lay a dedicated high-speed rail next to the regular tracks, and passenger service is well established between CHI and STL. In places where the rail has already been laid, the speed limit is a steady 90 mph, and a half-hour has already been carved off the six-hour run.
BUT, looking at the state’s website, it clearly shows all the same old stops, starting in Joliet, then at Dwight, Pontiac, etc. Pretty much all 30-40 miles apart. Every one of those stops adds a few minutes, even if there are no passengers boarding or debarking.
AIUI the proposed California high-speed route does reduce the number of stops between LA and SF. But compared to Amtrak’s Empire Builder the prototype Borealis route from Minneapolis to Chicago somehow managed to add stops and slow the average train speed to 57 miles per hour. And its supporters complain that it bypasses Madison, Wisconsin’s state capital and second-largest city.
IMHO what’s killing high-speed rail in the U.S. is politics more than anything else.
You can chalk the exclusion of Madison up to politics – Wisconsin rejected federal funds for the spur in 2010.
But the number of trains and which stops they make are going to be based on demand more than politics. If there are enough passengers to run a direct from Chicago to STL and another milk run that makes all stops they will do that.
It’s possible that politics will prevent the trains from being sufficiently subsidized thereby reducing demand.
What matters to people is not speed on the airplane or the train but the total door to door time. So a car goes directly from your origin to your destination while with a train or airplane trip you are making three separate trips: 1. from your origin to the train station or airport 2. on the train or airplane. 3. the trip from the train station or airport to your final destination. So relatively few trips are going to be a situation where the high speed train is the fastest door to door option.
And what I think is going to shortly be a better alternative for those best option high speed rail trips is the self-driving car. So instead of an unpleasant 6 hours driving the car you will spend these six hours sleeping, doing office work, watching TV, whatever.
Because train stations are small, they tend to be in more convenient spots than airports. The northeast corridor is successful in part because if you count the time to get to the airport, go through security, and hang around waiting for your flight, the train is often faster.
In this modern interconnected digitized electrolicized, dehumanized mid-21st century, you can know ahead of time, and there is no reason to stop if no one is getting on or off at a particular station.
If course not stopping puts the train ahead of schedule, which can just mean waiting longer at your destination, for no net improvement.
I ride trains a lot. In addition to the NE corridor, i routinely take trains when i visit Europe or Japan. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a line, except maybe some tiny commuter thing, that didn’t have both kinds of service. Usually there’s a regular train that stops at the cities, a milk run that also stops are all the little stations, and an express run that only stops at the larger cities and goes a lot faster between stops. You do need some extra track for trains to pass each other for that to really work. But it’s the typical model. And i haven’t seen any reason to think that the CA line is locked into “every train stops at every station”.
You can already do that today on the train, and not risk unscheduled dismemberment and death.
I wish that were the case. I ride the Capitol Corridor occasionally between Sacramento and the SF Bay Area, and they added a station and stop sort of in the middle of nowhere, for “future service expansion” and the station is not even fully functional. All well-and-good, there have been many cases where no one gets on or off there, and the nearest next station is less than 5 miles away, but every train stops there in both directions anyway. They could have built the station and continued to bypass the stop until demand increased.
The other issue is scheduling around the freight trains. Someone upthread mentioned sharing the tracks, and the tracks are owned by the freight companies - a passenger train getting too far ahead or behind schedule may interfere with a freight train, who generally have the right of way, and force the passenger train onto a siding to await the passage of the freight train.
I will see if I can find some info on this question. I, too, have experienced the three modes of train service in Europe, exactly as you described. It takes up a lot of space to have three levels of track tho, and even tho the US has plenty of land, the train corridors are narrow and land acquisition can take years or decades (which is why the CA HSR project elected to start where they did).
Here is another project to link Los Angeles to Las Vegas - this one is privately funded, but with some tax relief and help from the state:
You don’t need three levels of track. You just need enough places where there’s an extra track for one train to pass another.
Fwiw, even my commuter rail has two levels of service, local and express. And they don’t even pass each other, they are just scheduled so it works. The benefit of that the people who live far away have a shorter commute, so long as they are traveling at peak times. Often, the express starts downtown 5 minutes before the local.
An interesting alternative to traditional high speed rail: AirTrac Transport. Vehicles move on an overhead guideway using air-cushion technology. The air cushion minimizes friction and allows inter-city speeds of up to 200 mph. It’s based on existing technology. Projected cost of travel is about half that of driving an automobile. Routes can be established on existing interstate highway rights-of-way.
Yeah, they used to hold up the MBTA commuter trains to let the Acela pass; safety was (as I understood it) an issue, as well as sometimes using the second track to let the Acela switch over, bypass the MBTA, and then come back onto the track.
I was in Philly the last few days and spent a few hours in the Amtrak lounge at William H. Gray yesterday. Okay lounge, nice station, even though it’s under heavy reconstruction at the moment.
My dad wrote a book about a plan for a super-duper-high-speed rail line stretching all the way from Beijing to New York. It would go under the Bering Strait.
The book can be found on Amazon, but it’s not the kind of thing that’s sold, like, any copies at all. His storytelling skills took a back door to engineering plans throughout the work. Probably its most engaging paragraph was one I wrote for him, where I tried to demonstrate to him the principle of letting the reader inside the character’s head.
“High speed” would have to be in evacuated tunnels going about, oh, let’s say 1500mph. Which still makes it a 4.5 hour trip in a dark tube miles underground. Will sedatives be provided?
What always seemed like a nifty idea in Genesis II is scary when you think about it. What happens if you break down halfway between Bejing and the American continent? How long until help gets there?
Oh, the “super-duper-high-speed” rail my dad envisioned would only cruise at 400 MPH. It didn’t require vacuum tunnels or any dangerous exotic things like that. The biggest problem was that wherever the track curved, the radius of curvature had to be enormous.
More problematic, a freight train getting too far ahead or behind schedule will do the same thing, and there’s nothing that the passenger service can do about that. Proper passenger rail service requires tracks that are used only by passenger trains.
You don’t need three levels of track to have three levels of service, unless the line is super busy (in which case, you can probably afford it): For most of the route, you just need one, with a few stretches of two where the faster train can pass the slower train.
Agree, but I thought the high-speed trains required their own tracks? Even in Europe and Japan, do those high-speed trains share tracks with the other trains?