Actually the latest figures show the price has increased sevenfold:
California’s long-delayed high-speed rail project is now facing renewed scrutiny after state leaders revealed a dramatically higher price tag, now estimated at roughly $231 billion, nearly seven times the original $33 billion projection approved by voters in 2008.
The revised figures have reignited talks in Sacramento over whether the project can realistically be completed, how long it will take, and whether the state can continue to fund it at this scale.
Note this (perhaps paywalled);
Add one more twist to the complicated legacy of disgraced civil rights icon Cesar Chavez: A reroute around his gravesite has inflated the cost of California’s high-speed rail project by nearly $1 billion.
Add a $1 billion detour for California high-speed rail to Cesar Chavez’s legacy
Can’t they just move the headstone and leave the body? Imagine the tourist opportunities if the train is haunted.
Not high-speed rail, but still rail: Colorado is finally maybe moving forward on a front range rail service connecting (eventually) Ft. Collins (or maybe even Cheyenne) in the north with Pueblo in the south.
The initial run will connect Longmont (about 30 miles north of Denver), and Denver, with a stops in Boulder and several other north Denver suburbs. It will use BNF tracks, so they can only do 2-4 trips a day to not interfere with freight rail.
And the train will be named CoCo. I’ve not heard if Conan O’Brien will be sponsoring.
I think the critical bit from that CNN article is this.
High speed passenger rail is common around the globe, from major countries like Japan, France and China, all the way to emerging economies like Morocco.
The United States is a glaring exception, with no passenger trains that meet the global definition of high speed, or that run at least 150 mph for extended trips.
That’s partly cultural — America is a country of cars. But the main reason high speed rail hasn’t happened in the United States is due to a lack of government resources, according to leading high speed rail advocate Lou Thompson.
Foreign governments “wanted high speed rail, and they were willing to pay for it,” Thompson, who was involved in the formation of Amtrak in the early 1970s and served as railways advisor to the World Bank, told CNN. “Our government has never met those two conditions.”
The article also mentions that high-speed rail works best with distances not much more than 400 miles between destinations, because then air becomes faster.
It’s even better if there are several large cities in a line within that 400 miles. If we call four cities A,B, c, and D, a single train traveling from A to D can offer six different trips, AB, AC, AD, BC, BD, and CD. You would need six different airplanes to do that. If there are only two large cities, say Los Angeles and San Francisco, you lose that multiplication effect.
I’m pretty sure that the Northeast Corridor doesn’t have exclusive use of the track. Instead, I think, it’s shared with freight and commuter rail services like the New Haven Line.
If you do that your A to D trip slows down significantly while it is stopped in cities B and C.
I think this under 400 mile distance is going to be dominated by self-driving cars. Driving 8 hours in a car is stressful. Sleeping, watching movies, browsing the internet, watching books, playing games is not. Remember what matters is the total time for all three parts of the trip–home to rail station, rail station at origin to rail station at destination, renting a vehicle and driving to your final business (or whatever) destination and waiting at various parts of the trip means your average trip speed is very substantially below this 150 mph people talk about.
Amtrak is trying high-speed rail between Chicago and St. Louis - a distance of right about 300 miles. There are two problems.
The maze of railyards in both the Chicago and St. Louis areas cut the speeds down to barely better than rush hour traffic. The Chicago-Joliet (train station to train station, both in the heart of downtowns) leg of the trip is scheduled for 50 minutes by train vs. 51 minutes by car. Likewise, the Alton-St. Louis leg is 47 minutes by rail and 40 by car. The entire trip, depending on time of day, ranges from 4 hours 46 minutes to 5 hours 15 minutes. Driving point to point on I-55 at an average of 63 mph gets you there in less time.
Despite the fact that sections of that Amtrak route have speed limits of 110 mph, another reason for the long times is that every county in Illinois on the rail line wanted their own local stop.And the state Legislature funds the route. As a result, the Chicago-St. Louis run makes up to nine stops between the two cities.
And I actually think that’s good. While high-speed rail may be feasible in the Northeast, the rest of the U.S. is so spread out that it makes more sense to have trains feed outlying areas into large metro transportation hubs, and let air travel take care of the cross-country travel.
Any high-speed rail network can just run two parallel lines. The first line is the one with all the stops. If the politicians and voters insist on having 20 stops with small towns, so be it. Then the other one is the Express line, the one that only stops at the big cities; Austin to Waco to Dallas to Oklahoma City.
High speed rail lines are already double tracked, to allow trains going in opposite directions to avoid pulling off onto a siding. So you’re suggesting the lines be triple or quadruple tracked for the local trains. That gets pretty expensive.
Think about those that think that law enforcement is something you watch of internet videos, and that derailing a high speed train would make for a great, monetizable video.
No.
I mean really think about it.
Not to mention adding more tracks means acquiring more right-of-way. And those state legislators which agreed to spend money to bring high-speed rail to their communities may not be so happy to watch trains blow through the county seat without stopping.
And even if the money problems magically disappeared, it STILL doesn’t clear up the railyard congestion in the major rail hubs.
IIRC, that’s one of the (many) problems with California’s high speed rail project. So many cities and towns up and down the route were ‘promised’ they’d get a stop on the system in order to garner support at the ballot box that if the HSR ever does come to fruition, it’ll be a very expensive local, with stops every 30-45 miles. By the time it gets up to speed, it’ll have to start slowing for the next stop. Makes about as much sense as taking a Ferrari to run errands to pick up dry-cleaning, drop off a book at the library, and pick up a gallon of milk.
If one was to build a HSR system in the USA (hah, it is to laugh), a basic prerequisite is that exactly zero of the new system interacts in any way with the current legacy rail system. No common trackage or crossings whatsoever. It’s its own dog on its own tracks elevated or buried away from absolutely everything else.
Regarding the proposed “high-speed” rail connection between Chicago and St Louis, in the rest of the world, 110-mph isn’t considered high-speed rail. Perhaps that’s an indication of just how low our expectations here in America are?