Did you mean to say "how much longer a Charger is than a Sprinter"? It is about 5 feet longer in the Midwest/California form of it. In the AAF form it is a bit more for the shrouding in the front.
Yup. what the next gen will yield will also depend on whether FRA will allow additional underbalance beyond what it allows now. He was suggesting that somehow "removing" the S curve would give us a clear 160mph run presumably from Newark to Trenton. That certainly won;t be the case. Actually even after the HSR work is finished between NBK and TRE, the whole segment between County and Ham won't be 160mph, let alone dreams of Newark to Trenton.
It was stitched together from multiple short railroads built using various charters, some for toll roads, some opposed vociferously by toll roads causing weird routing, some others and when they came up against each other one bought the other and jogged their tracks around to meet up. Some of those were straightened out over time. Others weren't. The history of the coming together of what is NEC today is quite fascinating. The whole story of how PRR found its way into Washington DC working around a ban from the Govt. of Maryland is a fascinating one in and of itself.
I think the implementation of PTC is about to change the "faster than most trains in the country can travel". The troglodyte freight companies may still want to refuse to raise their speed limits, but when they already have the expensive parts of the signal system in place and the track is already Class 5, the necessary payments to get them to tweak the signal system to allow for 90 mph are gonna be a lot lower than before...
I believe not in the US at this time. There is intermittent discussion among the western roads of raising speeds for intermodals, where time is money, but the "low-hanging fruit" is still in intermodal yard operations, which are much slower than they should be.
I may be way off here because I'm working off memory, but didn't Union Pacific have a rule a few years back authorizing certain intermodal equipment to run 79 mph? Of course, things may have changed (or I could be totally wrong...), and merely having the authorization doesn't mean it actually happens, but I seem to remember something along those lines.
Starting about this time next year, a couple hundred miles of upgraded track between St Louis and Joliet will be carrying Lincoln service passenger trains at up to 110 mph. Union Pacific trains will operate over the same tracks, which UP owns.
I recall when the UP added those units to help the SFZ between Denver and Ogden. Wyoming was 90 MPH, cab-signaled territory for the Zephyr....
In places, yes. For Amtrak. To the best of my knowledge, though, no BNSF trains operate faster than 70mph.
