cross country high speed corridors

[Green Maned Lion]

Our government can't keep our basic infrastructure (ex. the northeast corridor or even the interstate highway system- witness the MSP bridge collapse) even in a "state of good repair". Given this, how do you expect them to design, engineer, procure land for, build, and especially properly maintain something to FRA 200mph standards?

The FRA's standards are pretty strict. The rules are pretty clear about how when the standards for a particular track class aren't met, you have to run the trains slower (though I think there are a few cases where you have a month or two in which to meet the standards before the trains have to fully slow down). If a lot of track that was supposed to be 200 MPH isn't, there's a good chance that the trains will slow down for a little while, the news media will notice, and the politicians will decide to throw money at the problem.

Sometimes building new things from scratch for $X is also politically easier than spending one twentieth of $X fixing something.

And I have to wonder if the sense of satisfaction engineers get varies. Would you rather spend a year of your working life building a new 200 MPH track, or doing a bunch of things along the lines of fixing some track that has a speed restriction of 90 MPH so that it can operate at 135 MPH like it's supposed to (and when you're done, still not being able to do anything about that catenary wire that won't let the trains run at 150 MPH)? (I assume the old catenary is not considered to be not in good repair merely on account of not being constant tension, but I don't really know.)

The US Navy's submarine force found that when the officers who had done best in school got to pick their assignments, the ships that were in overhaul ended up getting the weaker officers pretty consistently. The Navy eventually noticed that having weaker officers on the ships that were getting overhauled was a bad thing, and changed how they handled assignments.

If indeed the civilian engineers working on the railroads are going to prefer working on the 200 MPH track, there is no way in our democracy to force the best engineers to work on the stupid annoying little problems on the NEC. (And I strongly suspect that good engineers / management can do a lot to stretch budget dollars in a safe manner, where weaker engineers / management will take a less efficient approach and get less done with the same money.)

Notice also how the way Amtrak most recently managed to buy new rolling stock at all was that it was ``high speed''. Nevermind that the top speed south of New York City is a whole 8% faster for the Acela than the Regional, and an 8% speed difference probably barely has any effect on how many people are willing to ride the train. (It's more complicated than that, of course, since the Acela doesn't even get to enjoy that 8% speed advantage for the whole route, but the Acela also skips a bunch of stops, and can probably accelerate faster. But Amtrak could have simply bought some more electric locomotives and made a habit of running them in pairs and rewritten the schedule if they wanted the Amfleet I coaches to enjoy those last two advantages.)

I'm sort of curious about the NEC state of good repair issue. I do think I recall reading about it being an issue in the bill that Congress has almost managed to pass. But when I've ridden the NEC, I haven't noticed it being broken, and I suspect that the NEC in its present state is a safer way to travel than the current Interstate highway system, or any improved version of the highway system we might see in the next few decades.

I'm also wondering if the highway bridge standards are as clear cut as the FRA track standards. For some reason, I suspect they may not be, but I'm not really sure. I think I've seen news articles saying that engineers inspected some particular highway bridge and decided it was safe enough in some case in the distant past. I'm wondering how much subjectivity gets involved there; I'm reminded of what Richard Feynman discovered about various estimates of the safety of the Challenger. (Various lower level people at NASA apparently had a pretty good idea of the actual safety. Management figured they couldn't possibly be sending actual living human beings into outer space in something that dangerous, because if it was that dangerous you wouldn't want to send actual living human beings, so obviously it was safer than the people who were working for them thought it was. Unfortunately, we discovered that management writing wishful numbers down on a piece of paper didn't make reality so.)

While I do think we need to be working to fix the highway bridges (as well as thinking about whether we could save money in the long run in meeting our total transportation needs by getting some of the load off the highway and onto the rails), a single highway bridge collapse really doesn't bother me much. I'm too lazy to go find the real numbers at the moment, but if there were 150 people who died in that collapse and about 150 million Interstate highway bridge users in the US (counting both drivers and passengers), it would seem that collapse only killed one out of every 1 million Interstate highway users. There are probably a bunch of other ways of dying on an Interstate highway that are a lot more likely.

It might be a good thing if it happens, but I doubt it ever will. Maybe I'm just too cynical.

 

[George Harris]

(Various lower level people at NASA apparently had a pretty good idea of the actual safety. Management figured they couldn't possibly be sending actual living human beings into outer space in something that dangerous, because if it was that dangerous you wouldn't want to send actual living human beings, so obviously it was safer than the people who were working for them thought it was. Unfortunately, we discovered that management writing wishful numbers down on a piece of paper didn't make reality so.)

Dilbert management at its best. Way, way too common.

 

[George Harris]

An interesting question is whether you can build a switch that will let a train run through it at 200 MPH regardless of which of the two directions the train is going (which you'd want if you build the track mostly single tracked, with double track in the sections where you expect the schedule will put the trains where they meet). I bet you can, but it probably doesn't tend to be done. But keeping high speed switches maintained is apparently pricy, I think somewhere I read that a switch that you can go through at 45 MPH (in the slower direction, I think) can cost something like $10k or $30k a year to maintain.

If you are going to have enough volume of people and trains to be worth building the railroad at all, it will probably need to be double tracked from day one.

Not sure about the maintenance cost you quote for the 45 mph turnout. I have been working outside the country too long to have recent maintenance cost handy, but it seems high. A 45 mph turnout is nothing more than a garden variety No. 20 turnout. There are lots of them out there. Caltrain probably has somewhere between 30 and 40 of these things between San Francisco and San Jose.

As to the very high speed turnouts: There are German standards for up to 200 km/h = 125 mph. The German 200 km/h turnout is 197 meters (646 feet) long, has a spiraled switch piont, an internal radius of 6,100 meters (20,018 feet), and has 8 switch machines on the point and 4 more on the movable frog. The switch point alone is 63 meters (206 feet) long, which is almost as long as an entire No. 20 (45 mph ) turnout. (I have drawings of both of these things.)

To make one for 200 mph would require an internal radius of around 60,000 feet. and the whole thing would be something around 1/4 mile long.

 

[Joel N. Weber II]

If you are going to have enough volume of people and trains to be worth building the railroad at all, it will probably need to be double tracked from day one.

This statement has certainly made me think things through a bit more.

If there was 150+ MPH track that was designed to just not have sections requiring slowing down from that speed going from somewhere a bit west of the greater New York City area to somewhere a bit north of Pittsburgh to somewhere a bit south of Cleveland to somewhere near Chicago, with slower tracks getting the trains into the downtown stations, there'd probably be enough distinct routes that if several of them were run with one hour headways, any given section of the right of way would see multiple trains per hour in each direction, and trying to do less than double tracking the whole thing in that case probably would be crazy.

But then there's the Los Angeles to Las Vegas route. If there were hourly departures on a fast, passenger-only track, I'm not sure there'd be more than one train per hour in each direction. There might also be one or two long distance trains a day, of course, but that may not be terribly significant. Adding high speed track from near Las Vegas to Phoenix would potentially bring most of the Las Vegas to LA route up to two trains per hour in each direction if LA residents had a choice of either going to Las Vegas on that track, or going to Phoenix by going near Las Vegas but skipping the slow track through Vegas itself, but it's not obvious to me that two trains per hour would justify double tracking the whole length of the route. And maybe I'm not being imaginative enough, but I'm having trouble seeing how there'd ever be much point in having more than about two trains an hour in each direction on most of the Los Angeles to Las Vegas track.

Then again, I have little sense of the relative cost of laying the second track, vs the overall cost of establishing a new right of way (while doing all of the things needed for the second track that would be more expensive if not done when the right of way is established for the first track) in the first place.

 

[Joel N. Weber II]

It looks like the primary census statistical areas list is actually a better thing to look at than the combined statistical areas, because, as the text at the top of Wikipedia's combined statistical areas page notes, there are some cities like Phoenix whose population is quite large even though there aren't multiple entertangled MSAs, and discriminating against Phoenix because of its single core nature would be dumb.

If you look at the list of the top five areas, New York City, Washington DC, and Boston all fall in the top five. And Boston to Washington DC is under 460 track miles with the current route, which suggests that with sufficiently straight track, BOS to WAS could probably be done by rail in under three hours.

(Though I don't understand why Congress is so focused on new Baltimore tunnels, which if they're built soon, in isolation, probably will be in the wrong place to be used by a railroad made of class 9 track, if we ever get that.)

If you expand your view to the top 10, Los Angeles to San Francisco and Dallas-Fort Worth to Houston also look like very attractive places for high speed trains; both of those routes are well under 500 miles, and therefore can probably be done in under three hours.

Trying to evaluate the relative value of various routes becomes difficult, if you wanted to declare a single winner.

One unanswerable question is whether the goal should be to maximize the number of riders enjoying the new track, or to maximize the number of riders diverted from airplanes. NYP to Philadelphia riders can be counted towards justifying a new NEC if you care about the former, but probably not if you're focused on the latter. (If there are people who take a plane from the greater New York City area to Philadelphia today, I really doubt the airplane is saving them any time over Amtrak's current service, and therefore I really doubt faster Amtrak service would make them switch. Amazingly, when I ask the Internet for Newark to Philadelphia airfare, it tells me I can pay $400+ for the round trip and change planes in Pittsburgh or probably some other places, and doesn't suggest that I should just take a train.) New York City is huge, but being in the center of the NEC, it currently has pretty decent runtimes to the rest of the NEC.

It appears that if you were trying to justify a new NEC on the basis that it would help Bostonians get to Philadelpiha and WAS, the total population of those three CSAs is 21 million if you round each CSA's population down to the nearest million and then add. Los Angeles plus San Fracisco has a slightly larger population. And Los Angeles to San Francisco is 382 highway miles, so it's a slightly shorter route.

I guess this argues that the first place to build approximately 200 MPH track in the US ought to be Los Angeles to San Francisco. (Why is LA to Las Vegas being studied as a high speed route at all, then, even ignoring the whole maglev vs rail issue? I guess for the same reason that the political rules now specify that rail is not as good as maglev, regardless of the financial and technical realities.)

Kansas City (22nd largest CSA, 27th largest primary census statistical area)'s location is kind of annoying: 603 highway miles to Denver, 552 highway miles to Dallas. Trains with a top speed of 200 MPH probably are going to take a bit more than 3 hours, which may mean those routes would have trouble killing airplanes. And then you get into the question of how much value there is of having an interconnected system of 200 MPH track to make trips longer than three hours possible at high speeds. Then again, Kansas city is small enough that routes connecting to it at 200 MPH aren't going to be among the first built, and maybe that will make higher top speeds possible; 350 km/h might turn out to be fast enough to get Kansas City to Denver down to three hours, and if it doesn't, maybe 250 MPH would work.

We might someday have a train that goes slowly from New Orleans to Houston (363 miles and 9:18 on the current Sunset Limited schedule, and New Orleans is small enough that upgrades may be harder to justify), and then quickly from Houston to Dallas-Fort Worth to Kansas City to St Louis to Chicago.

 

[Larry H.]

This make me recall that if I wanted to fly I would take a plane.. I think a speedy trip, say 100 might be nice, but any idea what a wreck would look like at 250! Besides it would make rail travel for sure have the excuse of a bag of chips for 4.00 as your only perk. No thanks..

 

[Joel N. Weber II]

This make me recall that if I wanted to fly I would take a plane.. I think a speedy trip, say 100 might be nice, but any idea what a wreck would look like at 250!

The French have several decades of experience at 300 km/h, and I don't think they've managed to have fatal high speed wrecks yet.

Besides, how fast are you orbiting the sun?

I also don't think there's much danger of, say, the majority of the Empire Builder's route being upgraded to anywhere close to 200 MPH. There just isn't a huge population density along most of its route. Minneapolis to Chicago might be a good place to eventually build high speed track, but once you get outside the greater Minneapolis area heading west, there's not really much population until you're almost to the coast, as far as I can tell. There are probably always going to be lots of routes carrying some local passengers that aren't worth making all that fast, too.

 

[Joel N. Weber II]

This topic claims that a part of France's government has proposed that they should end up with about 3700 km of 300 km/h or better track by 2020, a mere 12 years from now.

The US about 4.7 the population of France, going by the numbers in Wikipedia's List of countries by population article.

If we want to be competitive with the French in terms of miles of 300 km/h or better track per capita, we need to have a major government official proposing that by 2020 we should have about 17390 km or about 10,800 miles of 300 km/h or better track in the US.

 

[Joel N. Weber II]

The Pittsburgh to Los Angeles route I gave early in this topic adds up to 2856 miles using the mix of highway mile and current track mile numbers I'd come up with.

Pittsburgh to New York City is 371 highway miles.

Pittsburgh to DC is 247 highway miles.

The Boston to DC route is 457 miles; building faster track for that may someday make sense.

Charlotte to DC is 399 highway miles.

Atlanta to Charlotte is 264 highway miles.

Atlanta to Orlando is 438 highway miles.

Orland to Miami is 239 highway miles.

Atlanta to Cincinnati is 461 highway miles.

Cincinnati to Chicago, going close to Indinanapolis along the way, is 297 highway miles.

Kansas City to Dallas is 552 highway miles.

Dallas to Houston is 239 highway miles.

Houston to San Antonio is 197 highway miles.

San Antonio to Dallas is 273 highway miles.

Las Vegas to Phoenix is 294 highway miles.

Los Angeles to San Francisco is 382 highway miles.

Portland, Oregon to Los Angeles is 634 highway miles.

Portland, Oregon to Seattle is 174 highway miles.

The sum of the above routes is 8774 miles.

One thing I'm not clear on is how the numbers in my previous post in this thread account for double track. It's quite possible that we'd only need to be proposing to have 5400 route miles of 300 km/h or better track by 2020 to be competitive with France, per capita, if a mile long right of way with two tracks on it is being counted as two track miles in counting how much track France has. Then again, would there be anything wrong with proposing to have more 300 km/h or better track per capita than France?

 

[wayman]

Then again, would there be anything wrong with proposing to have more 300 km/h or better track per capita than France?

But where do you stop, once you start thinking about it like that? Do we up our wine and cheese production to equal or better France's per-capita? Wait a sec, that would allow for wine-and-cheese tastings on more trains than just the LSL, so I'm all for it! :lol:

 

[Joel N. Weber II]

According to Wikipedia's List of countries by electricity consumption, we use about 1.7 times the wattage per capita as France. If we had 8774 route miles of 300 km/h or better track and only needed 5400 to match them in terms of track miles per capita, we'd have about 1.6 times the high speed track miles per capita as France, and that imaginary 1.6 track factor is less than the current real 1.7 electricity factor.

 

[Joel N. Weber II]

I'm starting to think that a logical approach to transcontinental high speed trains, assuming a willingness to build lots of new high speed track on new rights of way, would be to run pretty much all of them (giving the examples for the eastbound trains) from Los Angeles to Las Vegas to Salt Lake City to Denver to Kansas City, and probably from there to St. Louis.

At St. Louis, there could be a three way split:

One route would go to Chicago. (Someday, if there's a desire to build even more track, that trip could be shortened a bit by track directly from Kansas City to Chicago that bypassed St Louis.)

The second route would go to Atlanta (via Chattanooga, because it's pretty much on the way) and then from there to Orlando and Miami. (Or it could do Orlando to Tampa, but Miami has a larger population than Tampa; or maybe trains should alternate between Orlando and Tampa.)

The third route would go to Indianapolis, Columbus, and Pittsburgh. At Pittsburgh, some trains would then continue to DC and perhaps Philadelphia, and others would go to New York City, Hartford, Springfield, and Boston.

There might also be some trains that go from Miami to Orlando to Atlanta to Chattanooga to St Louis to Chicago without requiring passengers to change trains in St Louis.

 

[frj1983]

"assuming a willingness to build lots of new high speed track on new rights of way"

Well that's the problem Joel,

It's GIGANTIC assumption and I don't see anyone in Congress in your or my lifetime suggesting this. In fact, I think there will be a 10 year angst filled argument within Congress just to help the private railroads(in some way) get more trucks off the road. Passenger Rail is just not on their radar and will never be in this current generation of constantly re-elected legislators!

 

[wayman]

"assuming a willingness to build lots of new high speed track on new rights of way"
Well that's the problem Joel,

It's GIGANTIC assumption and I don't see anyone in Congress in your or my lifetime suggesting this. In fact, I think there will be a 10 year angst filled argument within Congress just to help the private railroads(in some way) get more trucks off the road. Passenger Rail is just not on their radar and will never be in this current generation of constantly re-elected legislators!

Amtrak Putsch, anyone? h34r:

 

[Green Maned Lion]

Our government is not in the financial position to finance anything like this, Joel. We can't even afford the war our *****-in-office is putting us through. Upgrading Amtrak funding is easy, and should be done. But frankly, before they spend trillions on a system like you suggest, they need to get a positive cash flow.

 

[George Harris]

If the California High Speed, Los Angeles to San Francisco gets built, and it seems more and more likely that it will, the political landscape should shift dramatically. Suddenly we will have one that even the politicians can feel and touch without having to go overseas to do it. Considering that right now there are six trains daily that are reasonably full even though it take bus rides on both ends to get to either SF or LA, and about 10 hours downtown to downtown, once you can make the trip in under 3 hours in the same seat, the problem with the system will probably be insufficient capacity rather than lack of ridership.

 

[Joel N. Weber II]

Our government is not in the financial position to finance anything like this, Joel. We can't even afford the war our *****-in-office is putting us through. Upgrading Amtrak funding is easy, and should be done. But frankly, before they spend trillions on a system like you suggest, they need to get a positive cash flow.

If we could move 100-300 billion a year from the military to train tracks, we could probably get catch up to the French in a decade or two, without changing the total we're spending each year.

 

[Green Maned Lion]

Thats like financially suggesting that I divest $300,000 a year from Ferraris to BMWs when I'm in a negative cash position.

 

[frj1983]

Our government is not in the financial position to finance anything like this, Joel. We can't even afford the war our *****-in-office is putting us through. Upgrading Amtrak funding is easy, and should be done. But frankly, before they spend trillions on a system like you suggest, they need to get a positive cash flow.

If we could move 100-300 billion a year from the military to train tracks, we could probably get catch up to the French in a decade or two, without changing the total we're spending each year.

Again Joel,

I DO NOT see any political will to do this...and while George Harris is correct that a California high speed system will change things a bit, I still think most legislators will think: "oh that's California where they have the budget of a small wealthy country and the size/population to make something like high speed work. In the Midwest where I live, high speed rail might work, but would end up crossing many state lines and each state, would of course, have their own views on how it should be done and where it should go, of course slowing the whole process down to a trickle! :blink:

 

[Joel N. Weber II]

Thats like financially suggesting that I divest $300,000 a year from Ferraris to BMWs when I'm in a negative cash position.

Wikipedia thinks the US GDP is $13.8 trillion. If we spent $100 billion a year on better track, that wouldn't even be 1% of the US GDP. $300 billion a year on track would still be well under 3% of the US GDP.

 

[Joel N. Weber II]

I DO NOT see any political will to do this...and while George Harris is correct that a California high speed system will change things a bit, I still think most legislators will think: "oh that's California where they have the budget of a small wealthy country and the size/population to make something like high speed work. In the Midwest where I live, high speed rail might work, but would end up crossing many state lines and each state, would of course, have their own views on how it should be done and where it should go, of course slowing the whole process down to a trickle! :blink:

The Interstate Highway system crosses many state lines. How did it ever get built in the midwest, and why is high speed rail harder than the Interstate Highway system?

The key to creating the political will to build this is to figure out how to get the average American to see how this would benefit them. Then there will be voters demanding high speed rail from politicians. I think the way to make this happen is to make people in major cities aware of what would be possible if we decide we want to catch up to the French. Specifically, it would be good for people in major cities to be aware of which other cities they could get to in how much time (for the places they'd be able to get in 3 hours or less) if we invested in high speed rail.

 

[frj1983]

I DO NOT see any political will to do this...and while George Harris is correct that a California high speed system will change things a bit, I still think most legislators will think: "oh that's California where they have the budget of a small wealthy country and the size/population to make something like high speed work. In the Midwest where I live, high speed rail might work, but would end up crossing many state lines and each state, would of course, have their own views on how it should be done and where it should go, of course slowing the whole process down to a trickle! :blink:

The Interstate Highway system crosses many state lines. How did it ever get built in the midwest, and why is high speed rail harder than the Interstate Highway system?

The key to creating the political will to build this is to figure out how to get the average American to see how this would benefit them. Then there will be voters demanding high speed rail from politicians. I think the way to make this happen is to make people in major cities aware of what would be possible if we decide we want to catch up to the French. Specifically, it would be good for people in major cities to be aware of which other cities they could get to in how much time (for the places they'd be able to get in 3 hours or less) if we invested in high speed rail.

OK Joel,

I'll bite: How? How? How? are you going to get average Joe/Josie America to see how it benefits them???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????

The average American isn't even aware that Amtrak exists as a travel option, let alone see it as a benefit! And most American's experience with trains has to do with waiting for one of those %*#$@ freight trains getting in my way and holding me up!! They have absolutely no perception of the need for any kind of train. Is it any wonder that elected members of congress have no conception about it either (unless of course they serve on a couple of committees that are somehow involved with trains)?

So HOW exactly are you going to convince America and Congress of the need? I hope you have a "detailed" miracle up your sleeve! I'd really like to hear it!

 

[Guest_TransAtlantic_*]

While the idea of cross-country HSR is great to dream about, it is impractical for a variety of reasons, not the least being the size of the country compared with the nature of successful HSR systems. You could fit most of France, for example, within Texas, so we are talking about MUCH longer distances than those in Europe or Asia; even in France, there are large parts of the country which are not - and will not be - served by HSR because of their low population densities.

What WILL work in this country - and the sooner, the better, I say! - is the development of regional corridors which can connect to more conventional (probably diesel/electric, at least for now) rail, which would still allow a person to cross the entire country in not much over a day. California and the NEC are well underway with corridor development; Florida, Texas, the Southeastern seaboard area, the Pacific Northwest, and the Midwest corridor areas (Chicago/Milwaukee/St. Louis/Kansas City) have all been proposed. With only the remaining gaps, one could conceivably go from LA to Orlando or Seattle, or from NYC to Minneapolis or Oklahoma City within a single day. We just need to make politicians AND the FRA aware of the realities of HSR around the world: proven, safe technology that is far more energy-efficient than the short-haul airlines currently cluttering the skies, and the comparatively low cost of maintaining the corridors once they've been built (much less than, say, maintaining another Interstate highway).

 

[Joel N. Weber II]

While the idea of cross-country HSR is great to dream about, it is impractical for a variety of reasons, not the least being the size of the country compared with the nature of successful HSR systems. You could fit most of France, for example, within Texas, so we are talking about MUCH longer distances than those in Europe or Asia; even in France, there are large parts of the country which are not - and will not be - served by HSR because of their low population densities.

I certainly agree that there are some parts of the country where high speed rail doesn't make much sense due to low population density. An excellent example of this is the portion of the Empire Builder route to the west of Minneapolis / St. Paul, which might end up being the longest long distance route in terms of hours if we do start agressively building high speed rail.

But if you want to compare the US to France, you also have to remember that the US population is roughly 4.7 times the population of France, so if we need 4.7 times as many miles of track, that shouldn't discourage us at all. I do think we may want to end up with nearly twice as much high speed track per capita as the French, but I don't think that's impossible.

What WILL work in this country - and the sooner, the better, I say! - is the development of regional corridors which can connect to more conventional (probably diesel/electric, at least for now) rail, which would still allow a person to cross the entire country in not much over a day. California and the NEC are well underway with corridor development; Florida, Texas, the Southeastern seaboard area, the Pacific Northwest, and the Midwest corridor areas (Chicago/Milwaukee/St. Louis/Kansas City) have all been proposed. With only the remaining gaps, one could conceivably go from LA to Orlando or Seattle, or from NYC to Minneapolis or Oklahoma City within a single day. We just need to make politicians AND the FRA aware of the realities of HSR around the world: proven, safe technology that is far more energy-efficient than the short-haul airlines currently cluttering the skies, and the comparatively low cost of maintaining the corridors once they've been built (much less than, say, maintaining another Interstate highway).

If we're talking about east coast to west coast in a day, I don't think that's going to work if there's any significant stretch of conventional speed track that one has to travel across. Travel between Denver and Winnemucca, NV is roughly 23-25 hours by conventional rail on the current California Zephyr schedule. I don't see how you're going to get from LA to Orlando in a day if there are any significant gaps where you have to resort to conventional speed track.

(10-30 miles of conventional speed track into the station at the center of a major city doesn't count as a gap for this purpose. But 1,000 miles of conventional speed track across the western US certainly does.)

If you aren't specifically concerned about having high speed track that goes from one coast to the other, the obvious areas to build in are approximately Kansas City and to the east (or maybe not even that far west) plus along the Pacific coast. If we want to be able to get from the eastern half of the country to the west coast in an amount of time that's more or less competitive with planes (when you consider the benefits of sleeping cars), we need high speed rail from Kansas City to Denver to Salt Lake City to Las Vegas to Los Angeles, even though most of those cities are smaller than might otherwise get high speed rail.

 

[Joel N. Weber II]

The average American isn't even aware that Amtrak exists as a travel option, let alone see it as a benefit! And most American's experience with trains has to do with waiting for one of those %*#$@ freight trains getting in my way and holding me up!! They have absolutely no perception of the need for any kind of train. Is it any wonder that elected members of congress have no conception about it either (unless of course they serve on a couple of committees that are somehow involved with trains)?
So HOW exactly are you going to convince America and Congress of the need? I hope you have a "detailed" miracle up your sleeve! I'd really like to hear it!

If California's high speed rail actually happens, that should generate lots of word of mouth advertising about what a high speed train is like. People who have never left this country have never experienced a high speed train. (In spite of its maximum speed, Acela's average speed is pathetic enough that I don't think it counts as a high speed train. A high speed train would be able to go from Boston to DC in a bit less time than Acela goes from New York City to DC.)

I think it would also be a good thing for there to be some organization which is organized to promote a national high speed rail system. This is something NARP could be doing but isn't, so maybe a separate organization would be a good thing. That organization could consider taking out ads in airports discussing the potential of high speed rail (and overly congested airports might not be opposed to such advertising) and/or hiring a PR firm (this article has some information on what PR firms can accomplish). That organization should also have a website describing the potential route structure for a national high speed rail system.