11 ms·

As i understand things at a fairly high level, and particularly w/r/t the northeast corridor, high speed rail in the US has two interlinked technical facts abou

As i understand things at a fairly high level, and particularly w/r/t the northeast corridor, high speed rail in the US has two interlinked technical facts about it that are hard to get over even if we can wave a magic policy wand and make governmental buy-in work several orders of magnitude better: - It's not that "American rail construction is just bad. However, this is not because rail is bad; it’s because the United States is bad.". It's that american rail construction in the northeast is OLD, and we're hosed by the first adopter paradox. - from this, it directly follows that upgrading the rail for high speed use is HARD, because the issue is at least in part down to rail line geometry. AIUI, a fundamental reason you can't go 95mph between Boston and New York is that the railroad tracks have curves in them whose radii have a maximum speed without risk of derailment that's quite low, and to resolve this problem you'd have to eminent domain swathes of, say, New Haven. There are other issues too, like local/freight/... sharing the same lines, but that's kind of saying the same thing twice: construction through densely populated Northeast Corridor cities is so impractical that it's hard to see how it could ever happen or be thought of as a particularly good thing if it did.

cletus 5y ago
This is exactly right. It's not as simple as just upgrading tracks for high speed. There's only so far you can go around certain turns. There are also likely limits based on how separated the track is from the surroundings. Going 50mph has less of a risk profile than going 200mph. High speed rail is generally elevated and/or fenced off to avoid animals, peoples and objects that would otherwise be deadly. The UK has this problem with old rail too. European rail is quite new, probably thanks in part to the "benefit" of Europe being leveled in the last century. China and Japan have new rail too. Another difference: populations in Europe, China and Japan are more concentrated. Just look at how many airports there are in the US vs Europe. France, a country of 60M+, has a mere handful of airports. So it's easier to serve more people with less line. Lastly, construction is (now) super expensive in the US. Sad as it is, I just don't see long-distance rail as being economically viable in the US.
- jschwartzi 5y ago
  Population clustering actually follows from the way people travel. It's a virtuous/vicious cycle where in the US we've been building in ways that reduce or eliminate the usefulness of high speed rail while countries that have favored rail have been doing the opposite. The US has always heavily-subsidized roads and automobile travel and as a consequence sprawl. I think it's catching up with us socially, economically, and physically. In my opinion focusing on cost versus fares is myopic to the point of insanity. As long as we're laser-focused on the economic viability of rail we'll never see any of the other benefits. We have a responsibility to future generations to not just keep things the same but to make them better, and I think rail does that. If you look around and you dislike your current mode of living, hate your commute, and want to have access to cities, then guess what rail is a solution for all of that. It takes decades to see any real benefit from it though, which is why nobody ever goes for it.
  - bombcar 5y ago
    This is the main (and perhaps the most important driving factor) - if you build a rail line from empty land directly into the heart of a major US city, that empty land will develop relatively quickly over the next 10-20 years. Instead we've done the same but with sprawling highways, which doesn't do much for density (and requires cars, and once you have a car you just use it for commuting).
    - bluGill 5y ago
      Careful there. It is easy to do stupid things and so not get that growth. A HSR from middle of nowhere south Dakota to NYC grand central station will get approximately 0 riders - the distance (all distance in transport is measured in minutes not meters) is too far to commute every day, and there is nothing else to draw people. I wish this didn't need to be pointed out, but there are a lot of stupid proposals out there. So be on the lookout - don't blinding support HSR: put support where it will be useful.
      - jschwartzi 5y ago
bluGill 5y ago
What is hard is nobody is willing to make and follow a long term plan. Amtrak has plans since the 1970s to fix those curves. Most of the places that would need to be bought have gone for sale since then - a bit of vision would mean that very little eminent domain would even be needed (not zero - there is always the one family that has lived in the same house for years). Also with the plan, you don't need to do it all at once - fix something every year. Amtrak hasn't had the vision to stick with the plan. Instead we get a new plan every 10 years or so. Sure the new plan is arguably better, but the old plan complete would be better yet. The money spent making a new plan would fix one of the bad curves (only one though)
- acdha 5y ago
  > Amtrak hasn't had the vision to stick with the plan. I think this would be better stated as “funding” — it's not like nobody at Amtrak has failed to think about the hotspots for them, it's just that they are in the unfortunate position of being expected to service a lot of [now] marginal routes against both very well funded alternatives, but they have limited governmental support for the kind of major infrastructure changes they need to dramatically improve their offerings. A completely private business could, for example, simply discontinue unprofitable lines or acquire long-term debt to fund a major capital investment but they were created specifically to avoid closing routes and debt is a political hot potato. A government service could point to greater societal benefits to justify funding out of general tax revenue but Amtrak is expected make enough in ticket revenue that they're perennially short of cash. A large part of the problem is simply that railroads have high base costs which can be made up in volume but their service costs more than alternatives because we don't subsidize rail anywhere near as much as highways (for example, DC to NY on train costs more than a bus, but I-95 isn't a toll road funded only by users). Edit: just to be clear, I'm sure that they're just as flawed as any other group of humans — it's just that whenever you see some obvious problem holding an organization back, it's almost never the case that nobody there has thought about it.
  - bluGill 5y ago
    I'm sure some low level people at Amtrak have thought about it. Upper management has generally not, and thus not allowed the limited funding they could have to be put to good use over the years. A new plan after all is all yours, if you take the old plan your predecessor gets credit (this is also why new CEOs bring in major re-orgs soon after starting - they can't let any credit for success go to their predecessor).
jcranmer 5y ago
About your second point: This is kind of partly true. The track in Connecticut in particular is bad enough that you really need new right-of-way as opposed to fixing individual curves here and there (which is the situation for the rest of the NEC). Alon has favored a new right-of-way that's basically right next to I-95 for as much as possible, which minimizes the takings you need between New Rochelle and New Haven. East of New Haven, there's far less density, and it's pretty easy to make a new right-of-way wherever you want to. The other issue in Connecticut is that, even on the existing right-of-way, Amtrak isn't able to utilize the available speed capacity of the current right-of-way. This is due to Metro North intentionally slowing Amtrak trains down for its commuter rail schedule instead.
- bradleyjg 5y ago
  I’d bet metro north saves more co2 than you’d save even by eliminating every plane flight between NYC and Boston. Probably by at least an order of magnitude.
admax88q 5y ago
> and to resolve this problem you'd have to eminent domain swathes of, say, New Haven. This never seems to be much of a problem when highways are concerned however.
- bluGill 5y ago
  It is harder than you think. In 1950 it wasn't a problem, but these days people are aware that a freeway too close to their house is a negative. They will support the next neighborhood - close enough to be easy to get to, far enough away that they don't get the noise and traffic.
- TYPE_FASTER 5y ago
  Yeah, or a Foxconn factory: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/dec/08/wisconsin-foxconn-factory-residents-displaced https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/dec/08/wisconsin-fo...
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- HarryHirsch 5y ago
  Americans know all about highways but can't imagine functioning railways. So, no surprise there's political will to do one and not the other.
tpmx 5y ago
to resolve this problem you'd have to eminent domain swathes of, say, New Haven I was a bit skeptical until I saw this user map of the Northeast Corridor: https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/viewer?mid=1dH5vJWx6lwBlBvv7Gia4Roc6Gkk&ie=UTF8&hl=en&msa=0&ll=41.44091023228675%2C-72.49809470678957&spn=0.018617%2C0.036736&z=10&output=embed https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/viewer?mid=1dH5vJWx6lwBlBv...
- jandrese 5y ago
  How are you ever going to achieve high speed if you are stopping every 10 miles for another station? There appears to be 8 stations in Baltimore alone.
  - tpmx 5y ago
    There are four tracks - that enables the combination of a slow local stop-at-every-station service along with a fast feeder service. But then the bizarre/historic track geometry ruins the fast service...
    - lmm 5y ago
      So the fast service shouldn't use that alignment. There must already be population centers that are skipped by the fast service - its tracks don't have to go through there either.
      - bobthepanda 5y ago
        Today the fast services follow the same alignment. Rerouting so far has been a headache; in New Haven-Boston where the tracks are so curvy new tracks have to be built, the FRA proposed going through entirely different population centers (the geography of the existing coast line is very challenging). This has resulted in an interesting fight where people want the train in their town, but also do not want the impact of newly constructed tracks through their town.
  - machello13 5y ago
aidenn0 5y ago
> you'd have to eminent domain swathes of, say, New Haven Just to pick apart that specific example, you could instead build a bridge from West Haven to East Haven with much less eminent domain, but much more complaints about the bridge being built. When a suspension bridge was proposed for where I-95 crosses the Potomac, the residents of Alexandria complained that it would be an eyesore and were able to get a drawbridge built instead of a suspension bridge.
Ericson2314 5y ago
I really don't buy this oldness argument. We have to build new alignment you say? That makes it like greenfield elsewhere. Connecticut is dense you say? That's just much parts of Europe. What that leaves your argument with is that existing rail only makes things harder because of a sunk cost facility. Let's improve our bean counting then. Maybe America is one big sunk cost fallicy, being an older republic. Time for some creative destruction I guess.
- hprotagonist 5y ago
  >Connecticut is dense you say? That's just much parts of Europe. those parts of Europe, let's not forget, were rather thoroughly flattened to a wet paste about 80 years ago, and were rebuilt with nice, straight, quick rail lines by people who knew how fast trains that weren't built in 1840 could go.
  - twic 5y ago
    I think you overestimate the extent to which the war ravaged the countryside. Some cities were destroyed. Most (most!) of the rest of Europe, the towns and villages, wasn't.
    - jcranmer 5y ago
      It's the cities (and their suburbs) where acquiring new ROW is expensive.
      - allturtles 5y ago
        For the most part, the cities in France that could fairly be said to have been 'flattened' during WWII were in Normandy. Paris was scarcely touched. Yet they have a high-speed rail network covering the whole country. Spain was untouched by WWII, yet they have a high-speed rail network. The U.S. somehow managed to build an interstate highway system through every major city in the decades after WWII without being bombed flat. The WWII argument seems weak.
giantrobot 5y ago
Your second point is missing some facts that actually make the situation more difficult. 1. Geography and geology is tricky. Rail lines don't curve because the builders just love curves. There's geographic and geologic reasons for a lot of rail line positioning. That's in addition to people living/working/shopping in a place where it would be useful to lay track. 2. Freight lines own most of the track in the US. Amtrak gets to use those lines but freight has right-of-way. Amtrak must side track when a freight train is coming. Amtrak only has a few sections of the NEC as dedicated passenger track. Without dedicated passenger track Amtrak's schedules are all over the place. Freight trains have trouble all the time and passenger trains need to sit and wait while they fix/move the freight train.
- froh 5y ago
  1. old rail line positioning was also influenced by land ownership and existing human structures. and our know how how to deal with previously difficult geography has evolved. you may want to study "Stuttgart 21" or "gotthard rail tunnel" or Eurostar channel tunnel or Berlin Munich high speed track to get an intuition for what's possible if there is a political determination. 2. France and Japan have dedicated tracks. Germany has reliable high speed freight lines. again more than anything it's a matter of political will.
- bluGill 5y ago
  Amtrak can't even keep a schedule on track they own though.
gumby 5y ago
> It's that american rail construction in the northeast is OLD, and we're hosed by the first adopter paradox. The rail networks of Britan and France, just to pick a couple, are older than those of the USA. No first adopter paradox in that comparison.
- cnasc 5y ago
  Asking genuinely because I’m not sure, but were Britain or France forced to upgrade due to war-related damage?
  - bobthepanda 5y ago
    France did but Britain largely did not upgrade the ROW to be straighter. And it's largely irrelevant anyways because true high speed rail (TGV, HS2, ICE) doesn't start showing up in Europe until the '80s, long after WWII reconstruction wrapped up.
  - DrBazza 5y ago
    The UK has several “mainlines”, all built before WW2. All are fairly straight and have been smoothed and updated continuously since WW2. Anything destroyed in WW2 was repaired as quickly as possible at the time. Britain didn’t really “make use” of bomb damage to change the layout of London as it wasn’t really destroyed. And then in the 1960s Dr Beeching’s cuts closed almost half the rail network. The only new high speed railway in the UK opened in the 90s to connect London with the continent, I.e. Eurostar
  - willyt 5y ago
    Most damage was to nodes not to the links between them. So important junctions were rationised but routes weren’t realigned.

cletus 5y ago

This is exactly right. It's not as simple as just upgrading tracks for high speed. There's only so far you can go around certain turns. There are also likely limits based on how separated the track is from the surroundings. Going 50mph has less of a risk profile than going 200mph. High speed rail is generally elevated and/or fenced off to avoid animals, peoples and objects that would otherwise be deadly. The UK has this problem with old rail too. European rail is quite new, probably thanks in part to the "benefit" of Europe being leveled in the last century. China and Japan have new rail too. Another difference: populations in Europe, China and Japan are more concentrated. Just look at how many airports there are in the US vs Europe. France, a country of 60M+, has a mere handful of airports. So it's easier to serve more people with less line. Lastly, construction is (now) super expensive in the US. Sad as it is, I just don't see long-distance rail as being economically viable in the US.

jschwartzi 5y ago
Population clustering actually follows from the way people travel. It's a virtuous/vicious cycle where in the US we've been building in ways that reduce or eliminate the usefulness of high speed rail while countries that have favored rail have been doing the opposite. The US has always heavily-subsidized roads and automobile travel and as a consequence sprawl. I think it's catching up with us socially, economically, and physically. In my opinion focusing on cost versus fares is myopic to the point of insanity. As long as we're laser-focused on the economic viability of rail we'll never see any of the other benefits. We have a responsibility to future generations to not just keep things the same but to make them better, and I think rail does that. If you look around and you dislike your current mode of living, hate your commute, and want to have access to cities, then guess what rail is a solution for all of that. It takes decades to see any real benefit from it though, which is why nobody ever goes for it.
- bombcar 5y ago
  This is the main (and perhaps the most important driving factor) - if you build a rail line from empty land directly into the heart of a major US city, that empty land will develop relatively quickly over the next 10-20 years. Instead we've done the same but with sprawling highways, which doesn't do much for density (and requires cars, and once you have a car you just use it for commuting).
  - bluGill 5y ago
    Careful there. It is easy to do stupid things and so not get that growth. A HSR from middle of nowhere south Dakota to NYC grand central station will get approximately 0 riders - the distance (all distance in transport is measured in minutes not meters) is too far to commute every day, and there is nothing else to draw people. I wish this didn't need to be pointed out, but there are a lot of stupid proposals out there. So be on the lookout - don't blinding support HSR: put support where it will be useful.
    - jschwartzi 5y ago

bluGill 5y ago

What is hard is nobody is willing to make and follow a long term plan. Amtrak has plans since the 1970s to fix those curves. Most of the places that would need to be bought have gone for sale since then - a bit of vision would mean that very little eminent domain would even be needed (not zero - there is always the one family that has lived in the same house for years). Also with the plan, you don't need to do it all at once - fix something every year. Amtrak hasn't had the vision to stick with the plan. Instead we get a new plan every 10 years or so. Sure the new plan is arguably better, but the old plan complete would be better yet. The money spent making a new plan would fix one of the bad curves (only one though)

acdha 5y ago
> Amtrak hasn't had the vision to stick with the plan. I think this would be better stated as “funding” — it's not like nobody at Amtrak has failed to think about the hotspots for them, it's just that they are in the unfortunate position of being expected to service a lot of [now] marginal routes against both very well funded alternatives, but they have limited governmental support for the kind of major infrastructure changes they need to dramatically improve their offerings. A completely private business could, for example, simply discontinue unprofitable lines or acquire long-term debt to fund a major capital investment but they were created specifically to avoid closing routes and debt is a political hot potato. A government service could point to greater societal benefits to justify funding out of general tax revenue but Amtrak is expected make enough in ticket revenue that they're perennially short of cash. A large part of the problem is simply that railroads have high base costs which can be made up in volume but their service costs more than alternatives because we don't subsidize rail anywhere near as much as highways (for example, DC to NY on train costs more than a bus, but I-95 isn't a toll road funded only by users). Edit: just to be clear, I'm sure that they're just as flawed as any other group of humans — it's just that whenever you see some obvious problem holding an organization back, it's almost never the case that nobody there has thought about it.
- bluGill 5y ago
  I'm sure some low level people at Amtrak have thought about it. Upper management has generally not, and thus not allowed the limited funding they could have to be put to good use over the years. A new plan after all is all yours, if you take the old plan your predecessor gets credit (this is also why new CEOs bring in major re-orgs soon after starting - they can't let any credit for success go to their predecessor).

jcranmer 5y ago

About your second point: This is kind of partly true. The track in Connecticut in particular is bad enough that you really need new right-of-way as opposed to fixing individual curves here and there (which is the situation for the rest of the NEC). Alon has favored a new right-of-way that's basically right next to I-95 for as much as possible, which minimizes the takings you need between New Rochelle and New Haven. East of New Haven, there's far less density, and it's pretty easy to make a new right-of-way wherever you want to. The other issue in Connecticut is that, even on the existing right-of-way, Amtrak isn't able to utilize the available speed capacity of the current right-of-way. This is due to Metro North intentionally slowing Amtrak trains down for its commuter rail schedule instead.

bradleyjg 5y ago
I’d bet metro north saves more co2 than you’d save even by eliminating every plane flight between NYC and Boston. Probably by at least an order of magnitude.

admax88q 5y ago

> and to resolve this problem you'd have to eminent domain swathes of, say, New Haven. This never seems to be much of a problem when highways are concerned however.

bluGill 5y ago
It is harder than you think. In 1950 it wasn't a problem, but these days people are aware that a freeway too close to their house is a negative. They will support the next neighborhood - close enough to be easy to get to, far enough away that they don't get the noise and traffic.
TYPE_FASTER 5y ago
Yeah, or a Foxconn factory: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/dec/08/wisconsin-foxconn-factory-residents-displaced https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/dec/08/wisconsin-fo...
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
HarryHirsch 5y ago
Americans know all about highways but can't imagine functioning railways. So, no surprise there's political will to do one and not the other.

tpmx 5y ago

to resolve this problem you'd have to eminent domain swathes of, say, New Haven I was a bit skeptical until I saw this user map of the Northeast Corridor: https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/viewer?mid=1dH5vJWx6lwBlBvv7Gia4Roc6Gkk&ie=UTF8&hl=en&msa=0&ll=41.44091023228675%2C-72.49809470678957&spn=0.018617%2C0.036736&z=10&output=embed https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/viewer?mid=1dH5vJWx6lwBlBv...

jandrese 5y ago
How are you ever going to achieve high speed if you are stopping every 10 miles for another station? There appears to be 8 stations in Baltimore alone.
- tpmx 5y ago
  There are four tracks - that enables the combination of a slow local stop-at-every-station service along with a fast feeder service. But then the bizarre/historic track geometry ruins the fast service...
  - lmm 5y ago
    So the fast service shouldn't use that alignment. There must already be population centers that are skipped by the fast service - its tracks don't have to go through there either.
    - bobthepanda 5y ago
      Today the fast services follow the same alignment. Rerouting so far has been a headache; in New Haven-Boston where the tracks are so curvy new tracks have to be built, the FRA proposed going through entirely different population centers (the geography of the existing coast line is very challenging). This has resulted in an interesting fight where people want the train in their town, but also do not want the impact of newly constructed tracks through their town.
- machello13 5y ago

aidenn0 5y ago

> you'd have to eminent domain swathes of, say, New Haven Just to pick apart that specific example, you could instead build a bridge from West Haven to East Haven with much less eminent domain, but much more complaints about the bridge being built. When a suspension bridge was proposed for where I-95 crosses the Potomac, the residents of Alexandria complained that it would be an eyesore and were able to get a drawbridge built instead of a suspension bridge.

Ericson2314 5y ago

I really don't buy this oldness argument. We have to build new alignment you say? That makes it like greenfield elsewhere. Connecticut is dense you say? That's just much parts of Europe. What that leaves your argument with is that existing rail only makes things harder because of a sunk cost facility. Let's improve our bean counting then. Maybe America is one big sunk cost fallicy, being an older republic. Time for some creative destruction I guess.

hprotagonist 5y ago
>Connecticut is dense you say? That's just much parts of Europe. those parts of Europe, let's not forget, were rather thoroughly flattened to a wet paste about 80 years ago, and were rebuilt with nice, straight, quick rail lines by people who knew how fast trains that weren't built in 1840 could go.
- twic 5y ago
  I think you overestimate the extent to which the war ravaged the countryside. Some cities were destroyed. Most (most!) of the rest of Europe, the towns and villages, wasn't.
  - jcranmer 5y ago
    It's the cities (and their suburbs) where acquiring new ROW is expensive.
    - allturtles 5y ago
      For the most part, the cities in France that could fairly be said to have been 'flattened' during WWII were in Normandy. Paris was scarcely touched. Yet they have a high-speed rail network covering the whole country. Spain was untouched by WWII, yet they have a high-speed rail network. The U.S. somehow managed to build an interstate highway system through every major city in the decades after WWII without being bombed flat. The WWII argument seems weak.

giantrobot 5y ago

Your second point is missing some facts that actually make the situation more difficult. 1. Geography and geology is tricky. Rail lines don't curve because the builders just love curves. There's geographic and geologic reasons for a lot of rail line positioning. That's in addition to people living/working/shopping in a place where it would be useful to lay track. 2. Freight lines own most of the track in the US. Amtrak gets to use those lines but freight has right-of-way. Amtrak must side track when a freight train is coming. Amtrak only has a few sections of the NEC as dedicated passenger track. Without dedicated passenger track Amtrak's schedules are all over the place. Freight trains have trouble all the time and passenger trains need to sit and wait while they fix/move the freight train.

froh 5y ago
1. old rail line positioning was also influenced by land ownership and existing human structures. and our know how how to deal with previously difficult geography has evolved. you may want to study "Stuttgart 21" or "gotthard rail tunnel" or Eurostar channel tunnel or Berlin Munich high speed track to get an intuition for what's possible if there is a political determination. 2. France and Japan have dedicated tracks. Germany has reliable high speed freight lines. again more than anything it's a matter of political will.
bluGill 5y ago
Amtrak can't even keep a schedule on track they own though.

gumby 5y ago

> It's that american rail construction in the northeast is OLD, and we're hosed by the first adopter paradox. The rail networks of Britan and France, just to pick a couple, are older than those of the USA. No first adopter paradox in that comparison.

cnasc 5y ago
Asking genuinely because I’m not sure, but were Britain or France forced to upgrade due to war-related damage?
- bobthepanda 5y ago
  France did but Britain largely did not upgrade the ROW to be straighter. And it's largely irrelevant anyways because true high speed rail (TGV, HS2, ICE) doesn't start showing up in Europe until the '80s, long after WWII reconstruction wrapped up.
- DrBazza 5y ago
  The UK has several “mainlines”, all built before WW2. All are fairly straight and have been smoothed and updated continuously since WW2. Anything destroyed in WW2 was repaired as quickly as possible at the time. Britain didn’t really “make use” of bomb damage to change the layout of London as it wasn’t really destroyed. And then in the 1960s Dr Beeching’s cuts closed almost half the rail network. The only new high speed railway in the UK opened in the 90s to connect London with the continent, I.e. Eurostar
- willyt 5y ago
  Most damage was to nodes not to the links between them. So important junctions were rationised but routes weren’t realigned.