8 ms·

Unless we dramatically increase vacation time or dramatically increase rail speeds, that would mean that many people would not be able to see their families and

Unless we dramatically increase vacation time or dramatically increase rail speeds, that would mean that many people would not be able to see their families and friends or travel to events.

ClumsyPilot 5y ago
If we had high-speed rail everywhere at 300km/h you can cross almost any country overnight, that radius of 3600km would give you 80% of all plane travel.
- Ericson2314 5y ago
  Thank you, and great username for the clarification :).
- beerandt 5y ago
  At energy and cost levels that exceed airline travel, per passenger-mile.
  - crazygringo 5y ago
    Do you have a citation for that? Quick Googling doesn't reveal any obvious authoritative answers (but a ton of guessing and unsubstantiated claims). The most authoritative/unbiased source seems to be this Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_efficiency_in_transport https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_efficiency_in_transport But the head-to-head comparisons are mostly gaps when it comes to trains, and the sections on trains and planes are in completely different families of units that makes comparison extremely non-trivial. :(
    - redis_mlc 5y ago
      In the US, interstate and some other categories of rail require massive cars and locomotives to be used instead of light-rail cars. This affects efficiency in the US. An example is the Bay Area Caltrain, which shares track with a cargo train, so is required to use heavy-iron rolling stock. Considering that airliner jet engines increase efficiency 1% averaged per year since 1945, airliners could be more efficient than heavy trains used for passengers.
    - beerandt 5y ago
      It was covered in a sustainable engineering class I took. There's not much generic into about it because every rail route proposal is different, even between the same destinations. Depends a lot on geography and what's already there. You basically need to do a full Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) for each route. Sometimes they're included in the EIS for a proposed project. That's prob the best place to start. But there's a reason most of the rail routes that keep getting proposed in the US are regional. Track and right-of-way is expensive, in both dollars and energy. Even moreso with high speed, where you need grade-seperated crossings and long, wide turns. Most people think track is shareable or reusable, but the real world limits to track capacity (trains per day) makes economies of scale difficult to implement. I posted it elsewhere, but the practical limit for non-high-speed rail is 300-400 miles, before airplanes start to make more sense. High speed is difficult to even estimate, since we don't have much here to base it on.
      - ClumsyPilot 5y ago
        China has more high-speed than the rest of the world combined, with even remote parts of China hooked up to the rail network. And when you compare energy, you have to take into account that Rail is already electric, powered directly by grid without batteries or any other efficiency loss in between. Airplanes use fuel that takes a lot of energy to refine and deliver, and will at best use hydrogen in 15 years which is 40% efficient to produce, plus losses in compression, delivery, engine, etc.
        beerandt 5y ago
        I'm not against it. But it's usually not more energy efficient. Life Cycle Analysis takes all the inefficiencies you mention into account, down to the zip code, and includes thing like present and future mix of electrical generation. Doing it because China is, isn't really a reason. You can take into account electrifying rail, but it doesn't really change much. This all gets taken into account. >other efficiency loss in between. The grid has plenty of inefficiencies, especially if we have to start designing beyond capacity to account for intermittent sources. But electricity's main inefficiency is in its creation. LCAs take all of this into account. It's the whole purpose of doing one. Embedded energy involved in manufacture, refining, transport, everything, is all added up based on things like location and present and/or future inputs.
Ericson2314 5y ago
Absolutely not. 300 kph HSR rail exists in developed countries. (2680 miles) / (300 kilometers per hour) = 14.3768064 hours That's coast to coast in ~ 1/2 day. Ships and blimps represent a much larger decrease in travel time over airplanes than rail. They perhaps pose a to be solved, but rail doesn't.
- ClumsyPilot 5y ago
  And you can go ecen faster >"TGV called V150 holds the record for the highest speed on any national rail system - it hit a whopping 357.2 mph "
  - LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
    Probably not during normal operations. IIRC they put more mechanical tension on the overhead catenary, also more voltage on it, and used slightly larger wheels. That was more of testing the absolute limits of what you can do with that sort of system, materials- and mechanics-wise.
- cortesoft 5y ago
  Yeah, but that is only from one part of the coast to one part. You would have to have so many lines to connect all the cities.
  - Ericson2314 5y ago
    Yes, but even if we double the time estimate, I don't think that's prohibitively slow. Only with the many day duration to traverse oceans eihtou planes do I get worried.
- sologoub 5y ago
  You do need favorable terrain for that speed. Much of western US is not exactly flat, so the costs to build this will definitely not be cheap. More likely something slower and a multi-day trip. I’d still consider a say 48h trip from SoCal to NYC provided I could work over wifi, but otherwise it’s really a nonstarter.
marcosdumay 5y ago
Well, in a plane trip you have 3 lost hours before it starts and after it ends, so a normal train, running at 130km/h will be faster than a plane at 850km/h for any trip of less than ~460km. If you make it a fast train, at 350km/h, it will beat the plane on any trip up to 1700km. Most trips are short, so no, most trips can be done by train and people still spend less time on them than by plane.
- cortesoft 5y ago
  I live in Southern California, with family in Kansas, Wisconsin, and New York. The closest one is 2500kms away. The longest is almost 5000kms A train would take a lot longer than a plane. Even more than just the distance, though, is the fact that there would be no practical way to have direct rail lines to every major city in the US. Trains are useful, but there is no way they could replace air travel in the US.
  - ant6n 5y ago
    Well, if there was no air travel, rail lines everywhere would likely be practical... again. If trains could go 250km/h on average, that 5000km trip would take 20 hours - that's plausible for an overnight trip, leave 6pm, arrive 10am. A flight over this is distance is probably a much more stressful red eye. Sure this is quite speculative, but perhaps less so than hyperloop dreams, or supersonic aircraft that somehow have no environmental impact.
    - sokoloff 5y ago
      6 PM to 10 AM is only 16 hours. Even with 3 time zones, you’d only be at 19 hours. 250kph straight line equivalent is unlikely given the terrain in the way (Rocky Mountains, primarily).
      - ClumsyPilot 5y ago
        Tonnels, we are made massive ones through the alps in europe https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gotthard_Base_Tunnel https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gotthard_Base_Tunnel
neolog 5y ago
Most travel is business. Business events mostly don't require travel as we saw this year.
- tonyedgecombe 5y ago
  And without business travellers many or even most flights wouldn't be financially viable.
pyrale 5y ago
Yes, and that is not a great prospect. however, it's going to happen regardless, since this way of living is not sustainable. The only choice that is ours is whether we prefer to anticipate this change and build a decent alternative, or whether we prefer to have it inflicted on us.
spodek 5y ago
It would mean many people wouldn't choose to live flying distance from their families in the first place and they would go to local events, and people would connect more with local community.
tdeck 5y ago
The trouble is that we've all organized our lives around fast air travel and it's hard to unring that bell. I might not interviewed at a tech company in SF and then moved out from Pennsylvania if I knew that every journey back to see my parents would take 5 days each way by train. Many of us have close relationships scattered across long distances, which was less true before the advent of affordable air travel.

Unless we dramatically increase vacation time or dramatically increase rail speeds, that would mean that many people would not be able to see their families and friends or travel to events.

ClumsyPilot 5y ago

If we had high-speed rail everywhere at 300km/h you can cross almost any country overnight, that radius of 3600km would give you 80% of all plane travel.

Ericson2314 5y ago
Thank you, and great username for the clarification :).
beerandt 5y ago
At energy and cost levels that exceed airline travel, per passenger-mile.
- crazygringo 5y ago
  Do you have a citation for that? Quick Googling doesn't reveal any obvious authoritative answers (but a ton of guessing and unsubstantiated claims). The most authoritative/unbiased source seems to be this Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_efficiency_in_transport https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_efficiency_in_transport But the head-to-head comparisons are mostly gaps when it comes to trains, and the sections on trains and planes are in completely different families of units that makes comparison extremely non-trivial. :(
  - redis_mlc 5y ago
    In the US, interstate and some other categories of rail require massive cars and locomotives to be used instead of light-rail cars. This affects efficiency in the US. An example is the Bay Area Caltrain, which shares track with a cargo train, so is required to use heavy-iron rolling stock. Considering that airliner jet engines increase efficiency 1% averaged per year since 1945, airliners could be more efficient than heavy trains used for passengers.
  - beerandt 5y ago
    It was covered in a sustainable engineering class I took. There's not much generic into about it because every rail route proposal is different, even between the same destinations. Depends a lot on geography and what's already there. You basically need to do a full Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) for each route. Sometimes they're included in the EIS for a proposed project. That's prob the best place to start. But there's a reason most of the rail routes that keep getting proposed in the US are regional. Track and right-of-way is expensive, in both dollars and energy. Even moreso with high speed, where you need grade-seperated crossings and long, wide turns. Most people think track is shareable or reusable, but the real world limits to track capacity (trains per day) makes economies of scale difficult to implement. I posted it elsewhere, but the practical limit for non-high-speed rail is 300-400 miles, before airplanes start to make more sense. High speed is difficult to even estimate, since we don't have much here to base it on.
    - ClumsyPilot 5y ago
      China has more high-speed than the rest of the world combined, with even remote parts of China hooked up to the rail network. And when you compare energy, you have to take into account that Rail is already electric, powered directly by grid without batteries or any other efficiency loss in between. Airplanes use fuel that takes a lot of energy to refine and deliver, and will at best use hydrogen in 15 years which is 40% efficient to produce, plus losses in compression, delivery, engine, etc.
      - beerandt 5y ago
        I'm not against it. But it's usually not more energy efficient. Life Cycle Analysis takes all the inefficiencies you mention into account, down to the zip code, and includes thing like present and future mix of electrical generation. Doing it because China is, isn't really a reason. You can take into account electrifying rail, but it doesn't really change much. This all gets taken into account. >other efficiency loss in between. The grid has plenty of inefficiencies, especially if we have to start designing beyond capacity to account for intermittent sources. But electricity's main inefficiency is in its creation. LCAs take all of this into account. It's the whole purpose of doing one. Embedded energy involved in manufacture, refining, transport, everything, is all added up based on things like location and present and/or future inputs.

Ericson2314 5y ago

Absolutely not. 300 kph HSR rail exists in developed countries. (2680 miles) / (300 kilometers per hour) = 14.3768064 hours That's coast to coast in ~ 1/2 day. Ships and blimps represent a much larger decrease in travel time over airplanes than rail. They perhaps pose a to be solved, but rail doesn't.

ClumsyPilot 5y ago
And you can go ecen faster >"TGV called V150 holds the record for the highest speed on any national rail system - it hit a whopping 357.2 mph "
- LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
  Probably not during normal operations. IIRC they put more mechanical tension on the overhead catenary, also more voltage on it, and used slightly larger wheels. That was more of testing the absolute limits of what you can do with that sort of system, materials- and mechanics-wise.
cortesoft 5y ago
Yeah, but that is only from one part of the coast to one part. You would have to have so many lines to connect all the cities.
- Ericson2314 5y ago
  Yes, but even if we double the time estimate, I don't think that's prohibitively slow. Only with the many day duration to traverse oceans eihtou planes do I get worried.
sologoub 5y ago
You do need favorable terrain for that speed. Much of western US is not exactly flat, so the costs to build this will definitely not be cheap. More likely something slower and a multi-day trip. I’d still consider a say 48h trip from SoCal to NYC provided I could work over wifi, but otherwise it’s really a nonstarter.

marcosdumay 5y ago

Well, in a plane trip you have 3 lost hours before it starts and after it ends, so a normal train, running at 130km/h will be faster than a plane at 850km/h for any trip of less than ~460km. If you make it a fast train, at 350km/h, it will beat the plane on any trip up to 1700km. Most trips are short, so no, most trips can be done by train and people still spend less time on them than by plane.

cortesoft 5y ago
I live in Southern California, with family in Kansas, Wisconsin, and New York. The closest one is 2500kms away. The longest is almost 5000kms A train would take a lot longer than a plane. Even more than just the distance, though, is the fact that there would be no practical way to have direct rail lines to every major city in the US. Trains are useful, but there is no way they could replace air travel in the US.
- ant6n 5y ago
  Well, if there was no air travel, rail lines everywhere would likely be practical... again. If trains could go 250km/h on average, that 5000km trip would take 20 hours - that's plausible for an overnight trip, leave 6pm, arrive 10am. A flight over this is distance is probably a much more stressful red eye. Sure this is quite speculative, but perhaps less so than hyperloop dreams, or supersonic aircraft that somehow have no environmental impact.
  - sokoloff 5y ago
    6 PM to 10 AM is only 16 hours. Even with 3 time zones, you’d only be at 19 hours. 250kph straight line equivalent is unlikely given the terrain in the way (Rocky Mountains, primarily).
    - ClumsyPilot 5y ago
      Tonnels, we are made massive ones through the alps in europe https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gotthard_Base_Tunnel https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gotthard_Base_Tunnel

neolog 5y ago

Most travel is business. Business events mostly don't require travel as we saw this year.

tonyedgecombe 5y ago
And without business travellers many or even most flights wouldn't be financially viable.

pyrale 5y ago

Yes, and that is not a great prospect. however, it's going to happen regardless, since this way of living is not sustainable. The only choice that is ours is whether we prefer to anticipate this change and build a decent alternative, or whether we prefer to have it inflicted on us.

spodek 5y ago

It would mean many people wouldn't choose to live flying distance from their families in the first place and they would go to local events, and people would connect more with local community.

tdeck 5y ago

The trouble is that we've all organized our lives around fast air travel and it's hard to unring that bell. I might not interviewed at a tech company in SF and then moved out from Pennsylvania if I knew that every journey back to see my parents would take 5 days each way by train. Many of us have close relationships scattered across long distances, which was less true before the advent of affordable air travel.