This animated map shows how radically a high-speed train system would improve travel

I'll need a source for that. All the figures I'm seeing show twice as much rail in the US.

 

The EAS is akin to providing infrastructure just like building roads and highways to lower population centers. The EAS “subsidies” are not paid to high population center service. The airline industry providers are not subsidized to provide air transportation in generally.

 

There can be short term weather problems with air transportation. But the same can apply to rail transportation. I don’t see any economic justification for a high speed rail money pit.

 

Customer service has a great value. Poor customer service will lose customers.

 

I agree with that.

Neither fast rail nor air are good at having stops along the way.

If what is desired is a milk run, then the solution should be designed for that.

 

Well then I'm going to have to ask for your source, because my sources say the US's railway is a combined 220,480 km and the EU is 200,161 km

https://www.statista.com/statistics/451812/length-of-railway-lines-in-use-in-europe-eu-28/
https://unacademy.com/content/railw.../a-short-note-on-the-largest-railway-network/

Wikipedia has slightly different numbers, but are still generally the same

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_rail_transport_network_size#cite_note-75

 

Railways are actually significantly cheaper to build than highways, and require less land. It would actually be more cost efficient to build a high speed railway to these lower populated areas than a highway, and wouldn't require as much money to subsidize as our air travel to these areas.

 

You ignore the human reality. People prefer the freedom of driving. I watch passenger trains her in California and just got back from Florida where the Bright Line operates. They are less than half full.

 

That's largely due to the fact that here in the US, our train trips take longer than our road trips. In countries that use high speed trains, taking the train will get you where you need to go a hell of a lot faster than driving, while here in the US, taking the train actually takes a bit longer than driving

Hell, I once looked into train trips to Seattle to see my cousin, it would have taken over 35 hours to take the train. In Japan you can make a trip of equal distance in under 10 hours taking the bullet train

 

Heh, such a thread bump, but this seems like something my great great grand childrens, great great grand kids can enjoy working with phase 3 starting in the year 2170. Possibly finished by the new year in 2200 celebrating energy independence? At the rate capitalism approaches basic needs instead of profitability, its likely to happen just as soon as never.

 

This thread shows how most Americans do not have a clue as to the obstacles in the U.S. to high speed rail. Unlike European countries, the U.S. lacks the local transportation infrastructure to support high speed rail. It doesn't do any good to have trains that can go 300 kph when the local short haul passenger rail and bus traffic either doesn't exist or travels less than 80 kph (50 mph)

 

Those commuting to work in London suffer the brunt of it. As land in London is some £10,000 per square metre, trying to buy a garage is a few hundred thousand. My brother in London cycles to work. So they need trains.

Half the rail on the UK was closed as cars became popular because those lines weren't cost effective. Unless you legislate crap onto people (EV's) or the government subsidises or foots the bill, I can't see the sense in soldiering on with it.

Personally, I would love to see every rail line reopened and upgraded in the UK, and certainly take freight off the road. But it'll never happen due to cost.

Japan is 3.84% the size of the USA, or in another way, the USA is 2,502% larger than Japan. So to develop a Japanese bullet train system in the USA won't happen.

 

And if you took an airplane it would take ~ 3 hours on a flat route. Throw a mountain range in between and bullet trains are excluded.

 

Yes, planes are faster, but they are also substantially more expensive to move than trains, and again when fast trains are a viable option, it helps bring down the demand for plane tickets, and in turn brings down the cost of air travel as well. The problem is trains are not a viable option in the United States, a train trip from LA to New York takes more than 3 days and a half days, where as a bullet train could make the trip in roughly 16 hours. Which although is not as fast as a plane, it would still be a viable cheaper alternative if the trip can be made in a single day. Any trip that takes multiple days simply isn't viable for most people, since it would require them having to rework their schedule to include extra days off just in traveling. For people in the US who need to make a long distance trip in a single day, their only viable option is going to be air travel.

Then you have your midlevel trips that are not quite long enough for air travel, but equate to several hours of driving. For example, for someone who lives somewhere in between Sacramento and LA, their only viable option to travel to either city is going to be to drive or take a train, which would be around 3 hours of driving on a good day, and about 5 hours with our current railway system, but with a bullet train they could make the trip in about an hour.

I should note in countries like Japan it is not uncommon for people to take the bullet train to and from work every day. This allows for more viable work opportunities for people who live outside of the major cities. Currently there's talks about building a hyperloop between DC and New York, which could transport people between the two cities in under half an hour.

 

Trains are an exceptionally viable option in the U.S. For freight.

Most of Europe's goods are shipped inefficiently over roads. Might suggest to them that trains are the way to go. Of course, it's not a good idea to use a high speed rail for that. All that mass is hard to send around corners at 200mph. Pretty hard to hit the brakes too.

https://www.google.com/search?q=us+...i22i29i30l7.4830j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

Which makes me wonder if the discrepancy between your numbers and mine are related to the types of rail included an excluded in the figures.

 

A train between New York and LA wouldn't be non-stop thus up to double that time with all the stops.

 

Dream vacation for me would be to ride rail across every country that has it.

 

According to the DOT there are 225308.16 Km of just freight rail... We can't run freight and passenger on the same rail here so something is askew in the numbers. Is that the twice as much?

https://railroads.dot.gov/rail-netw...ight Rail Network,freight system in the world.

 

Freight trains don't use the same railways as bullet trains, bullet trains run on tracks that have an electric overhead catenary every so and so miles, which is how they generate power. It is possible that your source is referring to non-electric tracks only. Over half of Europe's railways are electric, where as less than 1% of the US's railways are electric.

Overall the EU is less than half the size of the US, so having a freight railway system that is about half the size of the US's is about what we would expect, however the EU's electric railway system is substantially larger than the US's. Our means of transportation for traveling purposes are much more limited than in Europe and many parts of Asia. There are efforts to make the US the first country to use a hyperloop, which could revolutionize our means of transportation. In theory, a hyperloop system could get one from LA to New York in 45 minutes, but the main complexity of a hyperloop is it needs to be an exceptionally straight route in comparison to the bullet trains that operate in Europe and Asia.

 

Hyperloop was vaporware from it's original inception in 1799. Not efficient. Impossible to make safe.

 

That 16 hours is calculating stops, a non-stop trip at top speed would take about 7 hours

 

I'm wincing a bit at this too. The trains you're talking about don't generate power. They use power to do work. I know it's a nerdy distinction, but I want to point it out because it's important to realize that the power for these systems needs to be generated somewhere else.

All these demands to swap in electric motors in place of internal combustion also require a commiserate expansion in the production of electrical energy. To me, it's akin to the "let them eat cake" solution to famine.

 

Interesting video, but about 2 months after this video was posted the first hyperloop test to exceed 600mph speed was achieved in Korea, and construction of the first full scale hyperloop test was started this year. It's a bit more than just a blue print idea at this point in time, the big question is how feasible is it to build a near straight line route from one city to the next.

 

Uh huh.

The Korail research institute developed a 1:17 scale test model to test the concept..

https://eandt.theiet.org/content/articles/2020/11/hyper-tube-train-model-hits-1-000kmh/

More hype than loop.

 

They do both actually, rather than taking stops to recharge, the train recharges and generates power while it is operating. Modern bullet trains have even implemented methods of generating energy in their breaking system. Overall a diesel powered train requires more than 80% more energy than a modern bullet train

You talk as if this is all something that is unachievable, but it's already been achieved across Europe and Asia, it just hasn't been achieved in the US