

A Trainspotter's Guide to the Future of the World - tokenadult
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/05/opinion/05iht-edkennedy.html

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ugh
I’m confused by the numbers: 1100 km in less than three hours would demand an
average speed that is higher than 350 km/h. Not much, but still. And how
useful can a train be that seems to stop nowhere? A normal number of stops
(say ten) would add at least one hour to the traveling time. But, yeah, that
is still damn impressive.

I also don’t think that the Munich-Hamburg connection mentioned in the article
(somewhat more than 600 km) is very impressive: you will still be in the train
for five hours and thirty minutes (you will pay 130 €). Which is not that much
faster than the mentioned US connection.

We Europeans have our fair share of problems with upgrading our train networks
(as opposed to pretty much starting from scratch). There are dense existing
network but those were built decades, maybe even a century ago. Maintaining
them is expensive and upgrading them for highspeed trains is probably not much
cheaper than starting from scratch would be (new tracks, new course,
electrification, etc. – there really is not much you can reuse). Europe is
also densly populated, with fewer huge centers. You can’t just send a train
600 km through Germany without stopping at least half a dozen times.

