Amtrak Cascade has trains that can do 125 mph but are throttled to 78 mph because of low quality tracks, as I understand it. Amtrak also recently just started running many more trains per day between Seattle and Portland. High speed rail is great, but maybe a good starting point would just be… fixing the tracks. Get 3 1/2 hours from SEA to PDX down closer to 2…
It's much more tempting to announce a new project with a ribbon cutting ceremony. The topic often comes up in Toronto, often as it relates to our transit system:
/glory/money/s In the US public transportation primarily operated as system to transfer public money to large engineering firms, subcontractors and politicians. Any transportation utility is incidental. Cost over-runs are the rule and have no consequences (More money for everybody!). The US has the highest cost per mile because no involved parties benefit from making it practical and cost effective. Self driving cars are probably our best chance to break up this system and reinvent public transportation.
I think the tracks are the most expensive part though, no?
Although I'm not sure if you mean the physical tracks are in poor condition or the layout. If it's the layout, that's not much easier to fix than building a HSR. They may not even be able to fix the railroad company owned tracks?
It is the layout. They had a nice bypass set up, but the first day the train derailed and it has just recently re-opened.
Sharing track with freight is a PITA: the freight trains don't care about going fast (so no really straight tracks) and they often have priority especially if the cascade is running off schedule, causing even more delays.
Not sure where they are going to build new straight-enough HSR track unless they employ lots of viaducts like china does.
Sharing the tracks is a huge problem that’s just becoming worse. Railroad’s have taken the strategy of running trains so long that they no longer sit in sidings. That means that it is now impossible for many freight trains to pull into a siding allowing other trains to pass. While Amtrak is supposed to have the right of way it’s often impossible for a freight train to do so. Additionally, railroads have shown no interest in lengthening siding or really any capital investment at all.
If you’d like to learn more about this and other issues with the way the US does railroads I’d recommend this podcast. It’s probably the least efficient way you could intake the information but I enjoyed it.
> While Amtrak is supposed to have the right of way it’s often impossible for a freight train to [pull in to a siding]
Sounds like the system is working as designed for the shipping companies - they no longer have to pull aside, wait for Amtrak to pass them by, and resume. Much less downtime with a bonus of having the too-long trains carry more freight per employee!
Well There's Your Problem is somehow most gloriously inefficient way to gain engineering information and yet somehow also the exact opposite. Rarely a regretted minute, even when you're, say, 40 minutes into Cold War geopolitics as a prelude to a tunnel fire.
Legally, Amtrak is supposed to have priority, and freight trains are required to pull off. But freight trains usually get priority because that's what the railway wants, and Amtrak doesn't have the political muscle to do much. But it's illegal.
I highly doubt Amtrak will suddenly run on time if enough people write Congress like their video suggests. The delays are egregious. Can’t they just pay for priority?
Demanding that a passenger railway be self-funding while also trying to massively increase its scope is... not a path for success. Unless I'm wrong you know of any continent-scale railways that bootstrapped themselves into success recently...?
A possible strategy is to use money from ticket sales to pay for priority, boosting on-time performance which increases the competitiveness of their product.
And for a large portion of their routes are already overpriced and less convenient than almost any other means of travel (except for a handful of actually reasonably-priced routes.
A local route on Amtrak costs almost $100 for a one way ticket traveling <200mi
A bus ticket for the same route is $30. The bus takes an hour longer.
I want amtrak to thrive, but they need to attract customers, not drive more away with higher prices.
Amtrak doesn't need priority, they need to run their trains on time. That means not running old worn out,.under maintained trains. They nees to leave on time, every time.
That also means fining the freights when they have the track blocked so they cannot get access in their allocated time which was planed months ago.
Amtrak are freeloading on privately built and maintained railways.
If they want better track alignments, or prioritisation over other users, they should come to a commercial agreement with the infrastructure owners like anyone else. Alternatively, they can build their own infrastructure.
Railroads in the US run through land donated by the government, on tracks given to the railroads by the government, supported with funds from the government. Despite all that aid, the government has had to step in with additional funding to ensure they don't go bankrupt many times, especially in the 1920s, 1930s, 1970s, 2000s, and during COVID.
Fulfilling their legal obligations to Amtrak is the least they could do. It's worth noting that the corridors where Amtrak did build dedicated track have the fewest delays and the best safety in the network.
I think you’ve misunderstood the arrangement. They were not granted the land where the rails were laid alone. They were granted vast amounts of additional real estate, and the value of that land could have maintained the railways in perpetuity. However, similarly vast fortunes were extracted from the railways instead, and the generational wealth created during these events in the 1800s has proved more durable than the commercial viability of the rails that the country had intended to support.
I gleened it from conservative economist Kevin Phillips' book Wealth & Democracy. I assume it's bog standard economic world building. Nothing I've read since has contradicted Phillips. (I'm noob, not some kind of economist. Though I did get to chat with Phillips one time and I felt like I understood his answers.)
What mental model do you prefer?
Or maybe you object to the implications ("logic") of this model. That notions like property, wealth, and government are social constructs. Just shared fictions which hopefully make the world a little bit more predictable (legible), without too much extra effort, so we can all muddle thru our daily lives.
I think the Homestead Act is a good example for explaining my objection.
First of all, I believe the government is the agent and servant of the people, not the other way around. Any government land is also owned by the people because the people own the government. The Homestead Act was a simple way of Distributing this land to to be held directly by the people instead of managing it on their behalf.
When considering the giving away of land, the government loses property. What the government gains is the hope or chance that people will do something productive with it. Even if those people only benefit themselves and retain the profits, they are increasing the economy and total wealth/value of the country. This is the repayment, and those individuals dont "owe" the government anything.
What I especially object to is the idea of retrospectively applied debt, often long after the fact.
You see this a lot in discussion of government grants for science and tech research.
The government creates and awards research grants to encourage development because the public would be better off if the medicine or whatever exists opposed to not exist, even if it is being sold for a profit.
However, when something does get invented and sold, some people then think the public is owed a debt. This isn't true. The government provided funding because it wanted the thing to exist. Once it exists, the government's objective and any obligation has already been met.
By analogy, imagine two neighbors. Neighbor A pays for the other (Neighbor B) to paint their house out of self interest, because it will make the neighborhood look better and raise their own property value. The neighbor B has fulfilled their obligation and any debt by painting the house. It is both logically and morally bankrupt for Neighbor A to come back at a later day and claim the other is in their debt, after they already got what they initially wanted and bargained for.
This comes back to the idea of the government as the "source" of all wealth, deserving repayment.
Like I said before, the government is important, and even essential for economic development.
Being essential is different than being the "source" or deserving repayment. A government built road is essential for me to get to work, however that doesn't mean the government is the source of all the work I did, or entitled to a share of my salary, provided I already paid my share for the road.
Not just the first day, but the very first run. They cheaped out and didn't build a bypass for a 30 MPH curve on an otherwise 80 MPH run. Which, while embarrassing enough, shouldn't have resulted in an accident even if the conductor missed the signage as they did, but wasn't because the railways successfully lobbied to delay rolling out Positive Train Control for a few more years. The entire event was just a perfect illustration of the disastrous state of passenger train transit in this country.
HSR can use the same rails (standard gauge) if they are in a good state (i.e. fine in most of the rest of the world, not in the USA which is far behind on rail safety). Big differences are turning radii (HSR obviously wont go around sharp corners easily) and station distance (HSR will want stops ~50-100km apart, older railways its often more like 1-5). That generally means a new route rather than using an existing one.
HSR really wants total seperation, zero crossings, no shared traffic. That is what ultimately allows safe high speed travel.
Otherwise you are slowing down everywhere and can only run as fast as other trains on the line, unless you also impact their services by having them pull off.
If the track is built to HSR in the first place. You can't have crossings on HSR track because someone who carefully looks both ways before crossing will be kill by a train they didn't see.
Even then while it is possible it doesn't work well, as HSR will catch up to whatever else is on the track and then must slow down.. the cost to build HSR track is so high (even at world leading low prices) that you have to run several trains per hour on those tracks to pay for it, and so there isn't free space for lower speed trains in between.
Nobody makes a switch that can be crossed at high speeds so the slower train cannot just get out of the way no matter how much you might wish for that to wosk.
Construction is expensive, and purchasing right of way in populated areas is ridiculously expensive. Short tracks are more expensive because you want to do inconvenient things in order to keep them short (like tunneling and building bridges) instead of taking the path of least resistance. You need all of these things for a good high speel rail, but you need a lot of it to even improve the existing rail. There's some compromises you could make to improve the existing system, but there's not much desire for it I think since it'd still largely be a many billion dollar long term project. I think the opinion is that it's not worth spending all that unless it's transformative (i.e., the marginal benefit of a 2 hour vs 3 and a half hour train ride is small compared to the benefit of a 3 and a half hr ride to a 1 hour ride since at that point you have realistic commutes and such).
1 hr Seattle to Portland probably doesn’t even really make it commuting distance because very few people are going to live and work close enough to the endpoints to keep things to 90 minutes total. Boston to NYC is 4 hours or so and that’s useful for a lot of purposes although that’s admittedly in part because driving and parking in Manhattan is so awful. (I could drive from my house to Manhattan faster but I hardly ever do.)
I don't think commuting should be the main focus - if you want HSR to make sense ecologically, it should replace existing car and airplane trips, not enable people to make longer commutes.
I’m not from the area but does anyone actually fly from SEA to PDX assuming they have a car? It’s not like SeaTac is even that close to Seattle. And depending on where you live and destination plans it’s hard for me to imagine trading a less than 3 hour drive for a train trip.
From the number of flights offered, I think it’s much more common than you might think. My guess is that part of the reason has to to with Seattle’s very very bad traffic. I once spent 4 hours traveling less than 15 miles on a drive heading south from the city center, and I don’t think that’s even super anomalous.
I can't relate to this at all. I would trade driving for a train trip if the total duration is somewhat comparable (or even a little bit longer), especially if I would have to make the trip regularly.
I don't think flying is convenient but taking a HSR-train is.
It depends on a lot of factors. Where do you live relative to the train station? How annoying is the drive? Do you want/need a car on the other end? New York checks two of those boxes for me. (Getting to the train is out of the way.) But a lot of places that could be train trips I’d want a car once I got there.
One of these days people are going to understand that "what makes most ecological sense" is allowing people to live their normal lives as they're accustomed to live them, without beating them over the head and telling them they're bad people.
The average American lifestyle (cars included) is what it is . . . so decarbonize that and stop expecting everyone to live like Brooklynites or Europeans.
In a WFH or occasional-office-visit basis, that's more tractable as the trip wouldn't be made on a daily basis.
Though another option is to both densify development near stations and to create a well-functioning feeder transit system to service areas further out. If those can operate at, say, 35 mph / 55 kph average speed, and assuming a 5 minute walkable commute to the work endpoint (jobs are easier to cluster near stations than housing), and with well-timed transfers, then the feed-in distance could be up to about 15 miles / 23 km from the actual HSR station.
Note that average speed is usually about half of top speed, so these would be relatively high-speed commuter-rail systems. Note that the typical average speed of an urban bus, say, is about 5-15 mph (8-24 kph).
Manhattan is sort of a special case and I can tell you from personal experience that 90 minutes is pretty bad even if a lot of it is spent on a train. I commuted into Boston a few days a week when it was about 90 minutes door to door and IMO it was not sustainable. If I go into my downtown office now which I do rarely it’s 2 hours.
That some people are forced into super-commutes now and then doesn’t make it a really sustainable most days situation. So you’re up by 6am or earlier and you’re not getting home until 8pm or later depending on your work hours.
Adding to this, there's a pretty interesting paradox of transportation infrastructure as relates to land values, and a characteristic I've noticed of many high-speed rail systems.
The creation of transportation infrastructure can convert land from low-value (as reflected by market prices) to high, and this has very often occurred. The US Transcontinental Railroad, completed in 1869, was seen by many as a boondoggle, and indeed traveled through all but completely unpopulated (by European settlers) lands. But development quickly followed.
One settlement bypassed by the railroad was Denver, Colorado. That city raised funds to create a spur line to the Transcontinental Railroad in Cheyenne, Wyoming, and in the decade following that line's completion, Denver's population exploded tenfold, from 5,000 to over 50,000 inhabitants.
Many commuter streetcar and heavy rail lines were created as, or in partnership with, real estate developments, and profits from land speculation were often a very substantial portion of overall profits from such operations.
The flip side is that once land values have increased, establishing new rights of way becomes extraordinarily expensive. Which means that backfilling high-speed rail into an extant prosperous region is insanely expensive, not only in direct land acquisition costs but in the costs of passing legislation and litigating various objections to such projects.
Of the major high-speed rail projects created since 1950, at least three, Japan's Shinkansen, France's TGV, and China's CRH, all seem to me to have benefitted either from being developed in a post-war period of depressed property values (Japan & France) or emerged as a greenfield development through regions in which property values had not yet appreciated ... and in which private property ownership isn't a well-developed institution in the first place (China).
The very slowly-progressing process of high speed rail in California is in many ways due to both the high land valuations of that state and a political environment in which legal objections to such projects are easy to mount. The easiest places to proceed with the project are in the relatively depopulated and low-land-value Central Valley. Geography also plays a role in constraining potential routes, most especially within the San Francisco Bay Area (and especially especially along the San Francisco Peninsula, some of the highest-valued land in the world), and in crossing the Tehachapi mountains at the southern end of the Central Valley, through which there are very few viable routes. These create choke points by which interests opposed to, or simply looking to benefit disproportionately from, the project can focus obstruction efforts, and they have.
In darker moments, I reflect that it might be opportune to wait for a major San Andreas Fault movement to press forward with rail plans, whilst opposition is both defunded and occupied with other concerns.
I have read elsewhere that there are ways for rail development to capture some of the increase in land value, in order to offset the cost of the development. I do not have any pointers though.
A common example is railroads in Japan, which own the land around the station and either run or profitably lease buildings and services on them, with stations in densely populated areas doubling as shopping centers, hotels etc
In the US, railroads were granted sections of land (1 square mile) alongside tracks.
I believe this was every other section, for each mile of track laid. One site I'm finding says that this extended 20 miles to either side of the track:
Approximately 16 percent of Nebraska’s total land mass was given to various railroad companies, either by the federal government or by the state. Along the lines of the state’s two major railroads, the Union Pacific and the Burlington, every other square mile of land (called a "section") went to the railroads. This checkerboard of land extended back twenty miles on both sides of the track. So, the railroads owned a total of twenty sections of land for each mile of road constructed.
There are some holdings that are still retained (or were until relatively recently). The UCSF extension along the San Francisco bayfront is on land that had belonged to the Santa Fe Railroad, for example.
How US High Speed Rail projects are utilising this approach I don't know. Much of the valuable land is, of course, presently owned.
I believe this was initially specified under the 1862 Pacific Railroad Act, and may have been later amended:
Section 3 [of the Act] granted an additional 10 square miles (26 km²) of public land for every mile of grade except where railroads ran through cities or crossed rivers. The method of apportioning these additional land grants was specified in the Act as being in the form of "five alternate sections per mile on each side of said railroad, on the line thereof, and within the limits of ten miles on each side" which thus provided the companies with a total of 6,400 acres (2,600 ha) for each mile of their railroad.
The standard land grant pattern for railroads was a checkerboard pattern, which makes it hard to depict accurately on a map. The source I have doesn't give an exact number of Nebraska that was actually granted in land grant to railroads, but 16% is right in the ballpark of what I'd estimate from interpolation from other states.
However, it's also worth noting that land grants were only doled out in US history in an extremely limited time period--from the 1850s to the 1870s. The majority of railroads were not in fact built with land grants.
I was aware of the "checkerboard" land-grant allocation, but not how deep (perpendicular distance from RoW) it went.
I also wasn't aware of how brief the land-grant subsidy era was. Though it would be interesting to see a track-mileage development timeline or animation showing how trackage developed over time.
My general understanding is that track mileage exploded quite quickly, often with competing railroads establishing duplicate connections especially on highly-attractive routes, with the winner then absorbing (or simply competing to death) the loser(s). There is also a distinction between major (national or regional) Class I railroads, and short-line (usually Class III) railroads, where a short-line often served only a single line or small set of lines within a small region.
Overall, US railroad trackage shrank for much of the 20th century as early, redundant, competitive trackage was abandoned. I'm not sure what recent trends have been.
The line is owned by BNSF and has quite a lot of BNSF and Union Pacific trains running on it daily, in addition to the Cascades services. No amount of improving the tracks will fix congestion, so moving to a separate line entirely for passenger service makes a ton of sense.
organization before electronics before concrete. some amount of infrastructure will fix congestion, how much depends on what precise timetable will be run. the swiss manage to run a huge amount of freight alongside many passenger trains because they did their homework and built infrastructure where it was needed.
in general, "precision scheduled railroading" has fucked passenger-freight interoperability in the states because the freight railroads are running trains too long to fit into any of the sidings, which forces amtrak into the pocket
It's just a lack of political will. If Congress wanted Amtrak to really have priority, then they'd strengthen laws which allow Amtrak to have priority and then Amtrak can go for suit. They don't though whereas freight railroad has a lot of friends in Congress and so freight wins while Amtrak loses.
Even just reliability, I regularly make this drive for visiting family and it would be preferable to be able to kick back and relax instead of driving, but currently it’s just too snow and infrequent to be a viable option for me.
I never learned to drive and it turns out the Portland to Seattle train is a good option for getting between the two cities.
Everybody says they’d take the bus/train/whatever instead of driving if only this or that were true. If the train was faster and more frequent you’d find another reason not to take it. The stories we tell ourselves.
Approximately downtown to downtown without a car on either end is pretty much the ideal scenario and it applies to a tiny slice of the population. I mostly take the train to Manhattan even though it means driving in the wrong direction for about an hour only because the southern part of the drive into the city is so awful.
Exactly. I also do this drive every few months and still can’t believe driving is more efficient than taking the train. It’s the absolute perfect setup for a train too.
In the article they point out that for proper HSR you need segrated straight tracks.
Sure, for faster ordinary trains 100mph - 125 you need to improve tracks too, but a lot of that is also improving junctions implementing flyovers and extra track so that trains aren't delayed or stopped.
You don't even really need to get to 100-125 MPH to greatly improve travel times; usually the first step is just double tracking all the things; once that's in place you've shaved 20-30 minutes off a 3 hour trip.
> Preliminary information from the data recorder showed that, when the incident happened, the train was traveling at 78 mph (126 km/h),[4] nearly 50 mph (80 km/h) over the speed limit.
i am unfamiliar with the condition of the tracks on that corridor but in general the vast majority of lines in the US are limited to below 80mph due to the infamous FRA 79 mph rule which mandates in cab signaling to exceed 80mph.
with the near ubiquity of positive train control now following the FRA's unfunded mandate (another brilliant piece of policy from the boys in blue) this rule should no longer apply. but due to reasons unknown to me (bureaucratic mire?) trains on many corridors are still limited.
there are also some grade crossing related speed restrictions
the FRA and its cronies should be hurled into the sun
