Quotulatiousness

July 4, 2022

(Very expensive) roads, bridges, and railways to nowhere

In Palladium, Brian Balkus wonders why American can’t build anything any more:

Construction of the Fresno River Viaduct in January 2016. The bridge is the first permanent structure being constructed as part of California High-Speed Rail. The BNSF Railway bridge is visible in the background.
Photo by the California High-Speed Rail Authority via Wikimedia Commons.

Sepulveda’s cost and schedule overrun aren’t even the worst of it. Just as unattainable as a shortened commute is the Californian dream of building a bullet train that could take you from Los Angeles to San Francisco in under three hours. In 2008, a year before the Sepulveda project began, the state tried to turn this dream into a reality after voters approved a 512-mile high-speed rail (HSR) project. Amid failing overseas wars and financial crises, at the time it could’ve become a symbol of renewal not just for California but the entire country. Instead, it came to exemplify a dysfunctional government that lacks the capacity to build.

At the time California began accelerating the development of its HSR system it only had 10 employees dedicated to overseeing what was the most expensive infrastructure project in U.S. history. It ended up 14 years (and counting) behind schedule and $44 billion over budget. Incredibly, the state has not laid a single mile of track and it still lacks 10 percent of the land parcels it needs to do so. Half of the project still hasn’t achieved the environmental clearance needed to begin construction. The dream of a Japanese-style bullet train crisscrossing the state is now all but dead due to political opposition, litigation, and a lack of funding.

Despite its failure, the HSR project inaugurated the U.S.’s megaproject era. Once a rare type of project, by 2018 megaprojects comprised 33 percent of the value of all U.S. construction project starts. An alarming number of these have spiraled out of control for many of the same reasons that killed the California bullet train. The decade that followed the financial crisis was a kind of inflection point in the industry; this was when construction projects became noticeably worse and when the long-term implications could no longer be ignored. One of the most cited studies of the U.S.’s declining ability to build reviewed 180 transit megaprojects across the country, revealing that today, U.S. projects take longer to complete and cost nearly 50 percent more on average than those in Europe and Canada.

Having joined Kiewit in 2010, I witnessed these changes first-hand. I have since moved on, but have remained in the broader industry, including working on what are called “strategic pursuits” — the process by which companies compete for megaprojects. This experience has provided insight into the mechanics of how these projects are awarded and why they so frequently fail.

Even if the construction had proceded close to schedule, the economic justification for California’s high speed rail line was never strong … and it’s unlikely the service would have come close to breaking even. It almost certainly would have added significant ongoing costs to Californian taxpayers, and due to the nature of high speed rail services, been effectively a subsidy from working-class Californians to the laptop elites of Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay area.

All of that, however, are merely additional reasons to believe the project was doomed from inception. Broadly speaking, all major infrastructure projects in the United States are struggling with paperwork and compliance requirements mostly driven by state and federal environmental regulations passed with the best possible intentions (as the saying goes):

Sepulveda’s numerous lawsuits and stakeholder conflicts are an example of a phenomenon that can be traced back to the passage of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) in 1969. NEPA mandates developers to provide environmental impact statements before they can obtain the permits necessary for construction on huge swathes of infrastructure.

Shortly following the passage of NEPA, California’s then-governor Ronald Reagan signed the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) into law, which required additional environmental impact analysis. Unlike NEPA, it requires adopting all feasible measures to mitigate these impacts. Interest groups wield CEQA and NEPA like weapons. One study found that 85 percent of CEQA lawsuits were filed by groups with no history of environmental advocacy. The NIMBY attitude of these groups has crippled the ability of California to build anything. As California Governor Gavin Newsom succinctly put it, “NIMBYism is destroying the state”.

It is also destroying the U.S.’s ability to build nationally. The economist Eli Dourado reported in The New York Times that “per-mile spending on the Interstate System of Highways tripled between the 1960’s and 1980’s.” This directly correlates with the passage of NEPA. If anything, the problem has gotten worse over time. Projects receiving funding through the $837 billion stimulus plan passed by Congress in the aftermath of the financial crises were subject to over 192,000 NEPA reviews.

The NEPA/CEQA process incentivizes the public agencies to seek what is often termed a “bulletproof” environmental compliance document to head off future legal challenges. This takes time, with the average EIS taking 4.5 years to complete. Some have taken longer than a decade. A cottage industry of consultants is devoted to completing these documents, earning themselves millions in fees.

March 20, 2022

Florida’s new passenger rail service

Thomas Walker-Werth contrasts the different experiences of California and Florida in trying to build new passenger railway services:

“BrightLine – The Return of FEC passenger service” by BBT609 is licensed under CC BY 2.0

When the Federal Government ordered the construction of the Interstate Highway System in the 1950s and 1960s (at a cost to taxpayers of roughly $580 billion in 2022 dollars), it all but killed America’s privately operated passenger railroads. Since then, rail travel in America has mostly consisted of government-subsidized Amtrak services of deteriorating quality that amble across the country, catering to a niche market of leisure travelers and those with no other options. On the busy Northeast Corridor between Boston and Washington D.C. there is still enough demand to operate a busy, profitable service, but elsewhere Amtrak’s services are too slow, inconvenient, and infrequent to effectively compete with highways and airlines.

But with gas prices rising and traffic congestion strangling many American cities, passengers, investors, and government planners are all reconsidering railroads. Several new projects have sprung up across the country, aiming to link major cities a few hundred miles apart, where a train might provide a more convenient journey than a plane, car, or bus. Some of these projects are led by state governments, others by private companies. The contrast between the two is dramatic. To illuminate that difference, compare the government-run California High Speed Rail project with Brightline, a new private rail system in Florida.

Approved in 2008, California High Speed Rail (CHSR) was expected to deliver a 520-mile two-track, electrified high-speed railway on an all-new route between Los Angeles and San Francisco by 2029. Fourteen years later, CHSR is now only expected to have a 171-mile single-track section between Madera and Bakersfield will be operational by 2030. Meanwhile the project’s cost has ballooned to $80 billion from an original budget of $33 billion, and costs are expected to rise further to $100 billion, or triple the original budget.

Meanwhile in Florida, a very different kind of passenger railroad is already up and running. Brightline was launched in 2012 by the Florida East Coast Railway, a private freight railroad. Unlike CHSR, Brightline mostly uses existing routes, removing the need to acquire (or appropriate) large amounts of land. Instead of building the whole line before beginning any passenger services (as CHSR is doing), Brightline began construction on a 70-mile section from Miami to West Palm Beach in 2014 and opened it to passengers in 2018. This meant that Brightline already had an operational, revenue-producing service before embarking on the 170-mile northward extension to Orlando Airport. That extension is expected to open in 2023, and the entire project will cost about $1.75 billion, raised through private financing.

This equates to about $7.3 million per mile for Brightline, compared to $153.8 million per mile for CHSR (using the current $80 billion budget). Why will CHSR cost at least twenty times more per mile than Brightline? How has Brightline managed to deliver a high-speed intercity passenger rail system within ten years whereas CHSR needs twenty-two years to deliver an incomplete, scaled-down version of its original plan? Much of the answer comes down to the fundamental nature of public works projects such as CHSR.

This isn’t quite a fair apples-to-apples comparison between Brightline and CHSR, as Brightline’s services will have to interact with freight trains on conventional rails while CHSR — if ever completed — will be a separate line hosting only CHSR’s own high-speed passenger trains. Brightline’s trains will probably not have the theoretical top speed that CHSR is intended to use, as the physical plant of rail lines intended for mixed-use traffic will limit the speeds due to signalling, traffic density and braking distances of the respective types of trains.

February 28, 2022

QotD: Passengers versus freight in railway efficiency terms

Filed under: Economics, Europe, Quotations, Railways, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

First, consider the last time you were on a passenger train. Add up the weight of all the folks in your car. Do you think they weighed more or less than the car itself? Unless you were packed into a subway train with Japanese sumo wrestlers, the answer is that the weight of the car dwarfs that of the passengers it is carrying. The average Amtrak passenger car apparently weighs about 65 tons (my guess is a high speed rail car weighs more). The capacity of a coach is 70-80 passengers, which at an average adult weight of 140 pounds yields a maximum passenger weight per car of 5.6 tons. This means that just 8% of the fuel in a passenger train is being used to move people — the rest goes into moving the train itself.

Now consider a freight train. The typical car weighs 25-30 tons empty and can carry between 70 and 120 tons of cargo. This means that 70-80% of the fuel in a freight train is being used to move the cargo.

Now you have to take me on faith on one statement — it is really hard, in fact close to impossible, to optimize a rail system for both passengers and freight. In the extreme of high speed rail, passenger trains required separate dedicated tracks. Most rail systems, even when they serve both sorts of traffic, generally prioritize one or the other. So, if you wanted to save energy and had to pick, which would you choose — focusing on freight or focusing on passengers? Oh and by the way, if you want to make it more personal, throw in a consideration of which you would rather have next to you on crowded roads, another car or another freight truck?

This is why the supposedly-green folks’ denigrating of US rail is so crazy to me. The US rails system makes at least as much sense as the European system, even before you consider that it was mostly privately funded and runs without the subsidies that are necessary to keep European rail running. Yes, as an American tourist travelling in Europe, the European rails system is great. Agreed. I use it every time I go there. I have to assume that this elite tourist experience must be part of why folks ignore the basic science here.

Warren Meyer, “A Reminder: Why the US Rail System Is At Least as Good As the European System if You Care About Energy Use”, Coyote Blog, 2018-05-25.

May 31, 2021

The History of HSTs in the West

Ruairidh MacVeigh
Published 29 May 2021

Hello again! 😀

With the recent withdrawal of the last HST operations into London, I wanted to make a series of videos chronicling the history of these mighty trains in terms of their years of each region they were assigned to, the Great Western, East Coast, Midland, West Coast and Cross Country Routes.

With that in mind, we start with the first of the BR Regions to employ the venerable HST, but also the first to withdraw them from long distance services, the Great Western, a line that, since its inception under the auspices of Brunel, has played host to many different types of trains, but none have had greater impact that the superb HSTs.

All video content and images in this production have been provided with permission wherever possible. While I endeavour to ensure that all accreditations properly name the original creator, some of my sources do not list them as they are usually provided by other, unrelated YouTubers. Therefore, if I have mistakenly put the accreditation of “Unknown”, and you are aware of the original creator, please send me a personal message at my Gmail (this is more effective than comments as I am often unable to read all of them): rorymacveigh@gmail.com

The views and opinions expressed in this video are my personal appraisal and are not the views and opinions of any of these individuals or bodies who have kindly supplied me with footage and images.

If you enjoyed this video, why not leave a like, and consider subscribing for more great content coming soon.

Thanks again, everyone, and enjoy! 😀

References:
– 125Group (and their respective sources)
– Wikipedia (and its respective references)

January 19, 2020

Travelling SNCF in the age of the smartphone app

Filed under: Business, France, Humour, Media, Railways, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

At The Register, Alistair Dabbs reveals some unfortunate truths about the French railway service (the Société nationale des chemins de fer français or SNCF) and its mobile app:

An SNCF Train à Grande Vitesse (TGV) Duplex DASYE (moteur asynchrone, nouvelle generation de duplex) train at Figueres-Vilafant station, 1May 2011.
Photo by eldelinux via Wikimedia Commons.

Actually, the hotel app is rubbish. The booking system is slow, the property information incomplete and some of the buttons don’t do anything at all. From time to time, the app flashes up a notification inviting you to install the app … er, that you’re already running. Much better to book using a proper computer. Still, flashing the screen around got me the Presidential Disability Suite. Franklin D rocked a wheelchair, remember, and I’m a fan.

This, however, pales into insignificance with the tedious and frankly silly collection of smartphone apps I had to juggle to manage my train journey to get here. Yes, it’s my own fault for trying to navigate my way across France on public transport in the midst of a general strike but surely that’s precisely the kind of thing digital communications ought to be able to help you with, don’t you agree?

Map of the French railways on which the TGV (LGV: blue; normal tracks: black) and Intercités (grey) SNCF trains run. Only lines going to and from Paris are shown here.
Wikimedia Commons.

The French train company, SNCF, has been doing its best by notifying travellers with bookings every day at 17:00 which of the following day’s trains would be running and which would be cancelled. I’m a lifelong union member myself and I fully support the workers’ rights to … oh buggeration, my TGV’s been rerouted to set off from a city 300km away. Fucking union arsewipes – sack ’em all bastard wankers.

Oh well, I thought, I’ll just have to work out another way. Fire up the SNCF booking app!

A banner at the top informs me that I should seek information about which train services are running by checking its Twitter feed. So I launch the Twitter app. SNCF on Twitter says I should check via the idiotic INOUI brand for TGV bookings. So I launch the INOUI app. This tells me I should check with SNCF or, if I want more information, click on a highlighted link. I click on it: it links to a one-sentence message that tells me there is a strike on and that train services may be affected.

Two hours of thumb-numbing smartphone tomfoolery later, I have worked out my own alternative route via multiple connecting services. This was made more challenging by the SNCF and INOUI apps providing contradictory information about the same journey. Best of all is they can’t agree on where my TGV will actually go. Will it reach its terminus as usual or will it apparently go inexplicably missing from the tracks in the countryside outside Lille? According to SNCF and INOUI, it will do both. It’s Schrodinger’s train.

Just as I go to bed, the Eurostar app sends me a notification reminding me to get to my local station on time tomorrow to catch the TGV that’s been cancelled.

As you can see, my much prolonged, zig-zag route up the country and into Blighty worked, no thanks to these ridiculous apps. It wasn’t all bad: I got to see more French farmland than I expected and experienced first-hand the extraordinarily rich cultural variety of train station beggars that France has to offer the modern rail traveller.

January 7, 2020

“HS2 will make the country worse off and should be stopped as soon as possible”

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Railways — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

The British government recently reviewed the ever-escalating sums for the proposed HS2 high speed passenger rail connection that began at some £30 billion, then climbed to £50 billion, then £80 billion, and the latest estimate is up to £110 billion. Even by other countries’ high speed rail boondoggles, that is a breathtaking cost escalation. If, as it should, the government cancels the HS2 project, what happens to the money that was budgeted for the fiasco?

The figures used to justify HS2 were “fiddled” and that the project is most unlikely to deliver value for money — that’s the verdict of Lord Berkeley, the deputy chairman of the recent review into the project. He’s right of course and not solely because he’s repeating what I argued more than a year ago.

HS2 will make the country worse off and should be stopped as soon as possible. The government can mourn the money wasted and go off and do something else. Some suggest the HS2 money should be taken and spent on northern railways. Or as Lord Berkeley himself would prefer, on commuter lines in the Midlands.

But those offering these suggestions are making a very fundamental mistake: the real question is not which project most deserves this slab of funding, but whether the state should be spending this money at all.

This is not to say government should not be involved in funding any big infrastructure — everyone except the most hardcore anarchists accepts that state involvement in the economy is sometimes appropriate. But when it does intervene, it ought to be because there is an ironcast case for the betterment of the general population. That’s equally true whether we are talking about taxing to spend money now, or borrowing on the assumption that future benefits will pay back the debt incurred.

So, where does this leave the HS2 money? At some point it was decided that spending £30 billion, £50 billion, £80 billion or now as much as £110 billion on some nice choo-choos was an idea that justified taxing the public. Now it’s clear and obvious that it isn’t. Deciding afterwards that the government must spend all those billions on something else transport-related is missing the point entirely.

June 14, 2019

How Streamlining Changed Trains Forever | Spark

Filed under: Britain, History, Railways — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Spark
Published on 25 Jun 2018

Steam trains leapt forward in speed once Nigel Gresley decided to make them slick, sexy and streamlined.

In the 1930’s, Britain had a railway network that was envied around the world. The East and West Coast railway companies fought to transport passengers from London to Scotland in the shortest time possible.

Originally broadcast in 2003. Content licensed by DRG Distributions. Any queries, contact us at hello@littledotstudios.com

May 20, 2019

Britain’s InterCity 125 has run its last revenue miles

Filed under: Britain, Railways — Tags: — Nicholas @ 05:00

Tim Worstall explains why the withdrawal of the InterCity 125 has struck a chord in commuters and railfans alike:

An InterCity 125 power car in British Rail livery at Manchester Piccadilly in October 1976.
Photo by Dave Hitchborne via Wikimedia Commons.

The last run was between London’s Paddington Station and Exeter St. Davids. There’s an amusing anecdote about the development and testing of the locomotives that I thought I’d blogged, but better late than never:

There’s something called the chicken gun. If you’ve a jet engine then you want to make sure that it doesn’t fall apart in a bird strike. Shards of sharp metal flying around at hundreds of miles an hour are not known to be good for aluminium skinned modes of transport hundreds or thousands of feet off the ground.

So, you set up a cannon, spin the jet engine up and fire a chicken into it. […] Great. So, bright sparks at British Rail noted that their train was going to be hurtling through the countryside at 125 miles per hour. There would be cuttings and embankments and birdies flying around and the possibility of bird strikes. Better test this out.

So, borrow the chicken gun. Load chicken, fire. The carcass goes straight through the reinforced glass, through the steel back of the driver’s seat and embeds itself in the back wall of the engine compartment.

Umm, is it supposed to do that? No, it bloody well isn’t.

So, long pondering, they enlist the help of the Americans they’d borrowed the chicken gun from. Big report finally arrives, hundreds of pages of analysis, tensor strengths, bits of Fortran coding, the lot.

On the first page it reads

“In order to use the chicken gun, first defrost your chicken”.

February 15, 2019

European-style passenger railways don’t scale to North American distances

Filed under: Economics, Europe, Railways, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At PJ Media, Charlie Martin does a good job of showing why the fast, efficient passenger railways of Europe are not replicated in the US and Canada:

… the usual story is something like “the United States should have a world-class passenger train system, with high-speed rail like the French and Japanese have.” @AOC’s official-no-fake-no-just-a-draft-Republican-conspiracy-theory-why-are-you-all-being-mean? Green New Deal FAQ wanted one so good that air travel would become “unnecessary.”

Sounds great, and I love the covert “MAGA” aspect of the pitch, but it has one great big, pretty much insurmountable problem: America.

Not the country, the geography. People living on the coasts just don’t realize how big this country is. I was discussing it on Twitter with a Swiss who lives in Zürich who was telling me how great the Europeans trains are — and they really are comfortable, pretty fast, have great scenery to look at — but, well, let’s compare Colorado and Switzerland. Similar climate, mountains, pretty scenery, cranky natives who are suspicious of newcomers. But let’s go to the maps:

Colorado is 6.5 times as big, has 60 percent of the population — and, it happens, about two-thirds of the gross “national” product per capita.

Compare the lower 48 states with all of Western Europe:

The truth is, we’re in flyover country out here. The coastal clerisy don’t realize that on their five-hour flight from LAX to LGA they’re traveling 2,500 miles. Now, back in the days of the Super Chief and the 20th Century Limited, you could make that trip by train in only 76 hours, not counting changing trains in Chicago. (It takes longer on Amtrak.)

So, let’s say we could get high-speed trains for the whole trip that averaged 200 miles per hour, and could travel as the crow flies: that’s 12.5 hours.

Except of course you couldn’t because the crow is flying over some of the highest mountains in the country. You’re going to need rights of way, and you can’t use the rights of way that exist because they’re not suited for that kind of speed and they’re pretty full anyway. Also, it wouldn’t do to interrupt the existing freight lines, which actually are about as good as anywhere in the world.

February 14, 2019

Even train nerds don’t want “people who know absolutely nothing about rail, high-speed or otherwise, jumping on our bandwagon”

Filed under: Railways, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

John C. Wright shares a communication he received from a train enthusiast:

The comments on your blog post today about the Sickly-Green New Deal were coming thick and fast, so I didn’t really have an opportunity to say anything, but I did want to throw in my two cents.

Along with the other basic reason not to like this whole plan (namely, that it’s lunacy), I am personally frustrated by its emphasis on high-speed rail.

By now you know that I’m a train nerd (and I emphasize “nerd”: by my wife’s estimation, the attendees at a National Model Railroad Association convention are even more undateable than the folks at a typical Comic Con).

It’s precisely for that reason that I am so frustrated by these people: they give rail advocates a bad name.

The last thing we need are people who know absolutely nothing about rail, high-speed or otherwise, jumping on our bandwagon because “trains are neat-o!”

Among other things, this false enthusiasm on the part of the left leads to conservatives opposing trains qua trains, simply because they reason that anything liberals are so fond of must by definition be awful (a reasonable argument, I grant you). It’s a bit like having a crazy stalker woman being obsessed with you. Far from being flattered, you want to get a restraining order.

Now, of course, in MY utopia, railroads would dominate the travel scene, much like they did at the end of World War II, though not to the exclusion of other forms of travel.

(Envision the travel scene as it looked in 1945, but with current technology, and you pretty much have the picture.) People would simply use trains more and other modes less, and we would be able to manage without any more freeways or airports than we had in the late 1940s.

When I imagine this utopia, I run into the same problem anyone who tries to envision a utopia runs into: how does one make people like what you like? Since I would never want to force people to do things against their wishes, I can only overcome this by imagining a utopia where everyone just happens to agree with me about trains (along with anything else I consider important, like belief in God, or that bank tellers should still wear jackets and ties or dresses to work as appropriate).

Because this is obviously impossible, it serves to remind me that utopias can only exist in one’s mind and cannot be brought into reality – and that one should never attempt to do so.

February 13, 2019

California mercifully kills the High Speed Train project

Filed under: Economics, Politics, Railways, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In Reason, Scott Shackford reports on the sudden acceptance that California’s high speed train dream is dead:

Construction of the Fresno River Viaduct in January 2016. The bridge was the first permanent structure constructed as part of California High-Speed Rail. The BNSF Railway bridge is visible in the background.
Photo by the California High-Speed Rail Authority via Wikimedia Commons.

California’s wasteful, expensive, and likely doomed-to-fail statewide bullet train project is getting killed. Today, Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom said he’s abandoning the plan as “too costly.”

Newsom made the announcement in his State of the State address this morning. As the Associated Press reports:

    Newsom said Tuesday in his State of the State address it “would cost too much and take too long” to build the line long championed by his predecessor, Jerry Brown. Latest estimates pin the cost at $77 billion and completion in 2033.

    Newsom says he wants to continue construction of the high-speed link from Merced to Bakersfield in California’s Central Valley. He says building the line could bring economic transformation to the agricultural region.

    And he says abandoning that portion of the project would require the state to return $3.5 billion in federal dollars.

    Newsom also is replacing Brown’s head of the board that oversee the project and is pledging to hold the project’s contractors more accountable for cost overruns.

Newsom actually turned against the bullet train project years ago but then went quiet about it when he began his plans to run for governor. He declined to discuss what he saw as the train’s future on the campaign trail, but after he was elected he suggested some sort of cutback was coming, possibly eliminating the bottom half of the project, making it a train from San Francisco to the Central Valley of California.

Now it looks like he’s scaling even that back. Californians are just going to be left with a train in the middle of some of the more rural parts of the state because the Newsom administration doesn’t want to have to repay the federal funding.

Whatever may come next, this is happy news for most California citizens. Voters approved a ballot initiative in 2008 that set aside a $10 billion bond to begin the project of building a high-speed rail line from Los Angeles to San Francisco with the promise that more funding would come through from the feds or from private sources, that the train would not require subsidies to operate, and that it would help fight climate change.

January 10, 2019

What Happened to America’s Passenger Trains?! The Truth – from Class to Crap!

Filed under: Economics, Government, History, Railways, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

American Rail Club
Published on 1 Jul 2017

Did America’s once industrious and world-famous passenger rail system fall because of “fair and equal” competition – or did the federal government tax it to death? Did America’s shift from rails to roads come out naturally – or from lobbying from General Motors? We visit two of America’s passenger rail cars from a bygone era to reminisce and then dive into the history and truth behind the decline of America’s passenger railroad system.

January 5, 2019

We may already have passed the peak of High Speed Railways

Filed under: Economics, Japan, Railways, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Hans Bader looks at the mass transit mess, including a brief glance at the state of high speed passenger rail:

So-called bullet trains generally turn out to be white elephants. South Korea is abolishing its celebrated high-speed rail line from its capital, Seoul, to a nearby major city because it can’t cover even the marginal costs of keeping the trains running. Most people who ride trains don’t need maximum possible speed, and most of those who do will still take the plane to reach distant destinations.

Despite Japan’s much-vaunted bullet trains, most Japanese don’t take the bullet train either; they take buses because the bullet train is too expensive. Bullet trains do interfere with freight lines, so Japanese freight lines carry much less cargo than in the United States, where railroads—rather than trucks—carry most freight, thereby reducing pollution and greenhouse gas emissions.

California’s so-called bullet train is vastly behind schedule and over budget, and will likely never come close to covering its operating costs once it is built. As Reason magazine noted, transportation officials have warned that California’s misnamed “bullet train” is a disaster in the making. California is drastically understating the costs of its high-speed rail project. Just the first leg of this $77 billion project will cost billions more than budgeted. And the project is already at least 11 years behind schedule.

June 6, 2018

Travelling on British passenger trains

Filed under: Britain, Railways — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Other than preserved steam train passenger trips, the last time I took a train in Britain was during the “Winter of Discontent”, and it was a grim experience indeed. Recently, Malcolm Kenton purchased a First Class BritRail Pass and did some extensive travels on many of the passenger services (averaging over 250 miles per day over 12 days). He said he understands why the British complain about on-time arrivals, but compared to American passenger trains, he clearly felt he was in a railway wonderland:

10:00 PM on a Tuesday, May 15, at London’s magnificent Paddington Station. At right, a Great Western Railway
Hitachi dual-mode train has just arrived from points southwest, with a Great Western DMU train across the platform.

Photo by Malcolm Kenton

The Brits have a habit of complaining about their trains. As I experienced, their on-time performance often falls short of Swiss standards (though is excellent by American standards), ticket prices are continually increasing, and service frequencies and span on some lines aren’t what they could be. But it’s hard for someone who’s used to a country where even major cities are served by just one train a day, if that, to knock a system that provides at least three daily frequencies to even the least densely populated lines. If this is what remains after the infamous early 1960s Beeching cuts, which saw the abandonment of many secondary lines, then what existed before must have been absolutely mind-boggling.

[…]

The regular National Rail trains I rode were about evenly split between electric and diesel power. Most of the lines emanating within a 100-mile radius of London are electrified — both the East Coast and West Coast mains boast catenary as far as Edinburgh and Glasgow from London, and several other lines have third-rail power, including the South Western trains between London Waterloo and Weymouth via Southampton, which I rode — the world’s longest continuous third rail-electrified railway at 136 miles, whose electrification was completed in 1988. By contrast, America’s longest electrified railroad is only 57 miles: Metro-North’s Harlem Line from Grand Central Terminal to Southeast, N.Y. Trips of up to 200 miles on electrified lines tend to be covered by Electric Multiple Unit trainsets, while electric locomotive-hauled sets cover longer runs.

Top speeds for expresses on the electrified mains range from 100 to 125 MPH, akin to Regionals on Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor. Older equipment is usually limited to 80 to 90 MPH. On less busy branch lines, speeds top out between 40 and 70 MPH depending on track condition. Some of these lines are dark territory and some still use semaphore signals and manually-operated switch towers (signal boxes in British parlance).

Catenary electrification is working its way westward on the Great Western main line towards Cornwall, but long-distance expresses on this line use either 1990s-built High-Speed Train trainsets powered by diesel locomotives on both ends or two-year-old Hitachi dual-mode (catenary electric and diesel) multiple unit trainsets. Most services on less busy lines, however, are provided by Diesel Multiple Unit trainsets of varying vintages and configurations, often of just one or two cars. ScotRail’s rural services, including the five-hour run Sam and I took from Glasgow to Mallaig, all use DMUs.

Of the ten different branded National Rail services I sampled, I was most impressed with Virgin Trains, Great Western and Chiltern Railways. I took Virgin’s expresses on both the East and West Coast main lines and both offered a comfortable First Class product with hot meals and alcohol included, similar to Acela First Class. Great Western’s First Class seats were the most comfortable and the color schemes and seat arrangements the most attractive, and the food service included sandwiches as well as snacks, coffee, tea, sodas and still or sparkling water. On most trains traveling for more than one hour, there is food and beverage service from a cart. In most cases, First Class passengers get one complimentary snack (such as pretzels, fruit, crisps (potato chips in British parlance), candies, cookies and pastries) and one drink each time the cart passes through the coach.

April 29, 2018

Pipe Dreams: What Happened To Hovertrains?

Filed under: France, Railways, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Mustard
Published on 8 Apr 2018

In 1974, a French train sets a speed record, exceeding 250 miles per hour. But this train is unlike any other before it. Instead of rolling on wheels, it hovers on a cushion of air. In the 1970’s hovertrains were seriously being considered the solution to slow, antiquated railways, which increasingly had to compete with new superhighways and even intercity air travel.

Without the rolling resistance of train wheels, hovertrains promised greater efficiency and much higher speeds. By feeding high pressure air through lifting pads, hovertrains float on a cushion of air much like a hovercraft.

One of the most widely known hovertrain prototypes was called the Aerotrain. Lead engineer Jean Bertin and his team in France, designed several versions, including one that could carry 80 passengers. The i80HV was powered by a turbofan sourced from an airliner, producing over twelve thousand pounds of thrust. At the front, a 400 horse power gas-turbine supplied high-pressure air to hover the twenty loaded train a quarter of an inch off its guideway. The British and Americans also experimented with hovertrain technology, incorporating the linear induction motor for improved efficiency. British research led to the development of the RTV-31 Tracked Hovercraft, and the American’s developed several prototypes, culminating in the development of the Urban Tracked Air Cushion Vehicle (UTACV).

But like their counterpart the Maglev, Hovertrains failed to revolutionize rail. Hovertrains, Maglevs, or any other innovative alternative to rail has to compete with nearly a million miles of rail line already in existence. With stations and infrastructure built-out in nearly every city in the world. The limitations of conventional railways were overcome not a single innovative leap forward, but by incremental improvements. Existing rail networks were modernized with sections of track that could handle higher speeds. New signaling technologies were developed along with more advanced wheelsets.

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