Quotulatiousness

May 30, 2013

High speed steam run

Filed under: Britain, History, Railways, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 07:54

LNER A4 Class 4464 (60019) “Bittern” has been given dispensation to run at 90MPH on the East Coast Main Line in July, to celebrate the 75th Anniversary of Mallard’s world speed record, subject to a satisfactory high speed test. This is that test. The weather was perfect — damp, cool, no wind. Bittern left Didcot at 05:23 am and flew through Slough 05:58 at full pelt for an average of 60mph over the 35 miles. The 6.2 mile section between Maidenhead and Slough was completed in 4 minutes, an average of 93MPH. Using film time markers I timed the whole train at 90mph through Taplow where this film was shot.

Given the two sets of hand cranked data, and with no speed gun to hand, I am happy to put the 90MPH stamp on the film title.

H/T to Jim Guthrie for the link.

July 2, 2012

Alex Tabarrok on the slow rail and infrastructure bottleneck

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Economics, Government, Railways, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:58

Writing at Marginal Revolution, Alex Tabarrok wonders “Why haven’t the $500 bills been picked up?”:

High speed rail, especially California’s project, looks to me to be monorail economics, a costly boondoggle whose appeal lies not in rational calculation […] but in the desire of some politicians (and voters) to feel visionary and sexy. In theory, CA HSR might work but the inevitable reviews, delays, lawsuits and special interest payoffs make the prospects of a beneficial project look dim, demosclerosis kills.

Slow speed rail, however, i.e. freight transport, isn’t sexy but Warren Buffett is investing in rail and maybe we should as well. In particular, there are basic infrastructure projects with potentially high payoffs. Congestion in Chicago, for example, is so bad that freight passing through Chicago often slows down to less than the pace of an electric wheel chair. Improvements are sometimes as simple as replacing 19th century technology with 20th century (not even 21st century!) technology. Even today, for example:

    …engineers at some points have to get out of their cabins, walk the length of the train back to the switch — a mile or more — operate the switch, and then trudge back to their place at the head of the train before setting out again.

In a useful article Phillip Longman points out that there are choke points on the Eastern Seaboard which severely reduce the potential for rail:

    …railroads can capture only 2 percent of the container traffic traveling up and down the eastern seaboard because of obscure choke points, such as the Howard Street Tunnel in downtown Baltimore. The tunnel is too small to allow double-stack container trains through, and so antiquated it’s been listed on the National Register of Historic Places since 1973. When it shut down in 2001 due to a fire, trains had to divert as far as Cincinnati to get around it. Owner CSX has big plans for capturing more truck traffic from I-95, and for creating room for more passenger trains as well, but can’t do any of this until it finds the financing to fix or bypass this tunnel and make other infrastructure improvements down the line.

April 20, 2012

Building High Speed Rail won’t do much to cut carbon dioxide emissions

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:11

Brad Plumer at the Washington Post on the latest straw that high speed rail enthusiasts have been grabbing to justify their expensive toys:

… Brown’s administration has proposed using money raised by California’s new climate law. Under the state’s cap-and-trade system for carbon emissions, power plants and factories will have to buy permits to pollute. Brown has suggested diverting this money into high-speed rail. But there are two problems here. For one, this might be illegal, as the state’s Legislative Analyst’s Office concluded on Tuesday. But second — and more broadly — high-speed rail turns out not to be the most effective use of money that’s meant to combat global warming.

Paul Druce at Reason & Rail offered up a few numbers on this topic last year. The California High Speed Rail Authority claims that by 2030, if the train ran entirely on renewable energy, then it would reduce the state’s carbon emissions by about 5.4 million metric tons a year. If you ignore all the energy used to build the system, that means the rail network would reduce California’s emissions at a cost of $12,506 per metric ton of carbon dioxide.

That’s a pricey way to cut carbon. To put this in perspective, research has suggested that you could plant 100 million acres of trees and reforest the United States for a cost of about $21 to $91 per ton of carbon dioxide. Alternatively, a study by Dan Kammen of UC Berkeley found that it would cost somewhere between $59 and $87 per ton of carbon dioxide to phase out coal power in the Western United States and replace it with solar, wind and geothermal. If reducing greenhouse gases is your goal, then there are much more cost-effective ways to do it than building a bullet train.

April 16, 2012

“This sort of investment pays for itself ten-fold over a very short period of time”

Filed under: Economics, Government, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:16

You see? This is what’s wrong with private enterprise, especially in California. Those wimps aren’t willing to invest in something that will “pay for itself” ten times over in a “very short period of time”. That’s why all the greatest economic advances have come from over-aged students, business council speechifiers, bureaucrats, and career apparatchiks!

If you believe calling your opponents names is a sign that you have lost the argument, then this new high-speed rail commercial from the California Alliance for Jobs — in which unexpectedly macho proponents of the $41 billion, $110 billion, $98.5 billion, $68.4 billion high-speed rail project deride skeptics as “wimps” — is pretty much the end of the line […]

What reveals the intellectual bankruptcy of the high-speed rail project is not the insults but that what is supposed to be a rousing propaganda piece comes off like an orientation video for new hires at a failing company.

The video’s cast includes hacks respected citizens from Operating Engineers Local 3, including Alliance for Jobs Executive Director Jim Earp, along with leaders from what’s usually referred to as the “business community” whose skill sets cluster around serving on business councils rather than doing any actual business. There’s also a career apparatchik and the founder of the “I Will Ride” Student Coalition, who is apparently a UC Merced senior but looks at least a decade too old.

[. . .]

Again, why not just claim the Fresno-Bakersfield line will end up carrying 38 million people, the entire population of California, every day? It would be no less accurate than the current claims, which have been made with no data on ticket costs, no comparative studies of existing bullet-train ridership, or anything else that can reasonably pass for due diligence.

Oh, and nobody actually knows where the bullet train will go to or from. (Past, present and possibly future candidates include Corcoran, Borden, Fresno, Anaheim, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and some guy named Dave’s rec room.) You wouldn’t build a patio with the amount of planning that’s gone into the high-speed rail project.

To put the headline into a bit of perspective, note that only one high speed rail line in the world is profitable. This is an old hobby horse of mine and I’ve posted about High Speed Railways a few times before.

Update: And to answer the question about why parts of Europe, Japan, and China have high speed rail systems and neither Canada nor the United States do, here’s a brief overview I wrote last year:

The best place to build a high speed rail system for the US would be the Boston-New York-Washington corridor (aka “Bosnywash”, for the assumed urban agglomeration that would occur as the cities reach toward one another). It has the necessary population density to potentially turn an HSR system into a practical, possibly even profitable, part of the transportation solution. The problem is that without an enormous eminent domain land-grab to cheat every land-owner of the fair value of their property, it just can’t be done. Buying enough contiguous sections of land to connect these cities would be so expensive that scrapping and replacing the entire navy every year would be a bargain in comparison.

The American railway system is built around freight: passenger traffic is a tiny sliver of the whole picture. Ordinary passenger trains cause traffic and scheduling difficulties because they travel at higher speeds, but require more frequent stops than freight trains, and their schedules have to be adjusted to passenger needs (passenger traffic peaks early to mid-morning and early to mid-evening). The frequency of passenger trains can “crowd out” the freight traffic the railway actually earns money on.

Most railway companies prefer to avoid having the complications of carrying passengers at all — that’s why Amtrak (and VIA Rail in Canada) was set up in the first place, to take the burden of money-losing passenger services off the shoulders of deeply indebted railways. Even after the new entity lopped off huge numbers of passenger trains from its schedule, it couldn’t turn a profit on the scaled-down services it was offering.

Ordinary passenger trains can, at a stretch, share rail with freight traffic, but high speed trains cannot. At higher speeds, the actual construction of the track has to change to deal with the physical problem of safely guiding the fast passenger trains along the rail. Signalling must also change to suit the far-higher speeds — and the matching far-longer safe braking distances. High speed rail lines cannot be interrupted with grade crossings, for the safety of passengers and bystanders, so additional bridges and tunnels must be built to avoid bringing road vehicles and pedestrians too close to the trains.

In other words, a high speed railway line is far from being just a faster version of what we already have: it would have to be built separately, to much higher standards of construction.

Getting back to the California HSR line; it goes from A to B on this map:

Okay, you think, at least Fresno will get some snazzy slick rail service . . . except this section will be built but not operated until further connecting sections are built . . . at a later date. Maybe. It will be the track, including elevated sections through Fresno, and the physical right-of-way, but no electrical system to power the trains; but that’s fine, because the budget doesn’t include any actual trains.

January 14, 2012

How much is your time worth?

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Railways, Randomness — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:00

In an article about the recently approved high speed train link between London and Birmingham, Tim Harford points out a few oddities in the calculations that supposedly show how beneficial the new railway connection will be:

But it’s not just about forecasts — it’s about the value of time saved because of a faster journey, right?

That’s true. The high-speed link would save about 40 minutes on a journey from London to Birmingham. How much that is worth is an interesting question.

If you have a morning meeting it might mean an extra 40 minutes in bed.

It might indeed, which is priceless. HS2 Ltd told me that they use numbers from the Department for Transport. The DfT apparently values leisure time at about £6 an hour — this, intriguingly, implies that the UK government’s official position is that anyone under the age of 21 is wasting their time earning the young person’s minimum wage and would be wise to chillax in front of the Nintendo.

What about business travel?

Well, business travel is valued at £50 an hour. Unless the business travel in question is commuting, in which case it’s £7 an hour.

What?

Doesn’t make a bit of sense to me, either. Perhaps the idea is that commuting is eating into your leisure time, which is almost valueless apparently, whereas business travel is eating into your employer’s time, which is precious indeed. Complain to the DfT if you don’t like it.

September 2, 2011

Doubts about Britain’s next proposed high speed rail line

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Environment, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:12

The Economist is usually pretty gung-ho about high speed rail development in general, so this article expressing some serious doubts is noteworthy:

Earlier this year the coalition government announced details of a £32 billion ($52 billion) super-fast railway line from London to Manchester and Leeds via Birmingham (see map). Philip Hammond, the transport secretary, claims it will be a “fast track” to prosperity. If the project goes ahead—and there is still, just, time to reconsider—the final route, and Stoke’s transport fate, will not be decided until 2012 at the earliest. The first trains won’t reach Birmingham until 2026, and Leeds and Manchester until 2032-3.

There are practical reasons to favour a new north-south line. Good infrastructure lasts a long time: Britain is still enjoying the fruits of Victorian railway investment. At some point in the next 20 years the existing west-coast main line will face a capacity crunch. Upgrading lines is disruptive and expensive, so constructing a new one appears sensible. The vision of a futuristic train scything across Britain at 250mph (400kph) is appealing.

But although the plan has cross-party support, the British public is not entirely convinced. Objections have so far focused on two concerns. First, the environmental damage, particularly to the Chilterns, an area of “outstanding natural beauty” and home to many well-off voters. Second, the business case for the line: the projected doubling of long-distance rail use by 2043 seems ambitious.

August 8, 2011

China discovers that “You can’t stop the signal” again

Filed under: China, Government, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:32

Strategy Page looks at the way news was disseminated about the high speed rail crash despite the Chinese government’s attempts to quash the story:

Since July 27th, China got another reminder that it no longer can control the news. On July 27th, China’s high-speed “bullet train” had a fatal accident, leaving over 30 dead and many more injured. The cause was inadequate safety and communications systems. In this case, one train was halted by a flaw in the signalling system and another came up from behind and there was the collision that sent four train cars off the tracks, and a bridge. The government immediately tried to keep the accident out of the news. This effort failed because of the ingenuity of Chinese Internet users, despite the government ban on Twitter in China. The ban was meant to impede the rapid spread of news the government wanted to control. Given enough time, the state controlled media could get out a story the government could live with. But blog, RSS and other Internet tools have been tweaked to do the same thing Twitter does. This was especially true of “micro-blogs” that quickly distribute the same 140 character messages Twitter does. Not as well, but good enough, and the news the government wanted to control spread uncontrollably. This included pictures and video of the accident, which the government planned to keep out of the news.

July 28, 2011

Signalling failure blamed for high speed rail crash

Filed under: China, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:32

This sounds a bit fishy, as this kind of error has been known in railway signal systems for over 100 years: signals that fail to show stop as a default whenever power is lost:

After it was struck by lightning, the signaling device at the Wenzhou South railway station malfunctioned and failed to turn from green to red, An Lusheng, chief of the Shanghai Railway Bureau, told the news agency. He also said workers on duty were inadequately trained and failed to notice the malfunction.

Xinhua’s report, the first official explanation of the cause of the crash, raised further questions about China’s high-speed rail system, one of the world’s largest and most costly public works projects. The accident occurred when one high-speed train rear-ended another that had stalled on the tracks near Wenzhou in Zhejiang Province. High-speed rail has an excellent safety record elsewhere, especially in Japan, which has never had a fatality.

Chinese have flooded microblogging sites with furious complaints about breakneck development without heed to safety. Many also expressed fears of a cover-up, especially after reports that one train car was buried at the site despite the ongoing investigation and only later excavated.

July 26, 2011

Chinese government announces safety review after high speed rail crash

Filed under: Bureaucracy, China, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:01

In the wake of the deadly collision between two high speed trains, China announced a safety review of the high speed railway system:

Mr Sheng said railway officials would be deployed at frontline rail operations across the country to overhaul maintenance standards and checks on power connections to pre-empt outages.

All local railway bureaux were to draw lessons from the accident, a statement on the railways department website said.

Public fury and scepticism have been expressed in China’s blogosphere, both about the death toll of 39 people — suggesting it is too low — and the safety of China’s rail network.

State newspapers have also expressed concern. The Global Times ran a headline: Anger mounts at lack of answers.

“As the world is experiencing globalisation and integration, why can’t China provide the same safety to its people?” an editorial read.

July 25, 2011

More on that Chinese rail crash

Filed under: China, Government, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:49

The official story has changed a few times since the accident, and at least some Chinese feel they are entitled to the truth about the accident:

Internet users attacked the government’s response to the disaster after authorities muzzled media coverage and urged reporters to focus on rescue efforts. “We have the right to know the truth!” wrote one microblogger called kangfu xiaodingdang. “That’s our basic right!”

Leaked propaganda directives ordered journalists not to investigate the causes and footage emerged of bulldozers shovelling dirt over carriages.

Wang, the railways spokesman, said no one could or would bury the story. He said a colleague told him the wreckage was needed to fill in a muddy ditch to make rescue efforts easier.

But Hong Kong University’s China Media Project said propaganda authorities have ordered media not to send reporters to the scene, not to report too frequently and not to link the story to high-speed rail development. “There must be no seeking after the causes [of the accident], rather, statements from authoritative departments must be followed,” said one directive. Another ordered: “No calling into doubt, no development [of further issues], no speculation, and no dissemination [of such things] on personal microblogs!”

July 24, 2011

No, that’s not suspicious at all . . .

Filed under: China, Government, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:39

. . . when you use backhoes to bury the wreckage before determining the cause of the high speed rail crash:

The wreck on Saturday night killed 35 and injured 210 after a high-speed train lost power for more than 20 minutes and then was rear-ended by another train, according to the Xinhua news agency. Six cars derailed and two fell off a viaduct near the city of Wenzhou.

[. . .]

Photos on the popular Weibo microblogging service showed backhoes burying the wrecked train near the site. Critics said the wreckage needed to be carefully examined for causes of the malfunction, but the railway ministry said that the trains contain valuable national technology and could not be left in the open in case it fell into the wrong hands.

Foreign companies maintain that some crucial technology was stolen from their imported trains. But more importantly to domestic audiences is the perception of a coverup. Initial reports of how the accident occurred are already being partly contradicted by reports in the official media.

June 21, 2011

Chinese high speed trains to run slower than planned

Filed under: China, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 13:02

They’ll still qualify as high speed trains, but they’ll only travel at speeds up to 250kph instead of the 385kph they were designed to achieve. The problem is safety concerns:

The Chinese government has announced a significant lowering in the top speed its hallmark Beijing-to-Shanghai high-speed train will be allowed to run at when it opens later this month after a review of safety, shoddy workmanship and corruption.

The new service halving the 10-hour rail travel time between China’s political and business centres was meant to be the flagship project of a massive $400-billion program to give the country the most extensive bullet train network anywhere.

But the announcement last week by the Railway Ministry that trains on the new line will only be permitted to run at about 250 kilometres per hour instead of the projected 380 km/h has taken the bloom off the opening.

The restriction follows a review by officials stemming from the sacking in February of the railway minister, Liu Zhijun, and the deputy chief engineer of the department, Zhang Shuguang.

The concerns about safety are not at all unwarranted:

Contractors are said to have skimped on using expensive hardening agents when making the concrete for the rail bases. These ties are predicted to crumble within a few years. And there is said to have been a similar shortage of strengthening ingredients included in the concrete used to build bridges and their supporting columns.

A high speed train requires the right-of-way to be engineered to a much higher standard than ordinary passenger or freight rail lines. If too many corners have been cut in this construction, it would be insane to allow the trains to run at full speed until the entire line has been inspected, tested, and problems addressed. If there were even greater “economies” taken during construction, it might not be safe to run the trains at any speed.

And what’s a story like this without a bit of trash-talking from a rival high speed railway operator:

“The difference between China and Japan is that in Japan, if one passenger is injured or killed, the cost is prohibitively high,” he said. “It’s very serious. But China is a country where 10,000 passengers could die every year and no one would make a fuss.”

That’s a quote from the chairman of Central Japan Railway, which runs the Tokyo-Osaka Shinkansen service.

June 11, 2011

Redefining “high speed” as 45 mph

Filed under: Economics, Government, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:12

This is very amusing, unless you’re a taxpayer:

The latest in lunacy in high-speed rail lunacy: at Joel Kotkin’s newgeography.com Wendell Cox reports that the U.S. Transportation Department is dangling money before the government of Iowa seeking matching funds from the state for a high-speed rail line from Iowa City to Chicago. The “high-speed” trains would average 45 miles per hour and take five hours to reach Chicago from Iowa City. One might wonder how big the market for this service is, since Iowa City and Johnson County have only 130,882 people; add in adjoining Linn County (Cedar Rapids) and you’re only up to 342,108 — not really enough, one would think, to supply enough riders to cover operating costs much less construction costs.

The federal government must be getting desperate to find some state willing to take this deal . . .

May 20, 2011

Only one high speed rail line in the world is profitable

Filed under: Economics, Government, Japan, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:39

Babbage looks at the economics of the various high speed railway lines both in service and planned:

Of all the high-speed train services around the world, only one really makes economic sense — the 550km (350-mile) Shinkansen route that connects the 30m people in greater Tokyo to the 20m residents of the Kansai cluster of cities comprising Osaka, Kobe, Kyoto and Nara. At peak times, up to 16 bullet trains an hour travel each way along the densely populated coastal plain that is home to over half of Japan’s 128m people.

Having worked for many years in Tokyo, with family in Osaka, your correspondent has made the two-and-a-half hour journey on the Tokaido bullet-train many times. It is clean, fast and highly civilised, though far from cheap. It beats flying, which is unbearably cramped by comparison, just as pricey, and dumps you an hour from downtown at either end.

The sole reason why Shinkansen plying the Tokaido route make money is the sheer density — and affluence — of the customers they serve. All the other Shinkansen routes in Japan lose cart-loads of cash, as high-speed trains do elsewhere in the world. Only indirect subsidies, creative accounting, political patronage and national chest-thumping keep them rolling.

California’s planned 800-mile high speed rail route cannot possibly earn a profit, for many reasons (not least of which is that the first segment of the network won’t even run high speed trains until the entire system is built). It’s going to cost an eye-watering amount of money even to build that first section:

Between them, the federal government, municipals along the proposed route and an assortment of private investors are being asked to chip in $30 billion. A further $10 billion is to be raised by a bond issue that Californian voters approved in 2008. Anything left unfunded will have to be met by taxpayers. They could be dunned for a lot. A study carried out in 2008 by the Reason Foundation and the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association put the final cost of the complete 800-mile network at $81 billion.That is probably not far off the mark. Last week, the state’s Legislative Analyst’s Office came out with a damning indictment of the project’s unrealistic cost estimates and poor management. The bill this legislative watchdog put on the first phase of the high-speed rail project alone is $67 billion — and higher still if the project runs into trouble gaining route approval in urban areas.

If the latter number is correct, then the first phase of the system is clocking in at nearly $1 billion per mile. And this is the “cheap” section running through mostly thinly populated farming areas. If, somehow, the more expensive sections of the planned network don’t cost much more, the total construction bill will top $800 billion. The original plan had the entire system costing $43 billion.

Cost overruns are an expected part of major government construction projects, but that’s insane.

April 5, 2011

China’s High Speed Railways: not for the masses

Filed under: China, Government, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:07

Reports of corruption among top officials and soaring costs for China’s HSR network:

. . . question-marks have been raised over these plans after the sacking in February of Liu Zhijun, the minister responsible for building the high-speed network. He was accused of skimming off as much as 1 billion yuan ($152m) in bribes and of keeping as many as 18 mistresses. Zhang Shuguang, another top official in the railways ministry, was later dismissed for corruption. Separately, on March 23rd, state auditors reported that $28m had been embezzled from the 1,300km high-speed line between Beijing and Shanghai, the highest-profile of China’s many rail projects.

Public support for high-speed trains is muted. The trains may reach 350km per hour but fares are proportionately eye-watering. That is all right for well-heeled travellers, happy to have an alternative to flying. But tens of millions of poor migrants who work far afield and flock home for the Chinese new year are being priced out the rail market and have to go by bus (the number of bus journeys is soaring).

The sacking of top officials may be the result merely of one of China’s periodic anti-corruption campaigns. Or it may be the upshot of a high-level factional or personal battle, in which corruption charges are often a favourite weapon. If so, the dismissals would not necessarily affect railway development.

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