Overhauling Amtrak

[Nexis4Jersey]

I can't believe it will cost a billion to get to Wake Forest...it should at least get you to Henderson.

[Randomguy34]

Originally Posted by Atlurbsandspices

https://twitter.com/JoeBrunoWSOC9/st...41564044964124

More routes announced for NC Corridor ID...including Charlotte-Atlanta HSR???

With this plus the S-Line, the Southeast High Speed Rail Corridor could finally be realized

[202_Cyclist]

Originally Posted by Randomguy34

With this plus the S-Line, the Southeast High Speed Rail Corridor could finally be realized

Tennessee was also awarded $500,000 to study passenger rail between Nashville - Chattanooga - Atlanta.

https://www.timesfreepress.com/news/...nger-rail-tfp/

[Randomguy34]

^ That will be for regular passenger trains, not high speed rail. Still good, and is a step towards passenger rail between Chicago & Atlanta

[PanhandleBledsoe]

The full list and map of Corridor ID routes granted planning funds, per Railway Age.

https://www.railwayage.com/regulator...id-selections/

[Randomguy34]

What's that middle route between Chicago and the Twin Cities? The southern route via La Crosse is what currently exists & the northern route via Eu Claire has been planned for a while. I've never heard of a potential the middle route till now, and I can't find it in any documents.

[subterranean]

Takeaways From a Blockbuster Week for Trains Across America | High Speed Rail Alliance
Rick Harnish

Let’s celebrate a big step toward U.S. high-speed rail!

Today, the Biden Administration formally announced the awards for the Federal-State Partnership for Intercity Passenger Rail and the Corridor ID Program. This combines Year 1 and Year 2 of a five -year commitment contained in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL).

The big awards went to just a few projects, with several features common to all of them: 1) The state has shown a high level of commitment, in terms of funding and planning. 2) The state controls most of the land. 3) The project is ready to go.

Those states and projects were:

California: Continuing construction of the Central Valley segment of the Los Angeles–San Francisco 186+ mph high-speed line. $3,073,600,000
Nevada: Constructing the Las Vegas–L.A. Basin 186+ mph high-speed line. $3,000,000,000
North Carolina: Constructing regional rail on the Raleigh–Richmond segment of the New York–Atlanta Corridor. $1,095,576,000
Virginia: Building a second Long Bridge to improve the New York–Atlanta Corridor and other routes. $729,000,000
The other Fed-State Partnership awards were:

Alaska: A new bridge in Willow. $8,200,558
Amtrak: Concourse and platform improvements at Chicago Union Station. $93,600,000
Amtrak: Improvements to the Empire Builder route near Malta, Montana. $14,900,000
Northern New England Passenger Rail Authority: Construction to improve the Downeaster. $27,492,000
Pennsylvania: Construction to improve the Harrisburg to Pittsburgh line and add a daily roundtrip. $143,629,028

There are two big take aways from today’s announcements:

We need a much bigger federal program, and
We need a lot more projects ready to go.

That is where Corridor ID comes in.

The BIL established Corridor ID to create a pipeline of projects and launch a big, ongoing, federal program. Today’s announcement also included the news that 69 corridor segments have been added to the program. In some cases, they overlap with projects that already have funding. And, in many cases, each should be included as part of longer corridors or part of bigger networks.

Four new high-speed rail projects were included in this round:

Atlanta, GA – Charlotte, NC
Fort Worth – Dallas – Houston, TX
Portland, OR – Seattle, WA – Vancouver, BC
Palmdale – Victorville, CA (linking Brightline West to the California high-speed backbone.)

So, a lot of what we envision as a national network will soon be under study.

Source: https://www.hsrail.org/blog/takeaway...cross-america/

[202_Cyclist]

New high-speed rail could link to Atlanta airport, White House says
Train proposal between Charlotte, ATL part of $8.2-billion Investing in America plan


By Josh Green
Dec. 11, 2023
Urbanize Atlanta


"The Biden-Harris Administration has announced $8.2 billion in new funding that could help kickstart the first high-speed rail lines in America’s history as part of 10 major passenger train projects dotted around the country.

According to the White House, one of those high-speed rail lines would zip through Atlanta.

Among other objectives, President Joe Biden’s Investing in America program aims to establish a new planning framework that could result in seven high-speed rail initiatives, or “a pipeline of intercity passenger rail projects ready for future investment,” according to a Friday announcement..."

https://atlanta.urbanize.city/post/n...ing%20historic.

[SoCalKid]

Originally Posted by Nexis4Jersey

I can't believe it will cost a billion to get to Wake Forest...it should at least get you to Henderson.

We really need a national task force commissioned by the president to study our infrastructure costs and methodologies, compare them with nations around the world, then identify issues and come up with recommendations to mitigate them. We clearly are doing something wrong... it would be amazing if we could get the same amount of train for our $$ as western Europe, which should be achievable. Achieving that level of cost effectiveness would allow us to actually build out a high speed and higher-speed rail network across the nation, which I fear is out of reach as things stand.

[electricron]

Originally Posted by SoCalKid

We really need a national task force commissioned by the president to study our infrastructure costs and methodologies, compare them with nations around the world, then identify issues and come up with recommendations to mitigate them. We clearly are doing something wrong... it would be amazing if we could get the same amount of train for our $$ as western Europe, which should be achievable. Achieving that level of cost effectiveness would allow us to actually build out a high speed and higher-speed rail network across the nation, which I fear is out of reach as things stand.

Do you know how long it takes to ride on HSR between London and Berlin?
Do you know how many trains it have to take?
An interesting read.......
https://www.rome2rio.com/s/London/Berlin
Fly London Heathrow to Berlin (direct) 4 hours, 44 minutes
HSR Train via Cologne (with 2 transfers) 9 hours, 33 minutes
Slow Train (with 1 transfer) 11 hours, 3 minutes
Drive via Eurotunnel (with loading and unloading a train)10 hours, 27 minutes
Drive via Ferry (with loading and unloading a ferry) 11 hours, 40 minutes

Except for the flight, which can have delays as well, all the others modes have potential delays, with HSR with 2 transfers very likely to have a busted transfer.

Here's a YouTube video of an English blogger trying to get as far east as possible from Greenwich using public transport. Would you believe he only got as far as Warsaw, a distance of 1006 miles.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQYCtHln9w0&t=2s
Bing suggests 15 hours and 17 minutes by car. The blogger took 25 hours (a day with an hour advantage with a time zone).
The idea that HSR trains run distances over 500 miles is false. Assuming a 500 mile HSR line is the maximum distance in the USA, to travel between NYC and Chicago would require at least one transfer. To travel between Chicago and Los Angles would require at least 3, most likely 4 transfers.
So, a cross country HSR train ride would require a minimum of 4, most likely 5 transfers. At every transfer you could loose hours if the train is on time, and if late even more hours.
Cross country HSR lines for the USA would not be practical in any sense. So instead of dreaming about a country wide HSR network, we should be looking at profitable, or near profitable city pairs. Where there will be enough trains running to use the huge captail expense of the railroad corridor.

[subterranean]

Those are good points, but it also doesn't really doesn't paint the full picture. Places like Spain and Italy have made, and continue to make, improvements and expansions to their systems and they work very efficiently. The expansion of the Italian network was sited directly as having put Alitalia airline out of business.

Once you start adding up the time suck of driving to the airport early, parking, security checks, and then travel from the outskirts of a metropolitan area from an airport to the central city (where trains usually end their routes), the differences become much more negligible. For example, Venice to Naples is just over 5 hours via train (456 miles). It's an 8 hour drive. The shortest flight is 1 hour 15 minutes, but how early do you need to get there? How long did it take you to drive to the airport? How long did it take you to park your car, to check your luggage, to go through security? I'd be willing to bet it levels out to about the same 5 hours as the train ride, if not longer. And these aren't even the really fast trains.

[electricron]

Originally Posted by subterranean

Those are good points, but it also doesn't really doesn't paint the full picture. Places like Spain and Italy have made, and continue to make, improvements and expansions to their systems and they work very efficiently. The expansion of the Italian network was sited directly as having put Alitalia airline out of business.

Once you start adding up the time suck of driving to the airport early, parking, security checks, and then travel from the outskirts of a metropolitan area from an airport to the central city (where trains usually end their routes), the differences become much more negligible. For example, Venice to Naples is just over 5 hours via train (456 miles). It's an 8 hour drive. The shortest flight is 1 hour 15 minutes, but how early do you need to get there? How long did it take you to drive to the airport? How long did it take you to park your car, to check your luggage, to go through security? I'd be willing to bet it levels out to about the same 5 hours as the train ride, if not longer. And these aren't even the really fast trains.

Vience to Naples is 452 miles by car, I assume a similar figure for trains.
There's that 500 mile data point raising its ugly head again! Worse yet, you stated trains, so there are probably at least one transfer on that train trip.


Stop suggesting the distances in the USA are similar to the distances of a single country in Europe. We need to realize the distances in the USA are more similar to the continent of Europe, not an individual country.

[subterranean]

None of the HSR segments cover anything but regional routes of the U.S. and Canada. No one is proposing cross country HSR routs because they don’t make sense.

[Keep-SA-Lame]

Shocked to not see the San Antonio-Austin-Dallas corridor on this, it seems a lot more promising than a lot of the projects listed, something like 15 million people live along that 270 mile route. I have to assume it's some issue with the actual rail network? Like I know it's Texas, but why on earth does freaking North Dakota need a new long distance line and Texas doesn't need to boost frequency on the Texas Eagle? Seems crazy.

[sentinel]

It makes no sense that one of the largest hubs, Chicago, doesn't have any funding allocated for HSR?? Backwards.

[Keep-SA-Lame]

Originally Posted by sentinel

It makes no sense that one of the largest hubs, Chicago, doesn't have any funding allocated for HSR?? Backwards.

Amtrak just doubling down on the losing strategy of slow speed routes in the middle of nowhere. So disappointing.

[Busy Bee]

Much to the dismay of the dedicated Midwest HSR Association (now called HSR Alliance). Much of the problem with a midwestern effort towards a Chicago hub true HSR rail system is that it doesn't have a multi-state government sanctioned entity planning for it. In reality a Chicago hub HSR network really only has one state that would seriously push for it and put money behind it and that is Illinois. Michigan has made great strides in upgrading Chicago-Detroit for higher speed Amtrak service but even Michigan is not consistently governed by those that commit to the long term studying and planning of let alone the long term and massively expensive build-out of a true multi state hub and spoke HSR system.

Essentially this is an issue of political will. Illinois cannot force the hand of flanking conservative states (or at least Republican controlled) to commit to such a vision which would be absolutely necessary to fully cooperate for and fund. That is why in the meantime we can expect the basic investment in existing Amtrak infrastructure to raise speeds to 110mph as well as looking at restoring service to previously served markets but no grand vision for a Chicago centered bullet train network. It might be presumptuous but the painful irony is that if it wasn't for the fact our nation is composed of individual states, transport policy and initiatives would be directed from a national level and it's likely the midwest would, if not already operating one, actively planning or building a modern high speed network. Counterproductive inter-state hostilities, political ideologies and unshared visions prevent great things from happening.

[electricron]

Originally Posted by Busy Bee

Much to the dismay of the dedicated Midwest HSR Association (now called HSR Alliance). Much of the problem with a midwestern effort towards a Chicago hub true HSR rail system is that it doesn't have a multi-state government sanctioned entity planning for it. In reality a Chicago hub HSR network really only has one state that would seriously push for it and put money behind it and that is Illinois. Michigan has made great strides in upgrading Chicago-Detroit for higher speed Amtrak service but even Michigan is not consistently governed by those that commit to the long term studying and planning of let alone the long term and massively expensive build-out of a true multi state hub and spoke HSR system.

Essentially this is an issue of political will. Illinois cannot force the hand of flanking conservative states (or at least Republican controlled) to commit to such a vision which would be absolutely necessary to fully cooperate for and fund. That is why in the meantime we can expect the basic investment in existing Amtrak infrastructure to raise speeds to 110mph as well as looking at restoring service to previously served markets but no grand vision for a Chicago centered bullet train network. It might be presumptuous but the painful irony is that if it wasn't for the fact our nation is composed of individual states, transport policy and initiatives would be directed from a national level and it's likely the midwest would, if not already operating one, actively planning or building a modern high speed network. Counterproductive inter-state hostilities, political ideologies and unshared visions prevent great things from happening.

For there to be a Midwest HSR network, Amtrak or some other public or private entity would need to own most, if not all, of the tracks. The NEC works because Amtrak assumed ownership of most of it from Conrail, which assumed ownership from Penn Central while in bankruptcy. The NEC was and still is too valuable to lay vacant and unuse, hence the US government purchase and takeover.
If the US government and other state and local transit agencies was as diligent taking ownership of other railroad abandoned lines, there could have been a national network of railroad corridors for passenger trains. But alas, the rest of the country is apparently not as important as the Northeast.
As an aside, other transit agencies and states have been buying abandoned railroad corridors. DART bought hundreds of miles of railroad corridors in total from Cotton Belt, Missouri-Kansas-Texas, Southern Pacific, and Rock Island RRs, and gets criticized for using them for local rail transit.

[SoCalKid]

Originally Posted by electricron

Do you know how long it takes to ride on HSR between London and Berlin?
Do you know how many trains it have to take?
An interesting read.......
https://www.rome2rio.com/s/London/Berlin
Fly London Heathrow to Berlin (direct) 4 hours, 44 minutes
HSR Train via Cologne (with 2 transfers) 9 hours, 33 minutes
Slow Train (with 1 transfer) 11 hours, 3 minutes
Drive via Eurotunnel (with loading and unloading a train)10 hours, 27 minutes
Drive via Ferry (with loading and unloading a ferry) 11 hours, 40 minutes

Except for the flight, which can have delays as well, all the others modes have potential delays, with HSR with 2 transfers very likely to have a busted transfer.

Here's a YouTube video of an English blogger trying to get as far east as possible from Greenwich using public transport. Would you believe he only got as far as Warsaw, a distance of 1006 miles.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQYCtHln9w0&t=2s
Bing suggests 15 hours and 17 minutes by car. The blogger took 25 hours (a day with an hour advantage with a time zone).
The idea that HSR trains run distances over 500 miles is false. Assuming a 500 mile HSR line is the maximum distance in the USA, to travel between NYC and Chicago would require at least one transfer. To travel between Chicago and Los Angles would require at least 3, most likely 4 transfers.
So, a cross country HSR train ride would require a minimum of 4, most likely 5 transfers. At every transfer you could loose hours if the train is on time, and if late even more hours.
Cross country HSR lines for the USA would not be practical in any sense. So instead of dreaming about a country wide HSR network, we should be looking at profitable, or near profitable city pairs. Where there will be enough trains running to use the huge captail expense of the railroad corridor.

I wasn't talking about cross country routes, I was talking about 200-500 mile range networks that are built across the nation. Like the northeast corridor, the southeast corridor, Minneapolis-Milwaukee-Chicago, Chicago-Indianapolis-Cincinnati, LA-Phoenix, etc. I understand that long distance trains will never be competitive.

But my larger point is that we won't be able to build much of anything if we don't make bringing down infrastructure costs a national priority.

[Busy Bee]

Originally Posted by electricron

For there to be a Midwest HSR network, Amtrak or some other public or private entity would need to own most, if not all, of the tracks. The NEC works because Amtrak assumed ownership of most of it from Conrail, which assumed ownership from Penn Central while in bankruptcy. The NEC was and still is too valuable to lay vacant and unuse, hence the US government purchase and takeover.
If the US government and other state and local transit agencies was as diligent taking ownership of other railroad abandoned lines, there could have been a national network of railroad corridors for passenger trains. But alas, the rest of the country is apparently not as important as the Northeast.
As an aside, other transit agencies and states have been buying abandoned railroad corridors. DART bought hundreds of miles of railroad corridors in total from Cotton Belt, Missouri-Kansas-Texas, Southern Pacific, and Rock Island RRs, and gets criticized for using them for local rail transit.

Yes obviously public ownership would make things much easier but I felt like the larger midwest HSR issue was just a lack of cohesive agreed upon vision and then the state partnership necessary to make it happen. A Midwest HSR system would likely have significant dedicated greenfield corridors anyway. For the record I'm for nationalization of rail infrastructure and the leased access model. IMO it's clearly superior and it's something the country should have done in the 1950s when the long term challenges of the railroads were becoming clear, especially because and in the wake of the publicly financed IHS and the unfair advantage the trucking industry clearly was receiving. If that makes me a pinko or whatever so be it