High Speed Rail and Amtrak News

[EastPDX]

... Oregon decides that we need dedicated rail capacity. We are not practicing what we preach. Washington is years ahead of us. We spend all of our State transportation costs on roads that very few people use. We are a big state with many miles of paved roads over many rivers; hills, and over many ranges.

I think the ODOT needs to spend some of their research cash on the cheapest, smoothest , greenish, road design so all county roads can start implementing less costly road maintenance budgets. (Think gravel, sand, and strong, porous brick to move the water off the surface fast. Maintenance on bricks is much cheaper than repaving. Larger trucks are then banned on these county roads and smaller delivery trucks are used on the county roads. More jobs for trucking industry!!! Less money spend on supporting the big rigs.)

I think each region (e.g., Willamette Valley, Southeast Oregon) will need to decide what is more important (having pavement everywhere or moving the most people and goods). The State needs to understand that one size doesn't fit all. The planners and management at ODOT might talk about high capacity BUT THEY DO NOT PRACTICE IT. Example of this was when I went to some of the early Columbia River Crossing meeting and spoke about High Speed Rail (HSR) and moving the corridor to the Eastbank (no turns or Willamette River Crossings) and incorporating HSR into the design so we wouldn't have to spend billions later to get the dedicated corridor. I was listened to and then they moved on without much discussion at all. HSR at CRC was dropped early.

What bad planning and vision from my point of view. ODOT is very, very, locked into their view of the World and they know what is best for their citizens. It is a good old boys network base only on road construction with asphalt and concrete.

eP

[WestCoast]

I e-mailed ODOT, and boy was their response typical.

We have no plans to anything innovative or exciting. No vision and no leadership.

I thanked them for their efforts at all, but asked if there anyone in the pipe who might be a champion for HSR. I didn't hear back from them.

Maybe I should do it, if no one else is going to step up and make this an issue that gets solved quickly and gets infrastructure built before we're all dead.

[WestCoast]

rode the Cascade train up to B-ham a few weeks ago.

the cars were decent enough, but the train was SLOW, and always trailing a freight train.

It took close to 6.5 hours to do what a car does in 4.5.

Beyond awful

[pdxman]

I know EXACTLY how you feel westcoast. The train is incredibly unreliable. I will take the amtrak bus anyday over the train. The 3+ hour ride from portland to salem was the last time I will use the train. The train is extremely frustrating if you actually have to be somewhere by a certain time.

[Nutterbug]

Since it's such a long stretch without a stop between Vancouver BC and Bellingham, they should have a station at Blaine, WA, to serve the residents of the southeastern suburbs of the GVRD, so they don't have to go all the way to Pacific Central Station and back again, and the residents of northern Whatcom county, and in so doing, perhaps revitalize Blaine as a train connection town.

Ideally, White Rock would be the more suitable stop, with its larger population, but due to security and immigration issues, we can't have more than one stop on the Canadian side. With a stop at Blaine, passengers from Canada can cross the land border on their own, and board the train once they've already entered the US.

[PacificNW]

I ride the Cascades from Portland to Seattle every 3 months for my doctor's appointments. I upgrade to Business so that I normally don't have to deal with small kids/noise. I receive a $3.00 coupon to the diner. I would say that 90% of my trips have been super. I just started making the round trip from Eugene to Seattle with the same positive experience BUT if I plan my trip during flooding, etc. the trip can be a nightmare. The LA to Seattle train I would never even consider boarding..

[zilfondel]

I prefer riding the train from Portland to Seattle, especially since I always get stuck in 2-hour traffic on I-5 through Olympia and Tacoma. Train does pretty well in that corridor... they are also building a new bypass track from Tacoma to Lakewood, I heard it may shave ~15 or 20 minutes from the trip length, and eliminate delays from the Point Defiance tunnel.

[NJD]

A Federal panel (Passenger Rail Working Group or PRWG) have made a new recommendation for rail infrastructure improvements in the US, and call for an increase in auto fuel taxes to pay for it. Currently, the tax is at 18.4 cents per gallon, and the panel recommends an increase of 5-8 cents to help pay for these and other unfunded infrastructure discrepancies within the US highway system.



Note the already mentioned Cascade Corridor upgrade to 79-110 mph, but also the new Amtrak service from Portland to Boise, Salt Lake, Las Vegas and Los Angeles.

info found from: Susan Pantell With Light Rail Now Project Team · April 2008 www.lightrailnow.org

[CUclimber]

79-110mph still seems like it's setting the bar awfully low. While any improvement over passgner rail (especially in the Northwest) would be welcome, it would be nice to see a proposal with some more ambition.

Even at a constant 110mph with no stops it would still be 1:45 from Portland to Seattle, and that is a wildly unrealistic best-case scenario. 200mph, on the other hand, would give you a 1hr trip from PDX to Seattle, or an hour and a half from Los Angeles to Las Vegas; in my opinion, those are the sorts of trip times that would get the general population excited about using trains for those trips.

I hate to say it, but for a lot of these lines it sounds like we're finally catching up to 1960s Europe.

[NJD]

^ agreed, but Talgo trains (110 mph) do not require electrification, new ROW and complete grade separation. California's 700 mile HSR project (shown in red on map) will cost an average of $70 mil a mile or roughly $50 Billion because of these factors (original estimates were $39/mile, $30 bil total, California is still trying to figure out how to pay for it after the last $10 bil ballot failure and only able to get $15 bil from federal grants). So, the 466 mile Cascades corridor would cost $18 to 32 billion with construction costs rising every day. The 187 mile Portland to Seattle segment would cost $7 to 14 billion alone. Talgo tilting trains, upgraded track and crossings to allow up to 110 pmh speeds costs roughly $1-5 million per mile depending on urbanization and geographic features, which makes the entire Cascades route cost $0.5 to 2.5 billion. In a different political and social climate I would be with you all the way, but we have got to start somewhere and upgrading the system later WILL become a priority from those who control funding sources...

costs stated for the Cascades Corridor come from WSDOTs website

[zilfondel]

But even most high speed rail systems in Europe and Japan aren't even 186mph. I Germany, the fastest the train got that I was on was 150 mph. That is still pretty fast, tho!

I hate to say it, but for a lot of these lines it sounds like we're finally catching up to 1960s Europe.

Very true, but they had damn good rail service in the 60s.

[FrijolMalo]

Yeah, it's expensive, but how much would building a freeway or an airport cost? We really need to start reinvesting in rail infrastructure the way we invested in streets and freeways in the 50's.

[NJD]

^ I completely take back my above opinion. I just realized that the federal plan is for year 2050. That is purely asinine. By 2015 we should have 110mph service from Eugene to Vancouver, BC. By 2050 we should have 110-300mph service from BC to San Diego, PDX to Chicago, and so forth...

[WestCoast]

I posted a while back that I had contacted ODOT and the rail representatives.

It was clear that there was no vision, and no leadership to do anything great.


This isn't even a 'pie in the sky' type of thing, this is basic infrastructure.

110mph is insanely slow for decades from now. It's just insane.
If I had more free time, I would start a Friends of Trains to promote some of these issues.

I'm not sure why it is so far off the radar. It's infrastructure, investing in our own country and its people.

Why don't our tax dollars do that?

[Pavlov's Dog]

Originally Posted by WestCoast

I posted a while back that I had contacted ODOT and the rail representatives.

It was clear that there was no vision, and no leadership to do anything great.


This isn't even a 'pie in the sky' type of thing, this is basic infrastructure.

110mph is insanely slow for decades from now. It's just insane.
If I had more free time, I would start a Friends of Trains to promote some of these issues.

I'm not sure why it is so far off the radar. It's infrastructure, investing in our own country and its people.

Why don't our tax dollars do that?

It's especially frustrating when you consider that with the money spent on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan the US could have built true high-speed rail on every corridor on that report and had plenty of money left over. Instead of doing things to decrease our demand for hydrocarbons our policy has been to secure supply. Obviously the policy has gone very wrong.

[Nutterbug]

Originally Posted by Pavlov's Dog

It's especially frustrating when you consider that with the money spent on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan the US could have built true high-speed rail on every corridor on that report and had plenty of money left over. Instead of doing things to decrease our demand for hydrocarbons our policy has been to secure supply. Obviously the policy has gone very wrong.

GM, Ford, Chrysler, Exxon, Shell, Texaco, Chevron and Halliburton do not have interests in mass transit.

[mSeattle]

Originally Posted by Nutterbug

GM, Ford, Chrysler, Exxon, Shell, Texaco, Chevron and Halliburton do not have interests in mass transit.

Well, the American people should hopefully know how to change that now. If not, we're screwed for another 4 years.

[electricron]

Check out California's HSR web site.
It only approaches 200 mph in rural areas, in urban and suburban cities the fastest it goes is 120 mph or less.

The Talgo train sets can acheive a top speed of 150 mph on non electrified rural tracks design for high speeds. With grade crossings, and sharper curvatures of existing freight tracks, the best one can hope for is 110 mph on average.

The proposed Federal program upgrades mostly existing freight tracks, allowing financing for adding more double tracks, adding grade separations, installing modern CTC systems, and building bypass freight tracks around urban areas to move most freight trains away from out inner cities. It's goal to speed up both passenger and freight trains.

110 mph is still far faster than what Amtrak averages today on its long distance routes, a porkly 45 mph.

To go any faster, States will have to finance high speed rail projects between city pairs.

[JordanL]

Originally Posted by WestCoast

I'm not sure why it is so far off the radar. It's infrastructure, investing in our own country and its people.

Why don't our tax dollars do that?

Becuase it's rail. Any politician is going to be heistant to pay hundreds of billions for infrastructure that most people don't even know exists, let alone register as a travel option when planning trips.

[alexjon]

Yeah, ridership on Amtrak Cascades is near zero.