American Intercity rail service is slower today than it was in the 1940s.
Here is the full article, by train expert Mark Reutter. It is a good look at some of the obstacles facing a successful high-speed rail program.
High-speed rail fact of the day
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So, you are saying that effective nationalization of intercity human transport rail wasn’t a good thing.
1983 Popular Mechanics magazine — bullet trains coming soon!
http://books.google.com/books?id=zNgDAAAAMBAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_hp#v=onepage&q=&f=false
The greatest advantage of very fast trains is that it takes (relatively) narrow corridors of land, while providing huge transport capacity. A highway of silimar capacity would be several times as wide.
These factors are important in densely populated countries like France, Italy, Germany, the Benelux, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, China. I am not so sure about the USA, perhaps some regions like coastal California.
Colin,
In general what is screwing road building and maintenance right now is funds being siphoned off to poorly used forms public transit. If one want lots of public transit that is relatively cheap, that has low pollution to miles figures, etc. buy lots of buses.
It would help if railroads didn’t have to pay property taxes on the rail infrastructure and the land under it. Either that, or property taxes should be paid for the roads to the communities they run through based on the local tax needs.
Why not sell the roads to private corporations and then tax the roads as property, and then let the private corporations charge for the use of the roads to maximize profits while maintaining the roads. If a road is found by the corporation to be unprofitable, thn it can allow the road to decay, and when it is no longer usable, let it become idle.
If this is the superior model for rail which competes with roads, why not apply that same model to roads?
Why do we have communist roads and capitalist rails?
I’m so tired of all this focus on rail. If we really want to be serious about it, BRING BACK THE CANALS!
I find jokes always work best when you repeat them. Let me know if anyone wants me to explain it, too. Oi.
Indeed, kebko. Last year I took my boat all the way up and back the Intracoastal Waterway (ICW). Some of it is quite historic. I read up a bit on the subject of canals vs. rails, and the debate was oddly similar to rails vs. roads today.
Personally, I was quite happy to watch manatees mating along a taxpayer subsized stretch of canal south of Melbourne.
Jon Kay points out something most American passenger-rail fans ignore: rail is plenty profitable, for moving freight. The article points out that freight traffic makes high-speed passenger service nearly impossible, but glosses over the amount of freight which goes by rail.
Now that I’m thinking about it, the article doesn’t even say why passenger rail has gotten slower. The problem is superelevation on curves. On curves, trains don’t have to slow down, or have to slow down less, when the outer rail is raised a little bit above the inner rail. In the 1940s and 50s, when railroads ran first-class passenger trains, superelevation was 4-5 inches, allowing those trains to run faster. Since then, not only have tracks deteriorated, but also railroads have shifted their business to heavy freight. Heavy freight trains chew up the tracks, restricting the amount of safe superelevation: the FRA permits up to 4″, whereas in Germany 6.3″ is possible. Those trains also run more slowly, so superelevation has to be lowered to prevent them from toppling.
Whenever the subject of railroads and mass transit comes up, I have to point to the RUF (Rapid, Urban, Flexible) transportation system out of Denmark. http://www.ruf.dk/ It uses private dual-mode electric vehicles running on the roads or up on a guideway. Solves a lot of the problems that prevent people from using public transportation.
@Jon Kay, Alon Levy: It sounds like having freight and passengers use the same track isn’t really good for either (but especially the passenger service). Why not have one set of tracks for slow heavy freight and another for fast passengers? 100 passengers don’t want their trip to take an extra half hour but 100 tons of coal don’t really mind, or at least they don’t complain.
If the design incentives and traffic considerations are that divergent, build parallel tracks. (Or even non-parallel tracks, if the two types of trains are more efficient going to different places.)
Why not just have freight trains, primarily, and get over “being just like Europe” and having widespread passenger rail?
(Or, as we are now, restrict it to its own tracks in the few places it can pay for itself or come close?)
Indeed, it’s not impossible to run freight trains at 180kph (outside of cities and anywhere they need to stop)… but it is impossible without rebuilding the rail system (and god help you with all those rail crossings).
Would it be worthwhile to do that simply to run freight trains faster (and less efficiently in terms of cost per ton per mile; remember that most freight isn’t in that big of a hurry, and will happily trade speed for cost)?
Like many of the statements in Reutter’s article, the claim that intercity passenger trains today are slower than in 1940 is not true. The fastest trains in 1940 had top speeds of 110 mph, while the fastest today have top speeds of 150 mph. The average speed in 1940 was around 30 mph; the average today is 45 mph. This is because in 1940 there were lots of milk-run trains; today, the only intercity trains left are what in 1940 would have been called express or limited trains.
What is true is that, on some routes — such as Chicago-Minneapolis and Chicago-St. Louis — the fastest trains in 1940 were faster than the fastest today. But only on some routes and the average on even those routes was probably slower than the average today.
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