I forgot how nice it is to use the train
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@bachophile said in I forgot how nice it is to use the train:
american exceptionalism
Indeed.
In the early to mid 1960s, it became obvious to the private railroads that passenger rail is a loser - costs more than it earns. So, in 1971, Amtrak, was set up by the government. The private carriers turned over their passenger equipment and Amtrak, while funded by the government to a great extent, is not RUN by the government.
The biggest problems are:
- Lack of funding - old equipment
- Lack of infrastructure - track not built for high speed travel
- The rails, for the most part, are owned by the private carriers (freight) and though Amtrak has a contract for service, it's not unusual to be sitting behind a slow-moving freight.
- The size of the country (I know, "but China"). Traveling from Chicago to Portland is about 2200 miles, which is related to #2.
"Now look here, you Baltic gas passer... " - Mik, 6/14/08
The saying, "Lite is just one damn thing after another," is a gross understatement. The damn things overlap.
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@george-k said in I forgot how nice it is to use the train:
The biggest problems are:
- Lack of funding - old equipment
- Lack of infrastructure - track not built for high speed travel
…
Won’t be fixed when elected legislators keep refusing to vote for high-speed rail funding. We hear voices (like this one, as one example) that claims to want national high speed rail yet think it’s proper only when privately funded.
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@axtremus said in I forgot how nice it is to use the train:
high-speed rail funding
Look at the boondoggle in California's HSR initiative. It's massively behind schedule, massively over budget, and massively too short (if that makes sense). In the more than 10 years since it was approved, it has 119 "under construction." Not completed, under construction.
This video will give you an idea of the scope of the progress:
Link to videoThe inter-city travel in Europe is of a much smaller scale, and therefore easier to implement than here in the US.
The only place where HSR is possible here in the US is where Amtrak actually owns the right-of-way: the Northeast Corridor. Even there, the "high-speed" Acela between DC and Boston only hits about 150 mph, and that's for a short stretch in Connecticut.
"Now look here, you Baltic gas passer... " - Mik, 6/14/08
The saying, "Lite is just one damn thing after another," is a gross understatement. The damn things overlap.
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I thoroughly enjoyed using the train traveling between Frankfurt, Munich, and Vienna… Looking forward to my next trip.
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@horace said in I forgot how nice it is to use the train:
Looks very comfy. It surprises me it’s cheaper than the car. How does that work out?
Well, the trip today is around 800km and costs 120 Euro for a first class ticket. The gas alone would set me back more than 100 euros...
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@horace said in I forgot how nice it is to use the train:
Looks very comfy. It surprises me it’s cheaper than the car. How does that work out?
I don’t know the price for a private train car, but a general ticket from Frankfurt to Vienna was $80 when I went. Driving would have been about 450 miles. The fuel and wear and tear costs would be about $200 in a car…
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Last train trip I took, pre-COVID-19, was in Canada. Short segments between Montréal, Toronto, and Ottawa, I don’t remember the specific order off the top of my head now. Didn’t even care if it was “high speed,” it still saved me more time compare to taking airplanes once I factor in time spent in airports, and overall cheaper too! A lot more leg room and a lot more comfortable overall. I could decline my seat to, like, 150°, lots of elbow room, etc.
In the USA, though, I don’t recall ever finding a train trip that’s cheaper than flights for the same origin/destination pair, and the train trips will take longer overall even after I factor in airport time.
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My best ever business trip about 3 years ago included a return train journey between Zurich and Milan, through the alps. I spent a fair amount of time looking out the window just saying 'I can't believe I'm getting paid to do this!'
Proud supporter of Plan 2525. Everything you think, do and say will be in the pill you took today.
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@doctor-phibes said in I forgot how nice it is to use the train:
My best ever business trip about 3 years ago included a return train journey between Zurich and Milan, through the alps. I spent a fair amount of time looking out the window just saying 'I can't believe I'm getting paid to do this!'
Let me guess, the train was filled with white males?
#CheckYourPrivilege
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I’ve done one overnight train trip on Amtrak. It was an expensive hell. Sorry, @George-K and I get that it’s a different experience when getting a private car, but at that kind of price I could drive to the destination and stay overnight at Ritz Carlton’s the whole way and still be ahead of the game…
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@axtremus said in I forgot how nice it is to use the train:
In the USA, though, I don’t recall ever finding a train trip that’s cheaper than flights for the same origin/destination pair, and the train trips will take longer overall even after I factor in airport time.
Northeast Regional service is definitely cheaper between Boston-NY-Philly-DC. Acela is probably more expensive though.
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And Acela is faster NY-Philly and a wash from NY-DC considering airport time.
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@jon-nyc said in I forgot how nice it is to use the train:
Northeast Regional service is definitely cheaper between Boston-NY-Philly-DC. Acela is probably more expensive though.
I once took the Boston-DC ACELA after a big snowstorm as they'd cancelled the flights. Some big-mouthed fucking twat from DC was directly behind me and talked at some poor unfortunate girl for the entire time about all the people he knew. If I'd been sitting in the airport I could have either walked away, or told a security guard that he was acting in a highly suspicious manner. As it was, I was trapped in hell for about 6 hours.
They don't factor that into the equation.
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@jon-nyc said in I forgot how nice it is to use the train:
@axtremus said in I forgot how nice it is to use the train:
In the USA, though, I don’t recall ever finding a train trip that’s cheaper than flights for the same origin/destination pair, and the train trips will take longer overall even after I factor in airport time.
Northeast Regional service is definitely cheaper between Boston-NY-Philly-DC. Acela is probably more expensive though.
The cost differences between the NE Regional and Acela are not trivial, but the time differential is.
Here's the price breakdown for a DC departure early tomorrow morning (about 7 AM). Note, there is no "coach" on Acela, they call it "business," and there's no "first class" on the NE Regional. The only upgrade is to business from coach.
So, if you want to save an hour and 15 minutes, "Business Acela" will cost you about $40 more than NE Regional.
That said, D4 and I rode Acela 1st Class from DC to Boston in 2015. Loved it.
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@jon-nyc said in I forgot how nice it is to use the train:
@axtremus said in I forgot how nice it is to use the train:
In the USA, though, I don’t recall ever finding a train trip that’s cheaper than flights for the same origin/destination pair, and the train trips will take longer overall even after I factor in airport time.
Northeast Regional service is definitely cheaper between Boston-NY-Philly-DC. Acela is probably more expensive though.
And the I-95 is a shit road to drive on.
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@ivorythumper said in I forgot how nice it is to use the train:
the I-95
No the in the northeast
Just I-95
That's a California thing
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You can get from DC Union Station to Arlington in 8 freaking minutes by train. If that's mot magic, I don't know what is.
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How California’s Bullet Train Went Off the Rails
Building the nation’s first bullet train, which would connect Los Angeles and San Francisco, was always going to be a formidable technical challenge, pushing through the steep mountains and treacherous seismic faults of Southern California with a series of long tunnels and towering viaducts.
But the design for the nation’s most ambitious infrastructure project was never based on the easiest or most direct route. Instead, the train’s path out of Los Angeles was diverted across a second mountain range to the rapidly growing suburbs of the Mojave Desert — a route whose most salient advantage appeared to be that it ran through the district of a powerful Los Angeles county supervisor.
The dogleg through the desert was only one of several times over the years when the project fell victim to political forces that have added billions of dollars in costs and called into question whether the project can ever be finished.
Now, as the nation embarks on a historic, $1 trillion infrastructure building spree, the tortured effort to build the country’s first high-speed rail system is a case study in how ambitious public works projects can become perilously encumbered by political compromise, unrealistic cost estimates, flawed engineering and a determination to persist on projects that have become, like the crippled financial institutions of 2008, too big to fail.
Political compromises, the records show, produced difficult and costly routes through the state’s farm belt. They routed the train across a geologically complex mountain pass in the Bay Area. And they dictated that construction would begin in the center of the state, in the agricultural heartland, not at either of the urban ends where tens of millions of potential riders live.
The pros and cons of these routing choices have been debated for years. Only now, though, is it becoming apparent how costly the political choices have been. Collectively, they turned a project that might have been built more quickly and cheaply into a behemoth so expensive that, without a major new source of funding, there is little chance it can ever reach its original goal of connecting California’s two biggest metropolitan areas in two hours and 40 minutes.
Fourteen years later, construction is now underway on part of a 171-mile “starter” line connecting a few cities in the middle of California, which has been promised for 2030. But few expect it to make that goal.
Meanwhile, costs have continued to escalate. When the California High-Speed Rail Authority issued its new 2022 draft business plan in February, it estimated an ultimate cost as high as $105 billion. Less than three months later, the “final plan” raised the estimate to $113 billion.
The rail authority said it has accelerated the pace of construction on the starter system, but at the current spending rate of $1.8 million a day, according to projections widely used by engineers and project managers, the train could not be completed in this century.
The state was warned repeatedly that its plans were too complex. SNCF, the French national railroad, was among bullet train operators from Europe and Japan that came to California in the early 2000s with hopes of getting a contract to help develop the system.
The company’s recommendations for a direct route out of Los Angeles and a focus on moving people between Los Angeles and San Francisco were cast aside, said Dan McNamara, a career project manager for SNCF.
The company pulled out in 2011.
“There were so many things that went wrong,” Mr. McNamara said. “SNCF was very angry. They told the state they were leaving for North Africa, which was less politically dysfunctional. They went to Morocco and helped them build a rail system.”
Morocco’s bullet train started service in 2018.
"California's politics are too dysfunctional. We're going to North Africa, where the people are sane."
The most direct route would have taken the train straight north out of Los Angeles along the Interstate 5 corridor through the Tejon Pass, a route known as “the Grapevine.” Engineers had determined in a “final report” in 1999 that it was the preferred option for the corridor.
But political concerns were lurking in the background. Mike Antonovich, a powerful member of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, was among those who argued that the train could get more riders if it diverted through the growing desert communities of Lancaster and Palmdale in his district, north of Los Angeles.
The extra 41 miles to go through Palmdale would increase costs by 16 percent, according to the 1999 report, a difference in today’s costs of as much as $8 billion.
