The Bering Express

Americans definitely don't have a lot of leisure time compared to other countries. In Europe for example, a lot of workers get the entire summer off, a model we should emulate here. The more leisure time you have, the more you can dream, think out of the box, think big. Americans are just so tired and so busy working they don't have time to imagine anything different than the status quo. As a result, they're reflexively dismissive of anyone proposing things too different than what they're used. Even such a minor change as the idea of an electric car is too much for many Americans to comprehend, never mind schemes like interconnected high-speed rail and local public transit. The only silver lining on the cloud is that the younger generation seems to be enthusiastically embracing these things. I guess this might be because most don't have positive experiences with auto travel. For many of them, auto travel means sitting in traffic jams, or seeing their friends killed in crashes. The problem is the under 30 crowd just isn't yet politically powerful enough to vote in people who will get the job done. I fully agree though that once America finally makes up its mind to do something, then watch out. I liken a America to a sleeping giant right now more than anything else. If we decide national HSR is a priority, then we'll have a system bigger than China's up and running in a decade.

Let's bring this back to the Bering Express.

Here is some information from Discovery Channel, it would def be a high speed rail project.

http://dsc.discovery.com/convergence/en ... ctive.html

gprimr1 wrote:Let's bring this back to the Bering Express.

Here is some information from Discovery Channel, it would def be a high speed rail project.

http://dsc.discovery.com/convergence/en ... ctive.html

That shows a "concept". There is no reason for a "high speed" rail line. Freight would be the only justification for such an extremely long railway almost entirely through unsettled country (Siberia and Alaska). What kind of freight? China would want raw materials and would want to export finished goods. That assumes that the present economic relations between the Americas and China would continue and intensify into the distant future. That is some assumption.

What about passengers? In a post-oil future both sea and air travel would be very different from what they are at present. Maybe there would be demand for passenger traffic but that is very problematic.

This project is so far in the future that we cannot predict the macro-economic conditions that would exist then.

the idea of enough people wanting to drive from Alaska to Siberia to justify a road deck is almost laughable .

David Benton wrote:the idea of enough people wanting to drive from Alaska to Siberia to justify a road deck is almost laughable .

Never mind the lack of railways, there are no roads in that part of Siberia.

george matthews wrote:

David Benton wrote:the idea of enough people wanting to drive from Alaska to Siberia to justify a road deck is almost laughable .

Never mind the lack of railways, there are no roads in that part of Siberia.

The reason why there are no roads or rails is because hardly anyone lives there.

These "fantasy" topics come up from time to time. I remember one where someone was asking why there is no railroad from Anchorage down the Pacific Coast to Prince Rupert. I suggested he take a look at the terrain along that route! (fjords, 8,000 ft. mountains)

A few years back, when I was still working as a consultant, someone asked for a "quick and dirty" projection of how much rail traffic might use a link from British Columbia to Alaska. Answer: less than 3 million tons a year (estimated), way less than enough to pay for it. That's why BCR took the line to Dease Lake out of service, and never laid track on the graded ROW from there to Watson Lake. No people, no traffic.

So now we're talking about a Bering Strait tunnel, from an area of Alaska where no one lives to an area of Siberia where no one lives. I've flown over that part of the world several times, and when you fly for several hours (at 550 MPH) without seeing so much as a road, you know that's empty country.

Oil, minerals and other such products don't need high speed rail, the distances are far too great to make HSR competitive with air travel, and the local population is non-existent, so this is hardly a candidate for HSR. I very much doubt it could compete on cost with ocean transport, even for manufactured goods, and not at all for bulk commodities. If there's water transport available, it is always the low-cost mode.

If you want to talk about fantasy rail projects, a tunnel from Spain to Morocco under the Strait of Gibralter is a whole lot more reasonable project than a Bering Strait tunnel.

Oh, and the Chinese aren't likely to continue to fund major rail projects. The proposed link to Myanmar has been quietly abandoned, and the recent HSR accident has cast even more doubt on their HSR program. So I wouldn't be looking for Chinese funding for this one, and good luck finding anyone else who can pay for it.

With all due respect, Mr. Bly, without exception, every "standard breaking" major rail project in America (including the trans-continental railroad) has had people that have said the same thing. Some perhaps less knowledgeable than yourself, some perhaps more. The verses are so similiar that you only need to plug in different key words here and there to make your opinion apply for any of them, which has already been done historically time and time again.

3rdrail wrote:With all due respect, Mr. Bly, without exception, every "standard breaking" major rail project in America (including the trans-continental railroad) has had people that have said the same thing. Some perhaps less knowledgeable than yourself, some perhaps more. The verses are so similiar that you only need to plug in different key words here and there to make your opinion apply for any of them, which has already been done historically time and time again.

And they've all been successful. Oops, how about that line to Key West?

those railroad projects were to open up new land for settlement . Noone wants to live in Siberia .

David Benton wrote:those railroad projects were to open up new land for settlement . Noone wants to live in Siberia .

They might if global warming continues.

I have to find it encouraging that while Mr. Mathews and I usually end up in fundamental disagreement on economic issues, there is enough room for pragmatism to assert itself on this subject so that we might one day see a uniform global rail system. It's just that all of us here will be long gone before the underpinning economic and societal driving forces take root ... if they do at all.

Couple of points:

The standardization of freight containers for international service has been under way for decades. Those of is who can recall the early days of what at the time was still called "piggyback" can substanitate how much of a struggle it was to define uniformly-compatible equipment, and how this was linked to the "real" rail-traffic revival that began ithe mid-80's

The ability of present-day rail-technology to deal with the climatic challenges has already been demonstrated on both sides of the Pacific. Again, the senior members here can recall that BC Rail (some of us still remember the Pacific Great Eastern) started an extension toward Alaska back in the 1970's, and "mothballed' it.

I don't think any but the most short-sighted and unrealistic among us dispute the reality of climate change ...it has been well-documeted, but there is also some strong evidence that it manifested itself at times well before industrialization would have been a factor. The simple fact that, as with the use of HSR systems as a "poster child", it was hijacked for short-term political gain and turned into the "globaL warming" scare-tactic by a collection of special interests with little regard for the far more powerful forces of basic economics has diminished its credibility among a more reserved portion of the electorate. The finite supply of fossil fuel is a far stronger argument, once the laws of supply and demand rule the day, as they surely will.

In the end, the emergence of a true rail-based global transport infrastructure depends upon the continued development of parliamentary democracy itself, and upon the spread of institutions whereby our basic disputes are resolved by the free exchange of both economic value and human opinion. The tacky "consumerist circus" has to be allowed to exist, indeed, to flourish on the surface because, as wise men observed two centuries ago, it's only when real suffering sets in that extreme "solutions" are proposed. People with less shallow thinking have to make the right decisions, and sell them to the readership of voth Pupular Science and People.

That's just the way it is. We won't be around to see the result, but a lot of the pieces of the puzzle have become more apparent in recent years.

Another article in msnbc today:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/44212283/ns ... ws-europe/

This article was linked to in a thread on Trainorders (Western railroad discussion), and there are some pretty good comments.

I remain skeptical. With respect to the comments above about "climate change", well, no one alive should doubt it, since the climate changes all the time. What we're considerably less sure of is *why* it changes, and by how much, and therefore what (if anything) can or should be done about it. As a friend at Canadian National Railway commented to me, it's all very interesting to see people planning for rising sea levels and other effects of the presumed "global warming" that is expected by some, but suppose the reverse occurs? CN would have a *lot* of trouble running trains underneath a mile-thick glacier.

There is only one continent in the world -- North America -- on which rail "land bridge" services compete successfully with ocean transport, and even here rail service isn't cheaper, but it's faster. An all-water route from Asia to the US East Coast carries about a seven-day time penalty, so the high-value goods take the train.

With the distances involved in a Bering Strait routing, and with the Russian and Chinese rail infrastructure unable to permit double-stacking of containers, freight service on the route wouldn't be price-competitive with water transport and might not even be time-competitive. Also, with a paucity of local traffic to pay the costs, presumably the through traffic would have to bear the full cost of operation and maintenance. That would make it a non-starter, economically.

I was involved with some proposals to test Asia to Europe container service. One test train was run from Shanghai to Hamburg. It took three weeks. The ocean trip was actually faster.

So when you figure the distance, the break of gauge (from Russian to North American), and customs issues, this idea is pure fantasy. It's fun to dream, though.

So when you figure the distance, the break of gauge (from Russian to North American), and customs issues, this idea is pure fantasy. It's fun to dream, though.

Two breaks of gauge if you want to get beyond Vienna.

Have people worked out what the Northwest Passage will do to trade with Europe?

And by the way, whatever they think in the US, climate change is happening and the cause is known, and also the remedy.