Railroad Forums
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FRN9 wrote:Do you mean building alongside existing roads in general or just to get out of NYC? I am assuming that the roads won't be straight enough for LGV tracks to allow for trains to go 220mph.Newly built TGV lines tend to follow motorways rather than old lines. There's a lot of talk here about resurrecting old lines for fast routes. In Britain it cost more to increase the speed on the West Coast line than a completely new TGV line would have cost - and the refurbished line isn't very reliable anyway.
TGV trains can share tracks with existing trains, but is this an issue for FRA certification given the crash test issues?
george matthews wrote:As to whether TGV trains can use ordinary tracks, that's for the US to sort out. The Regulations need to be changed.Under our current moronic FRA regulations, the TGV is effectively illegal. Even California's separated system is getting the FRA to stick their nose into it.
Interestingly, the FRA can't regulate you at all if you're not 4 ft 8.5 inches.That is bizarre. How does that come about?
george matthews wrote:It's the way the legislation's written.Interestingly, the FRA can't regulate you at all if you're not 4 ft 8.5 inches.That is bizarre. How does that come about?
BART uses Spanish gauge.
lpetrich wrote:NYC - Chicago strikes me as a rather long shot, even assuming TGV speeds. To get an idea of what one may expect, let us estimate the speed of the Paris-Lyon TGV. Its best scheduled time is 1h 51m, and the distance along paralleling highways is 289 mi, giving an average speed of 156 mph.Great points. I have a few ideas that could perhaps make these choices better.
Let us now consider various NYC-Chicago routes, using Google Maps highway distances, as with Paris-Lyon.
First, the populations of those two cities' metropolitan areas: 18.8m and 9.8m. Most of the cities along the way are not nearly as populous.
All the routes will share Cleveland, OH as an intermediate stop. Its population is 2.3m, one of the largest in between. Nearby Akron has 0.7m, and is thus less suitable.
Cleveland is at a respectable distance from Chicago for HSR service: 344 mi, or a travel time of 2h 12m. Toledo has 0.7m people and South Bend 0.1m.
The shortest NYC-Chicago route is by I-80 through central Pennsylvania. Its distance is 806 mi and its travel time 5h 10m. The largest city along the way is Youngstown, OH, at 0.6m, and my former home of State College, PA is 0.04m. It is also a very mountainous route.
Looking southward and using the PRR/NS/Amtrak ROW through Philadelphia, at 5.8m, Harrisburg at 0.5m, Pittsburgh, at 2.5m, and Youngstown, I find 883 mi and travel time 5h 40m. NYC - Pittsburgh would make a respectable HSR route at 406 mi or 2h 36m, though it would require much construction in western Pennsylvania's mountains.
Looking northward to NY's Southern TIer and the former Nickel Plate route through Scranton, PA, at 0.5m, Binghamton, NY at 0.2m, and Erie, PA at 0.3m, I find 890 mi and 5h 43m. It is also rather mountainous, and only parts of it may be Nickel Plate (I'm recalling an old map).
Further northward to the NYC/CSX Water Level route through Albany, at 1.1m, Syracuse, at 0.7m, Rochester, at 1.1m, Buffalo, NY, at 1.3m, and Erie, I find 972 mi or 6h 14m. Construction will be the easiest, but it will be the slowest route, at over 1 hour more than the most direct route. The NYC - Buffalo distance is 435 mi, or 2h 47m. It is a bit of a stretch for HSR, but it is still reasonable.
Summary:
The shortest route goes through a lot of thinly populated mountains. A Philly-Pittsburgh route would be somewhat longer, but it would require less mountain construction, and it would serve some respectable-sized populations. An Albany-Buffalo route would be even longer, but it would require even less mountain construction, and would still serve some respectable-sized populations.
It would be difficult to justify a NYC-Chicago HSR line unless one could serve cities in between, meaning that one ought to use use either the Philly-Pittsburgh route or the Albany-Buffalo route. This would make it a concatenated-corridor route, with many of its passengers going distances shorter than the complete route.
2nd trick op wrote:Youthful enthusiasm to the contrary, I can't see any brand-new separated-grade HSR system east of the Mississippi emerging due to the high costs of right-of-way and NIMBY opposition. If passenger rail service is to evolve into a significant player in the Middle Atlantic, Great Lakes, and Upper Midwest regions, it will have to be by a gradual upgrade of speeds along existant routes .... not that far-fetched a proposition if energy pressures continue to diminish the suitability and comfort of long-distance auto travel.You bring up a good point with the idea of reusing existing rail, but here is the argument for a new TGV style route:
And given that scenario, the competition for the current limited supply of rail capacity is likely to intensify, with the former NYC "Water Level" Albany-Buffalo-Cleveland-Chicago route as the principal object of contention. Since most of this route formerly supported four main tracks, the capacity should be there, but if technology gradually pushes speeds upward, 80MPH to 110MPH to 150MPH, the old disparities which first led to the development of four-track mains will reappear, and that, in turn, leads to the safety conflicts first spawned by the Chase accident to twenty yers ago.
A revival of the former West Shore might be possible in some areas: CSX still uses one portion, now single-tracked, as a bypass around Rochester, but I'm not sure what has happend regarding development in other areas. So another alternative might be to use the former Erie main (now part of NS), much of which is still intact as far west as Youngstown/Akron, and has the advantage of bypassing Buffalo, for diverted freight. But there remains a small issue of CSX' attitude toward diversion of its traffic to a line owned and dispatched by its principal competitor, not to mention the Gulf Summit grade, a very hefty consideration in a time when energy efficiency, and the simple physical obstacles which determine it, are usually a prime concern of top freight rail executives.
With regard to a service via Harrisburg and Pittsburgh, the issue is probably less contentious; NS began proposing an alternative transcontinental route via Roanke and Memphis several years ago. But a check of topographic maps shows that the high cost and slower speeds mandated by bigger physical obstacles, and the curvature they dictate, sets in not at Altoona, but at Harrisburg. East of the Keystone State's capital, the former RDG East Penn line would be a more direct approach to New York, but the three-dozen-or-so freights which presently use it would have to be either accomodated with extra track capacity (with the safety concerns cited above), or diverted by reactivating the former PRR Trenton Cutoff.
The grade-centered issue is nothing new; historians of the old Philadelphia and Erie, which became Pennsy's Northern Division, have long recognized that things might have turned out differently if that line had built from Driftwood, Penna, to DuBois (using the lowest crossing of the Appalachians by rail, requiring no helpers, and at one time home to a B&O/BR&P line as well) then turned toward the lakes. And until the crash of 1929, both PRR and the Van Sweringens had visions of a freight-only trunk line bypassing both Pittsburgh and Buffalo, thereby freeing up more capacity for passengers.
But the central point remains that creation of an East Coast-Midwest HSR network isn't likely to be addressed unless the proposed California plan becomes an unqualifed success, and at that point the short-sighted reduction in Eastern trunk line rail capacity will become a major factor. And the high cost and fixed nature of the plant guarantee a need for public-sector involvement, with all the wrangling and delay that that condition entails.
) and since almost every Penn State grad used to get some exposure to the earth and mineral sciences, I think he will back me up on some of these observations.
