electricron wrote:Why study something you really do not wish to build? They really want to, that is my point.
Between Portland and Olympia there is a fairly straight power line a HSR train could follow 3-5 miles west of I-5. Northeast of Olympia, to Seattle will be more challenging to find a route, but not impossible if you look at vertical instead of just horizontal solutions. Going vertical will definitely cost more to implement, but vertical solutions have not deterred WDOT in the past.
I have a stack of rail plans of ambitious projects between Portland and Eugene and Portland and McMinnville, repeated about every five years, that all say the same thing: It's technically feasible, it will never pay for itself nor attract significant ridership off highways. Study, after study, after study.
Well, there was one study that actually suggested upgrading a one-time interurban railway that currently is limited to freight trains moving 20 MPH on 90 pound jointed rail would be cheaper to upgrade for passenger service, than the paralleling Union Pacific (ex-Southern Pacific) mainline to "upgrade" it to passenger service - never mind, passenger trains already run on the track.
You also ignore the fact that if you build a straight line 3-5 miles west of I-5, you have to somehow find a way to build a track through either Portland's industrial area or through Forest Park, one of the nation's largest wilderness parks, that climbs to an elevation of over 1,000 feet above sea level (the industrial area sits around 40 feet ASL), and then build a massively huge bridge somewhere over the Columbia that has a minimum clearance of at least 197 feet at the high water mark to clear oceangoing ships, will likely bypass Longview and Centralia, and then force a sharp curve at Olympia or a massive slowdown to access Olympia (remember, even today's Amtrak trains don't stop in Olympia, they stop over six miles away in an exurban sprawling residential neighborhood that used to be farmland).
Or we can build another floating bridge over Puget Sound, like WSDOT intended to do some 50 years ago when it bought up a bunch of ferry lines as a temporary measure until the bridges were built. 50 years later, we're still running the ferries, but the plans for the floating bridges are sitting in a dusty old file cabinet somewhere in Olympia.