CarterB wrote: ↑Tue Jul 14, 2020 6:01 pm
Other than for the 500, who wants to go to a cornfield with electricity...Indy?
Indy is more a “have to go” than a “want to go”
Maybe it’s sports, maybe events like Gencon, maybe some other sort of business since it’s such a corporate city. I’ve never heard of it as an entertainment town, but I’m also not an expert.
Jeff Smith wrote:Don't know if it's been said, but Virgin, interstate median.
Pretty sure it’s been said by a poster whose name rhymes with “Chef Myth”
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But let’s see this through. I think the traffic is there (will be there after COVID is controlled) for three daily turns to start, up to five or six round trips within ten years. That is, between
Wolverine and
Downeaster levels of service. That isn’t enough for a private firm to justify building a line though, not when half the route is soybean fields and another quarter is tract houses
You could justify a suburban stop for both Chicago and Indy (Lebanon perhaps, though that’s an exurb), and you’d be daft to skip the Boilermakers in Lafayette.
It
is enough for the State of Indiana to invest. Indiana isn’t big on social programs, but y’all do love your infrastructure development like I-69 construction and I-65 improvements. They’re (planning on?) building the NICTD West Lake Corridor south to Munster/Dyer; that’s nearly a quarter of the way to Indy. And as the state-owned railroad, NICTD is a friendly connection from Dyer into the heart of Chicago via Metra Electric; Amtrak never had a friendly connection into Union Station from Dyer.
And let’s run it off DC catenary. It’s essentially free energy - if you’ve ever driven through Indiana you’ve seen thousands of wind turbines, turning day and night. Add a hundred more on state-owned property, pair them with substations and rectifiers, and sell the excess power on the grid. It solves the first-mile problem in Chicago too, and you would only need diesels for rescues.
“But 1500 VDC isn’t suitable for high speeds! And it isn’t a standard voltage!” True, 1.5 kVDC is a little marginal for high speeds (you can do it, but you have to deliver a lot of amps), but step it up to 3000 VDC and now you’re talking. Trenitalia’s older ETR450 and ETR460 run 250 km/h on 3.0 kVDC every day (a hair over 150 mph), and I think their new ETR600 and ETR610 do the same. Just have the voltage break at Dyer (or Lowell if the extension ever happens) and you’ll be good, since it’s nearly no trouble for DC equipment to shift from full to half-voltage (and operate at half-speed.)
I have another post in the works about operators and route, but that’s later.