What I find odd about this is that... Trains are the go-to means of intercity transport across much of Europe.
The term "High speed rail" isn't strictly defined, but seems to kick in somewhere between 110 and 155 mph. Pretty much every intercity train in the UK is running at 125mph for at least some of their journey. Europe is full of functioning high speed rail networks - TGV, ICE, Eurostar, networks in Spain and Italy. If you include 125 mph networks then there's loads of them - and those older, slower high speed networks have more or less been profitable.
Even the US has a high speed rail corridor in the North East.
The author tries to make the argument that there's physical limits to high speed rail that mean it'll never catch on. But the limits are far more political than physical.
If you live in the UK or Europe, rail is the go to method of travel between cities.
Edit to add: the distance between LA and San Francisco is 382 miles. Almost exactly the same distance as between either London and Edinburgh and London and Glasgow. There's something like 22 trains a day on each route - more or less every half hour during the day. The time from city centre to city centre is better by train than plane or driving. That's not even a proper "high speed" train - the routes they follow were laid out in the 1800s.
> The author tries to make the argument that there's physical limits to high speed rail that mean it'll never catch on. But the limits are far more political than physical.
The author is showing considerable ignorance on the topic.
For decades it's well understood that railway top speed is lower than airwaily travel. That's irrelevant. For travelling, the key factors are door-to-door speed and rider comfort.
It makes no sense to look at plane speed as the defining factor because anyone onboarding to a flight has to endure mandatory 60m-90m waits within an airport to pass through security and embark, not to mention the fact that airports are very often located tens of km outside of city centers. Meanwhile, railway travel is hop on/hop off with central stations typically right in city centers.
Consequently, it's very well understood for decades now that high-speed railway is by far the fastest solution for trips up to a 600km-800km range. Above that threshold there's a tradeoff threshold with air travel, with longer travel distance favouring flights over train trips. Increasing high-speed rail's comercial speed only works to hike the crisp threshold where high-speed rail dominates air travel.
Read the article—the author prefaces with their experience riding trains all over the world and has worked in rail. There is a ton of detail, much more interesting than the conclusion.
A clarification. They’ve not worked in rail. They’ve worked in hyperloop. A fantasy technology that does not, and probably never will, exist.
Imagine being able to destroy the idea of constructing rail in a few paragraphs of a tiny blog and then choosing to work on hyperloop, which has all the problems mentioned about rail but also throws in creating and maintaining a vacuum pipe in addition.
> A clarification. They’ve not worked in rail. They’ve worked in hyperloop. A fantasy technology that does not, and probably never will, exist.
Hyperloop is a marketing project which is based on the assumption that a few PR drones can be lowder than anyone with any cursory knowledge on transportation engineering.
The same goes for the boring company, where the company tries very hard to pretend they invented digging holes in the ground while using COTS tunnelers.
Hyperloop was a fantasy project pitched by Elon so that he could continue selling more cars. The same way the big Auto companies of the early 1900's bought up railroads and trams and then tore them up, to sell more cars.
I understand where you’re coming from. It’s really a shame that this article has the conclusion in it. I finished it feeling optimistic about our ability to implement reasonable-speed rail in the US.
That doesn’t track, since I was responding to a comment implying the author was ignorant of rail infrastructure outside of the US.
As to the expertise, he seems unseasoned but in command of a lot
of facts. Which is why I think the conclusion is wrong despite the post being interesting and informative. Unfortunately, my fellow rail enthusiasts think I’m against them because I read the article and ignored the headline and first and last few sentences. :)
> The article takes the premise that HSR should go 320 kph (200mph) and then explains why that is infeasible in many places.
Top speed means close to nothing, and it's one of the reason why the definition of high speed rail is not tied to top speed.
Great Britain has a notorious high speed railway corridor whose top speed is only around 160mph, and the reason is that the railway line was designed with the express purpose of preserving a cruise speed close to the top speed of the trains available at the time.
It's absurd to talk about high speed railway if it was a drag race. The main challenge in high speed railway is making it possible for high speed trains to actually travel at speeds that high-speed trains can already reach. Lines need to overcome constraints imposed by speed, geography and infrastructure costs, and tradeoffs often lead solutions to not match optimal layouts to reach top speeds.
Also, whenever a train needs to serve an intermediate station, they need to spend a great deal of time decelerating, stop at the station to serve passengers, and accelerate again. Sometimes it's feasible for infrastructure operators to spend money on a sideline to skip that station, but on some cases that's simply not realistic. Take for example Paris-Amsterdam and Paris-Cologne, which have to pass through Brussels and where the bulk of the train trip is spent passing through the inner city of Brussels alone where the top speed is 20km/h.
And it’s not only the city-city times being better. I’d happily spend 1-2 hours more on a train ride because I’ll have a more comfortable seat and I’ll be able to read/work/sleep/… more or less uninterrupted the whole time.
Edit: also, that added comfort is exponentially higher for families who can share a table or even a private compartment.
London-Edinburgh is only just faster by train. There is not much in it TBH. It is about the break even point I guess.
There are other benefits like you can use your phone and get up and walk around more easily. If you go first class you can actually get some work done at tables and stuff. But the flip side is train travel is often 10 or 20 times more expensive than flying, so only worth doing if you can expense it IMO (or you get some huge off-peak super saver special one-time discount or whatever)
In cases where trains and planes are equally fast, trains basically always win on comfort. Much easier boarding, better legroom, longer time of being able to sit down and focus on your work, and so on.
But the flip side is train travel is often 10 or 20 times more expensive than flying, so only worth doing if you can expense it IMO (or you get some huge off-peak super saver special one-time discount or whatever)
The standard off-peak walk-up fare (i.e. the maximum you will ever pay) between London-Edinburgh is £82, and the peak-time fare is £176. Cheaper if you book a couple of weeks in advance.
It can cost less than this to fly sometimes, but in practice not by that much unless you’re doing awkwardly-timed no-baggage Ryanair flights from Stanstead or whatever.
I have done that trip hundreds of times over the years and I think I’ve only ever flown when engineering works made it in feasible to take the train. Usually it’s no competition.
Yes – if you're willing to fly from Stansted at 7:20am with no luggage, like I said above, you may be able to take a £14 Ryanair flight – though I doubt you can book this for tomorrow. If you can make these work, they're the cases where it's more cost-effective to fly.
A £197 train ticket is a walk-up, peak-time fare from Euston, which will take you via Birmingham. Not the way you'd to want to travel to Edinburgh – go off-peak up the East coast, and the walk-up fare is £82.
One of the good things about the UK rail ticketing system is that—while complex—all ticketing information is publicly available. You can look up the available fares between any pair of stations using the BR Fares site – e.g. https://www.brfares.com/!fares?orig=KGX&dest=EDB
As someone who has made this trip countless times, London-Edinburgh is sluggish. The UK's only true high-speed network is the Eurostar from London ('HS1'), under the channel.
Paris-Marseilles in 3.5 hours is a better comparator.
"Over longer routes, the relative hassle of getting to and from an airport instead of an HSR rail terminal is eroded by the higher speed of aircraft, even in places where the rail terminal is in a densely populated city center and the airport is way outside."
I think in the case of the US, the distance makes the difference. The trouble of checking in at an airport is factored out by the length of the journey. California to Los Angeles has a target time of 2 hours and 40 minutes. The train which I take in the UK most regularly runs for 2 hours, and that feels like a relatively long journey.
I think the issue is that in the US, most intercity journeys are much longer than this, which normalises air travel, meaning that rail ends up not getting a chance on the shorter routes on which it might be suitable.
The US is the size of Europe. You'd have to take a train from Lisbon to Kiev to have a similar to say NYC to SF. A intra state high speed rail network would make a lot of sense in the US. Especially in New England. Boston - NYC should be a nice one hour and a half trip from down town to down town.
"functioning" is an exaggeration. Most of the German trains are slower than 300kph most of the time. They are also often crowded, delayed or outright cancelled. They are also quite expensive, compared to planes.
I think the author has a very valid point when it comes to the cost of rail tracks. It's something the proponents always conveniently ignore. On top of that, a rail station has quite a limited capacity, especially if it's inside the city. The travel time between, e.g., Berlin and Paris is something like four to five times as long as by plane.
So unless someone develops a low-maintenance, high-capacity fast train, planes with ecofuel are probably going to win any fair competition.
> low-maintenance, high-capacity fast train, planes with ecofuel
is either existing?
> On top of that, a rail station has quite a limited capacity, especially if it's inside the city.
Traffic generated by rail station limited by capacity would require gargantuan airport to handle it, which would anyway require bus/train/car connections from within city taking even more space.
He is not entirely wrong about the capacity limits of the railway stations, though. European cities struggle with inadequate railway capacity all the time.
The main problem is that the original railway stations were laid out in about 1840-1870, for much smaller passenger streams, and today find it hard to cope with modern requirements (a lot of commuters from the suburbia). But given that there is dense city infrastructure all around them, the only way to solve this is to build a new station underground, which is hideously expensive and slow.
Berlin was somewhat "lucky" to have a good place to build their new Hauptbahnhof, a result of the former division of the city. Stuttgart is rebuilding and upgrading its railway network at a great expense, the construction works started in 2010 and are far from finished.
In Prague, there is a lot of discussion what to do with the rail network in the center. You cannot just tear down whole tracts of buildings in a historical city, so yes, we will have to go the Stuttgart route and who knows what the budget (and) time overrun will be.
I commute with a train daily. The lack of capacity is visible in chronic delays, sometimes up to 30 minutes. Fortunately I do not have to be at my office at a precise hour, but going to a medical appointment without wasting too much time is already a bit of a challenge. I even witnessed a 15 minute delay at 4:30 in the morning.
I can totally believe that. But it has 470 or so stations. That makes about 10k or so daily passengers per station. That's very roughly the same as Berlin. Additionally, the trains are quite slow, which ain't a problem for a metropolitan network, but you certainly cannot compare that system to a country- or continent-wide train network.
In London, the Kings Cross + St Pancras complex handles about 340,000 passengers per day, and is about 0.3km x 0.5km. Heathrow handles about 240,000 passengers per day, and is about 3km x 5km.
> The travel time between, e.g., Berlin and Paris is something like four to five times as long as by plane.
I think your estimate is quite off here: Train connections from Berlin to Paris take about 8.5 hours. Flights take 1 hour and 50 minutes plus the overhead time for traveling to and from the airport, security and taxiing. Just let's suppose that this will be 2.5 hours in total, which would be very fast. So we are comparing 8.5 hours with 4.5 hours. So, the factor is less than two rather than the four to five you suggested.
> "functioning" is an exaggeration. Most of the German trains are slower than 300kph most of the time.
This is a silly red herring. Top speed means nothing. The only key factor is door-to-door travel time, and it means nothing if a train goes 180km/m in some sections and 320km/h in others if in the end you reach your destination 1h earlier than b flying.
> They are also often crowded, delayed or outright cancelled.
Things that are completely unheard of in any sort of public transportation service, specially air travel!
Please look at the Netherland's Schipol airport, one of the largest in the world and often used as the paragon of well functioning hub, and how they've been systematically cancelling and delaying flights throughout the year.
> They are also quite expensive, compared to planes.
No, not really. Only the lowest-cost low-cost operators tend to beat high speed railway on price, but they often have flights to airports well outside of city centers or even in suboptimal terminals with all sorts of hidden costs, and ultimately lead to a slower suboptimal experience.
If you want a truly working high speed rail network look to Japan. Shinkansen trains are punctual and fast. That is possible with political will.
And yes, the German system is a fascinating mixture of really good parts and really bad parts. But while troubled, to large degrees it works to acceptable measure.
I don't think the problems with German rail apply universally. The prevalence of low-speed tracks and frequency of delays comes from a period of missing reinvestment following the (semi-)privatization of Deutsche Bahn. Not every network will have this issue.
You would never fly Frankfurt-Paris, because the train is a much faster, more comfortable option.
The Deutsche Bahn has significantly degraded over time, due to insufficient investment, but it's still an incredibly useful system.
If you want to see what's possible with current technology, look at Chinese HSR. Beijing to Shanghai is a 20% longer distance than Berlin to Paris, yet it takes only half as long by train (just over 4 hours vs. 8-9 hours). If such a connection existed between Berlin and Paris, it would be very difficult to justify flying.
CHSR is technologically impressive, but planning and operations of boarding and stations are superior with DB that treats HSR like normal trains and not ground-level planes (an issue with many HSR systems).
In Germany, the fact that you can just walk onto the platform at any time and that your ticket is checked after boarding is very convenient.
However, on-time performance in Germany is horrendous compared to China, so I'm not willing to call Germany's operations as a whole superior. If I had to choose between my train arriving within half an hour of the scheduled time and having to board airplane style, I would board airplane style.
most new&large airports are far outside of cities (example: Munich, Frankfurt, Berlin, ...) because of the enormous space needed and environmental problems is creates. Nearer airports will close operating at 10pm, whereas train stations will operate 24h no problem.
Large projects for new train stations/systems in major cities (Hamburg-Altona, Stuttgart, ...) take a long time, but they exist. Large new airport projects near (!) major cities here in Germany don't exist.
> Most of the German trains are slower than 300kph most of the time.
That's because Germany has dense population regions and there always will be stops in cities and a lot of passengers. It's an optimization question. Being able to run a train system with max 300kmph is much more expensive than at 250kmph and the advantages are not that huge.
> They are also often crowded, delayed or outright cancelled. They are also quite expensive, compared to planes.
Planes are always crowded with a tiny personal space, difficult to board/leave, difficult to work in, difficult to reach, subject to a complex passage on an airport with all its rules®ulations, longer upfront booking, ...
For example when I want to travel from Hamburg to Düsseldorf (400km) on wednesday morning, the price is around 35 Euros incl. local public transport tickets with my Bahncard 50 which I got from the company. There is no flight like that.
Hamburg/Munich: >600km. Already too long for a business trip by train. Cost 60€ with Bahncard 50 incl. local public transport tickets. Time: 6:30 center to center. Flight: much more expensive, unreliable (I remember been waiting on friday evening two hours on the runway for the start), Munich airport is 40km outside, the Munich airport has long transit times. Time from city center to city center by flight is around four hours. The travel costs about three times as much.
> Most of the German trains are slower than 300kph most of the time. They are also often crowded, delayed or outright cancelled. They are also quite expensive, compared to planes.
For certain longer trips, but if I want from Hamburg to Berlin, Frankfurt, ... I take the train.
> especially if it's inside the city
That's great: with an ICE I want to reach the city center and not some airport 40km outside (like in Munich). I want to be in a big hub where all the local transports are reachable.
High-Speed trains here are connecting centers of a large local public transport system: local trains, underground trains, busses, ferries, ... When I travel by train between Hamburg and another major city, the tickets for much of the local transport systems for the start end destination cities are already included.
Indeed. I had to fly between LA and SF while on holiday earlier this year, because the equivalent rail service takes over 11 hours. I’ve done those London-Scotland routes hundreds of times over the years and they are 4.5 hours end-to-end, and as you say this isn’t even on modern high-speed infrastructure.
I get that it may be impractical to introduce a continent-spanning national rail service in the US, but there are a whole bunch of costal corridors where rail is—from a functional standpoint—objectively feasible.
It's true, there are many corridors and routes, and not just on the coasts, where HSR would be quite feasible in America. The problem is that Americans refuse to see this and refuse to accept train travel as acceptable. You can talk until you're blue in the face about how many people transit regularly between LA and SF, or between DC and NYC and Boston, or between Houston and Dallas, and Americans will simply counter that a train between NYC and LA takes too long, and therefore trains are a completely unworkable solution anywhere in the whole country.
There's just no political will to implement true HSR in America and I don't think there ever will be.
I lìve in Europe and I have traveled maybe 10 times in my life travelling between euro countries. It's nice for city trips, but it's way more expensive than by car. And once you need to be outside of a city a train is not very convenient.
I took a look a few times at Berlin->Geneva, and it would have cost more by car adding in mileage costs and gas, vs. train especially if the train booking was not last minute.
That advantage vanishes when you have more than 1 occupant in the car of course.
However if you can work from the train, the advantage flips back to the train. It is priceless for being able to relax and/or be productive. However, I do like the monotony and semi-meditative qualities of driving long distances. But I don't like being stuck in traffic and construction zones.
This topic comes up periodically on HN and it typically ends in the same points:
1. Your entire country (UK) is smaller than 11 of our 50 states. The several hundred miles between London and Edinburgh pass through many smaller cities and towns, between which people travel. Between SF and LA is a pea soup restaurant and a handful of midsized, mainly agricultural settlements that can't be gotten around without a car (or pickup if we're being specific). SF/LAers aren't going to Stockton, or vice-versa.
2. Your entire continent, minus Russia, is smaller than the lower 48 states (2.5 vs 3.1 million sq miles), with a much higher population density and, again, actual places every 10 miles or so. I've bicycled across the US, there are stretches bigger than Western Europe that are full of nothin in particular.
3. Look at some population density maps. The US is light on corridors of sufficient size & density to make much sense for HSR considering the space between population centers: the Northeast (already served by HSR) and my native Chicago-Milwaukee-NW Indiana corridor (already served by commuter rail). Maybe Florida where they're actually building rail, surprisingly. Detroit area, maybe throw Ohio & Pittsburgh in (Amtrak partly covers it). The eastern 43% of China's land area (~1.6 million sq miles) contains 94% of the people (~1.3 billion people) See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heihe%E2%80%93Tengchong_Line
In Japan you can basically draw a single, ~1400 mile line from Hokkaido in the north to Kyushu in the south that hits most of the population centers. Actually, they did that for you, it's called the Shinkansen and it is awesome.
4. This is actually the main point but I thought I'd sh!t on passenger rail first. The US has the largest and most extensively used rail network on the planet earth. We just use it to move freight, which doesn't breath, eat, use the lavatory, attempt to explode the vehicle it's on, or (to stay my sarcasm for a moment) complain when it's delayed.
I haven't done the numbers here, but that probably offsets a lot more GHG/oil than replacing airports with passenger rail would.
5. To dovetail on earlier points, the US is largely defined by invisible cultural borders. To a disturbingly large extent, city people travel between cities and country people travel around the countryside. Each are often actually afraid of the other places. City people talk about 'flyover country' or make jokes about rednecks, incest, the banjo from Deliverance. Country people talk about 'inner city violence'. This is a newer, still emergent phenomenon and only partially true (hence it's placement last on my list).
All this said, I love Amtrak and ride when I get a chance to take a little time off and enjoy the scenic route. You see the country from a grounds-eye view that you can't from the air, and it's pleasant to walk around the cars and talk to people you otherwise wouldn't (I once chatted with Seth Green's mom - or a woman convincingly claiming to be Seth Green's mom - on the City of New Orleans). On the longer routes eg Empire Builder you can buy one ticket and stopover at interesting places along the way and get back on tomorrow's train with the same ticket. I'm looking forward to taking the train from Anchorage to Denali next year. But I'll be flying home at Christmas, with only 5 days off.
> Your entire country (UK) is smaller than 11 of our 50 states. The several hundred miles between London and Edinburgh pass through many smaller cities and towns, between which people travel. Between SF and LA is a pea soup restaurant and a handful of midsized, mainly agricultural settlements that can't be gotten around without a car (or pickup if we're being specific). SF/LAers aren't going to Stockton, or vice-versa.
This is true, but it's not a reason to discount train travel. San Francisco is the size of Edinburgh and Glasgow combined - and between them there's 40 odd services a day. I get that route regularly, and it can be standing room only the whole way.
You mean like airports? Or the existing rail infrastructure? Either way, additional HSR is doable, just not enough juice for the squeeze. Suburban commuter rail would have a higher bang:buck ratio
Tacking a separate question on for anyone who's read this far:
It looks like there's already a Union Pacific rail line from LA to SF, via Santa Barbara and hits Monterey/Santa Cruz along the way with some scenic ocean views. What would it have cost to simply upgrade this line to be able to handle some passenger train traffic at normal speeds, like Amtrak does already? Wouldn't that be online by now?
While the amount transferred is impressive, much of it is low-value a-to-b bulk shipments. With coal drying up in the near future, that's going to be a major issue.
The term "High speed rail" isn't strictly defined, but seems to kick in somewhere between 110 and 155 mph. Pretty much every intercity train in the UK is running at 125mph for at least some of their journey. Europe is full of functioning high speed rail networks - TGV, ICE, Eurostar, networks in Spain and Italy. If you include 125 mph networks then there's loads of them - and those older, slower high speed networks have more or less been profitable.
Even the US has a high speed rail corridor in the North East.
The author tries to make the argument that there's physical limits to high speed rail that mean it'll never catch on. But the limits are far more political than physical.
If you live in the UK or Europe, rail is the go to method of travel between cities.
Edit to add: the distance between LA and San Francisco is 382 miles. Almost exactly the same distance as between either London and Edinburgh and London and Glasgow. There's something like 22 trains a day on each route - more or less every half hour during the day. The time from city centre to city centre is better by train than plane or driving. That's not even a proper "high speed" train - the routes they follow were laid out in the 1800s.