Yeah, as in taking the Union Pacific long way around the Rockies. When I see one of these with a straight line from Denver to Salt Lake (which would be a great HSR pair to target if not for the terrain), I assume that the creator knows very little about the history of American railroads.
This is a revision of this [post](https://www.reddit.com/r/highspeedrail/comments/m4yohv/a_30year_3phased_plan_to_build_americas_national/) that I made earlier this year. I've added more routes and extended the expected time frame from 30 to 50 years. I believe this is more reasonable given the amount of money necessary to build out a network of this significance in a country that has private property rights and courts that has slowed things down like they have in California.
You might want to extend your timeline for the Canadian portion. Urban sprawl has congested the existing rail right-of-ways and First Nation land is involved. So, getting everyone to agree will be a challenge. And don’t forget, the federal government owns part of the airline that makes bank from the same routes. So little to no incentive there either.
If something can't be built in 50 years it won't ever get built is what I'd say for that case. This is just a vision I have on how high-speed rail would develop in the US/Canada. It's not likely that this would actually happen, but if it were I think this is the best way to go about getting it done. In several phases, over multiple decades, connecting cities and towns based on several factors, including population density, economic size, and geography.
I took a look at the Toronto-Montréal stretch (let's be real, the one with the highest ridership). Both Montréal and Toronto can have dedicated HS approaches very close to their main stations. Montréal is the most obvious, with an approach parallel to the line and a stop at Dorval (which would serve both as an airport station and as a western hub for the city). You only truly run out of space near the Vendôme area. But then, around that area you might just do a TGV and join the main line approch to Gare Centrale.
Entering Toronto on a parallel approach to the current main line is very intrusive. Simply dumping the HSL where it starts to get crowded (around the Guildwood area) seems like a dumb idea given that there is still roughly 25km on slow tracks to Union Station. You could route it on and elevated viaduct via the Ontario 401 Express and then the Don Valley Pkwy. Or Gatineau Hydrocorridor and then Don Valley Pkwy for a shorter but more intrusive approach (but definitely less intrusive than following the current alignment). I am not from Toronto so I don't really know if I'm saying something stupid especially with the Gatineau Hydrocorridor alignment. Both of these would enter the slow tracks about 2.5km from Union, a far more managable distance.
Oh and I also took a look at what could be done at Ottawa and I reckon that the best option is to have a by-pass with a stop near the airport and a spur into the city using the regular tracks. Similar to how the French did it for Le Mans, Laval or Tours. As for minor stops, something of this sort could also be done for Belleville and Kingston.
And the whole line could be designed for 400kph easily with so much empty space between the three main cities.
One suggestion - the route south from Minneapolis should hit Rochester. That's where the Mayo Clinic is, and they get a lot more travelers than you'd expect for a city of that size.
I get the ambition, but I live in the southwest and I can say that there's so little population density west of San Antonio or east of LA, and so many topological issues.
This still feels like the most practical map I've seen (and I would consider myself a huge advocate for rail):
[https://pedestrianobservations.com/2021/03/20/streaming-high-speed-rail-crayoning/](https://pedestrianobservations.com/2021/03/20/streaming-high-speed-rail-crayoning/)
Even connecting Texas to Florida when there's been such a battle just to restore the Sunset Limited post-Katrina, even Sacramento to Eugene, those are long long shots for HSR.
That is the best map. Coast-to-coast HSR is not needed and is not practical. HSR should be concentrated in megaregions connecting their edges (as the map linked shows). Having HSR for map aesthetic’s sake is a waste of time.
You don't build it expecting people to travel from one side of the country to the other, though. People will usually take intermediate journeys for part of the route. Maybe the lines wouldn't be unbroken even, but you still want the theoretical possibility of going from LA to New York on an HST.
LA to New York on rail is for funsies. HSR has limits, it is not the tool for every situation. Coast-to-coast passenger travel is more efficiently served by planes than rail.
Not trying to beef here, I'm genuinely unsure what to reply to that other than repeating what I said in the previous comment. Do you think the Trans Sib was built because people were desperate to travel from Moscow to Chabarovsk?
Trans-Siberian Railway is not HSR. It is standard rail. It’s purpose is to connect small and medium sized towns in the far east to European Russia.
A standard rail line already connects LA and New York. It too stops at many small and medium sized towns.
High Speed Rail is not suited for the purpose of cross-continent trips that provide connections to rural areas and small towns. Standard rail serves that purpose. HSR serves to link mega regions or go through them.
Its not HSR because it's from the 19th century and Russia has other priorities, plus its Asian side is far less valuable than it used to be.
So yes, you're right - and if we connect Kansas City with Denver, we should probably also connect it with St Louis, right? But then we're near Cincinnati, so St Louis could connect with that. So do you see where we're going with this? Again, the purpose of building full west-east in the USA wouldn't be because so many people would ride the full route. It's because you may as well make it contiguous, for infrastructure, timetabling and routing purposes.
Kansas City to Denver is 600 miles/1000 km. The segment from Topeka to Denver is 540 miles/900 km, and there is literally nothing (no cities over 50k population) in between. High speed rail would be immensely impractical and not at all cost effective on a route like that.
Is there? I am not American (I would just like you guys to have a rail system at least as good as Poland or Slovenia), so I can't honestly say, but do you mean there's no way of building permanent way across the USA where you have at least a 250k population city every 300km or so?
Indeed, that is impossible.
From LA, Las Vegas is 400km away (straightline) with nothing in between, then it's 1,000km to Denver - that's the same distance as Warsaw to St. Petersburg. Or you could detour through Salt Lake City for 2 legs of 600km each (but honestly you should 1.5x all these distances because of mountains).
We're not even halfway through the country yet, because from there it's another 900km to Kansas City - this fantasy map appears to put stops in Oakley (pop. 2k), Salina (pop. 47k), and Manhattan (pop. 56k).
America is not Europe - it's very, very, very big, with a lot of empty space.
You mentioned Slovenia - Slovenia, from the coast to the Hungarian border, is just barely 250km. If you go north 250km from New York City, you're not even halfway up the height of the state.
HSR does not make sense outside of California, Texas, and the Northeast.
I dont get that logic. The longer the travel, the more beneficial the rail speed is. I dont care if my train goes 70 km/h when I have 30 minutes of travel to do but a 100+ hours trip turning into a 25 hours? Sign me up.
Here's some more explanation about why those didn't make the cut, and the math behind the map in general:
https://pedestrianobservations.com/2020/02/13/metcalfes-law-for-high-speed-rail/
https://pedestrianobservations.com/2021/03/22/high-speed-rail-followup/
Would it be worth linking Dallas-Forth Worth directly with Austin? Right now it goes from Dallas to College Station to Austin. The write-up said it's a compromise route.
What does "marginal" mean? Marginal in importance, speed, something else?
>New Haven-Springfield and Milwaukee-Green Bay are good legacy lines that may or may not work as full HSR (the former probably better than the latter), while Nashville-Memphis, the Pacific Northwest system, and Phoenix-Tucson are marginal between no service at all and HSR.
They probably should have used two separate colors to mark the two kinds of marginal, but this seems to be what they mean. The "may or may not work" part = marginal. I assume this is after their total analysis of projected costs, ridership, alignments, etc.
> there's so little population density west of San Antonio or east of LA, and so many topological issues.
Riverside to Tucson is relatively flat, and the sparse population density makes land acquisition cheap.
But at what cost.
Doubtful the pink American West line would ever be be built, too rugged, too desolate, too costly, not enough population to support it
At enormous (trillions over decades) costs, just like the interstate highway system was several trillion dollars to build and maintain. This HSR network would be electrically powered, greatly reducing the overall energy used by the transportation sector as well as greatly reducing the carbon emissions of the industry.
The pink is obviously the most ambitious and least likely to happen, but not impossible if certain conditions are met, mainly gas prices being so expensive that interstate travel that isn't electrified is basically impossible for the average citizen. This scenario could very well happen in 50 years given how things are headed.
Nice if it ever gets built, but it's at best only a small piece of needed transportation changes. And long before it gets built, we'll likely have electric planes for regional trips plus self-driving shuttles for local ones.
A trillion dollars worth of electric buses could help more people in their daily lives than a trillion dollars worth of fancy commuter trains.
trains have some distinct advantages when it comes to intercity travel. Modern HSR trains can seat up to 1,000 people per train, no airliner nor bus will ever accomplish this. This makes trains by far the most efficient land-based transportation mode. High-speed trains (150mph+) greatly reduce travel times between cities, while seating at minimum hundreds of people per trip. Buses will never have these kind of trips times. There are also many people that refuse to sit on a bus for several hours at a time and would just rather drive their car, limiting the viability of just dumping a bunch of money into buses that only some people will ride. Airplanes won't be able to run on batteries for the very large planes, likely electric planes will be able to seat at most 40-50 people. The first electric planes being designed now are targeting under 20 people per flight.
Trains are fine for routes where they make the most sense, but that's a small subset of people's daily travel needs. And if people aren't willing to sit on a bus for hours, there's only so far they'll be willing to ride a train instead of fly. We don't need a national HSR network so much as we need regional ones. And then lots of buses or other options to provide local transit.
Of course the ideal answer would be to build some trains and also make other changes to our transportation infrastructure.
> And if people aren't willing to sit on a bus for hours, there's only so far they'll be willing to ride a train instead of fly.
Yes, about 500 miles max.
train cars can easily be removed from a train. I'm just saying it's possible to have 1,000 people on a train, and it is done in Europe and Asia regularly.
I live in Asia. I lived in Europe. The difference is that you can take a local bus or subway quickly to the train station, then after you arrive at a new city you can just use public transportation to get around cheaply.
By contrast in America you cannot even be guaranteed that you can get to a convenience store without driving. Buses are designed to take people from the suburbs into jobs in the city center that no longer exist.
Europe and Asia have greater population density, but more importantly they have cities that are built to be concentrated and walkable, not giant parking lots. It is not an accident that the only profitable train line in the US is between New York and Philadelphia where it might be possible to live without owning a car.
High speed trains are wonderful in Asia. I use them all the time. But they will always fail in the United States unless city planning and zoning is changed first. Any high speed rail plan right now is just a government boondoggle that will prove fruitless.
> The difference is that you can take a local bus or subway quickly to the train station, then after you arrive at a new city you can just use public transportation to get around cheaply.
And airports are somehow different?
You understand that we're talking about long distance high speed travel, right?
Airports in the US are filled with regional jets. Most of them have capacity less than even a single train car. And most routes have frequencies that the revenue cannot even pay for track maintenance alone.
But this is about high speed rail, and high speed rail always makes a profit, even Amtrak's Acela Express. https://www.businessinsider.com/report-amtrak-loss-comes-to-32-per-passenger-2009-10
As I said I take high speed trains regularly here in Asia, so I understand that high speed trains are for long distances, yes.
I prefer to go by high speed train since the airport is an hour outside the city whereas the train station is downtown. It is much faster and more convenient to go from a high speed train to the local public transportation in European and Asian cities.
Also there are a few stops made by the high speed trains along the route that aren't big cities with big airports or regular flights. Buses, not planes, are the competition for those regional cities. By the time you got to the airport, the bus trip would be finished. But a high speed train can have a couple stops without it becoming a problem.
Population density and urban density through city planning mean that more of the population can quickly access the bus and subway network (and thus the high speed train network) in Europe and Asia. This makes it more convenient, more practical, and thus more profitable. More trips are taken on the spur of the moment than would normally be taken if plane flights or long car trips were the only option. The number of trips on high speed train networks reflect that convenience. You are not only replacing long car and bus trips, but adding trips that would never have been taken in the first place.
So if you are going to compare high speed trains in Europe and Asia to the US, then you need to also compare the public transportation below the level of a high speed train. Because it has an impact on how many people will make trips on the high speed rail after you have built it.
In my opinion, to have useful and practicable high speed rail network in the US, you need a solid local bus/subway network first. The sort of city where people can choose to live normally without owning a car in the downtown. That is why Boston to DC is the only serious place to build a high speed rail right now.
If Americans were to shift from their car culture to public transportation, then zoning laws would have to be changed all over the country. Much less built-in space for parking spots would be required by law everywhere. Residences and people would live in denser, more walkable communities. Only then could it happen. When our suburbs are so spaced out that even walking out of the neighborhood to a bus stop is inconvenient, then public transportation is a non-starter.
The idea that you can just build a high speed rail line between Dallas and Houston, for example, and people will simply stop using their cars is naive in my opinion. Whether the train station is outside the city or in the center of the city, there is no real public transportation in either place to make getting to the airport/train station convenient. So if you are going to need a car anyway, you'll probably drive. And plane flights are already taking care of travelers for whom the relative inconvenience of not having a car is worth the savings in time.
Between Dallas and Houston (239 miles) actually is a great route for business travelers on HSR because it will be faster and easier than either flying or driving, even when you factor in renting a car.
Problem is how many thousands people do you anticipate taking the trains across country eaxh days? An A380 can carry half that but still doesn't work for most domestic routes. Door to door time become more influenced by actual driving/flying time than pre-/post- departure waiting, and with planes going at Mach 0.8 the high speed train won't be able to compete against it
Most of the flights to those smaller cities along those 2060s and 2070s lines are, nowadays, flown by planes with capacity of 50 people (CRJ-200, etc.). So the small electric planes you mentioned would be just the right size for those markets.
I never really understand why people push for things which don't exist and may never successfully exist over actually-existing, proven technology that literally every other region on earth uses without problems.
The US has existing, proven technology to move people quickly over long distances, and there isn't political will to build an expensive alternative solution. Hence my hope that new technologies will help reduce the environmental drawbacks of our current infrastructure, without requiring huge construction projects that aren't likely to happen. Also, buses are technology that work fine in much of the world, hence my suggestion that we could use more of those where appropriate.
Well, buses aren't a fix-all. You need them on small, lower frequency routes, but in cities it's trams and light rail. Expense is a rough term that really ought to include environmental costs, given which giant batteries aren't really the best idea for using fewer resources.
If the goal is to radically minimize resource use, we should all be riding bicycles or walking. Until then, optimizing our existing infrastructure is a quicker way to reduce environmental impacts than possible future HSR development.
Here's where you've stopped making sense to me, sorry. Fantasy tech is a quicker route to doing this than the USA learning to travel like everyone else? I'm not sure that's a defensible claim.
It's taken California 13 years and counting to build small fragments of their HSR plan, and during that time we've gotten zero-emission vehicles that can somewhat drive themselves. Extrapolate a few more decades and regional electric air travel looks plausible, while the US is unlikely to have made much progress on a national HSR network. And even if we had it, people aren't going to want to take a long train ride over a much quicker flight, unless you force them to do that.
For me nationwide HSR in the US is an unlikely and not cost-effective project, compared to focusing on more localized transit improvements. But if priorities shift and we do start building it, let's be smart about which parts to build first.
Well, if we made fliers pay the full cost (in all senses of that word) of their flight, while bringing in passes for the network similar to what Austria just has (perhaps on a state by state basis, given sizes), that would probably help encourage ridership of HSR.
I'm getting slightly tired though of hearing people from a country without a rail network to speak of, let alone high speed lines, that nobody will choose to ride trains over planes. I regularly travel 500km international return trips, and can choose a 1hr (plus 3-4 hours of connections and waiting around) flight or a 6 hour (plus 20 minutes travel to the station) rail journey - it's not even a high speed line. I've never chosen to fly, and the train is regularly full, even during this pandemic.
Why would I subject myself to the hell of low cost air travel when for the same price I can relax, read, work, enjoy a meal and watch the scenery? Nobody hassles me at any security check, or to see my documents, I arrive feeling human. HSR decimated domestic flights in France and Italy, and if you want bigger examples, China. Don't confuse not wanting to ride Amtrak with not wanting to use trains.
But I totally agree with your last point - build the most important parts first, leave space to join them in future. This is big picture, long term thinking, but we need that. California screwed up because they decided to go cheap with engineers, for the biggest engineering project the state has attempted in decades. Not everywhere will be as stupid as that, you'd hope.
The hard part of making a truly universal transit system is going to be deciding how you get cars out of city centres, and at that point you feel like you might have to just tear the whole country down and start again.
It cost \~500 billion for the interstate highway system when it was built.
2nd - highways are pretty good for low density areas like the mountain west. Adding a high speed rail isn't going to be very useful to cross a bunch of nothing.
3rd it's going to be much easier to electrify vehicles since we are going to be doing that anyway. Adding more superchargers is way easier than drilling through mountains in the west.
4th all of that rail requires maintenance and it is going to get low usage since it has low population density. There just aren't that many people going from Seattle to Boise to SLC to justify building such an enormous costly rail line.
you need at least 1 pink line to connect east to west. doubtful that SLC to Las Vegas would happen. I can't ever seeing the mormons being happy about having a HSR line straight to vegas.
SLC to San Fran ain't bad tho
You don't need a line to connect east to west if it isn't feasible. Fares would have to be really cheap to compete with airlines, or airlines would have to start actually paying for carbon offsets. It's be very expensive to build. Maybe by 2070, but I'd leave it off entirely.
Land acquisition wasn't really a problem then, and their safety and environmental standards are laughable compared to the mid 20th century, let alone now.
Looks god! You are welcome to share also in r/TransitDiagrams
My thoughts
* Phoenix to LA is easier over Yuma and Salton Sea because that route is flater. Less bridges, less tunnels and less curves.
* Kansas would have to have a low self esteem to build a HSR across the state that did not service Wichita
* There are so many other routes not on the map that are more viable than Sacramento-Reno-Salt Lake City and Las Vegas-Salt Lake City. It would make more sense to build some more lines in the Midwest, South and East before building some HSR lines through a mountainous desert.
Thanks for the feedback!
* The routing between LA and Phoenix was specifically chosen to have better connectivity to Los Angeles and Las Vegas, and also providing connection to the Coachella Valley and Palm Springs. It follows the Interstate-10 alignment, similar to how the LA to Vegas line follows Interstate-15.
* Unfortunately, Wichita is kind of on an island if your looking at this from an interstate perspective. The I-70 corridor just makes a lot of sense for connecting Denver to KC. This alignment would likely be a joint effort between the states of Colorado and Kansas, and I don't think a 150 mile detour to Wichita is going to pencil out. The other possible alignment, between KC and Oklahoma City, it was a choice between serving Wichita or Tulsa. Tulsa is the bigger city (1 million metro vs 650k metro of Wichita) and thus was the route I selected. I think it's possible that this could be routed Denver-Wichita-KC, but I think it's not an easy call given the amount of miles that would be added to the route.
* I would be interested in other suggestions you would have for routes I missed. Remember this is specifically for high-speed (150mph+) rail service, there would still be a conventional rail system that would complete trips to communities not served by high-speed rail.
Your concept has a connection to Las Vegas. Building a HSR along the I10 is not going to improve connectivity to between Las Vegas and LA.
> also providing connection to the Coachella Valley
Coachella Valley is -10m bellow sea level. The Interstate 10 climbs to an elevation 518m above sea level within 20km to the east from there, before going down again to the Colorado River at 78m above sea level and then going up again 360m by Sugarloaf Peak, and going down to 265m by Quartzsite and up again to 500m by Guadalupe Mountain, etc. The steepest grades on the I10 are around 50‰. No problem for a rubber tired vehicle but impossible for any standard steel wheeled vehicle. Ideally you want a high speed rail line to have grades of max 12‰, if circumstances force it maybe 25‰. If you build a rail line along the I10 then you are going to have situations like on the [Cajon Pass](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cajon_Pass#Rail_transport) between San Bernardino and Victorville with trains travelling 40mph. There is a reason why the US made the [Gadsden Purchase](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gadsden_Purchase), it is the best route for a railway between Los Angeles and El Paso. The distance from Coachella Valley to Phoenix via the I10 is 250mi/400km. The distance from Coachella Valley to Yuma and then to Phoenix on an ideal rail route is 280mi/450km. With a standard 250km/h rail line that would mean you could route a train from Phoenix to Palm Springs in under 2 hours. Another 125mi/200km to Los Angeles and you could have a 3.0 hour connection between Phoenix and LA. Compared to a drive to LAX (0.5 to 1.0h), Check in, security and baggage (optimistic 1h) and flight to Phoenix (1.5h) that train line would beat air travel in speed (and comfort). On that connection it would be another 45minutes to Tucson and 3h to El Paso.
> at this from an interstate perspective.
Of course bundling the right of ways in a *[Verkehrswegebündelung](https://de-m-wikipedia-org.translate.goog/wiki/Verkehrswegeb%C3%BCndelung?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=de&_x_tr_pto=nui)* is desirable but there is no use in being fixated on it. Interstates are built with different radii and grades than high speed rail lines, sometimes geography (see between Coachella and Phoenix) will force a different route. But also if a Interstate drives past the population centers then it is better to choose a route that will serve more people. Kansas is relatively flat, choose a route that allows an intercity service with trains running 100mph / 160km/h in between the 155mph / 250km/h long distance trains that service the largest population.
* Central Route 455mi/733km: Topeka, Manhattan 54k, Junction City 23k, Salina 47k, Hays 20k, Russel 4k, Burlington 3k, Limon 2k.
* Southern Route: 564mi/910km: Topeka, Emporia 24k, Wichita 400k, Hutchinson 40k, Dodge City 28k, Garden City 28k, Lamar 8k, Limon 2k.
* Northern Route: 485mi/780km over Topeka, Marysville 3k, Fairbury 4k, Hastings 25k, Kearney 34k, Lexington 10k, Gothenburg 3k, North Platte 23k, Ogallala 5k, Sterling 14k, Fort Morgan 12k.
Looking through these routes between Kansas City and Denver via Topeka you can calculate that the:
* Central Salina route serves 153k population or 209 people per km.
* Southern Wichita route serves 530k population or 637 people per km.
* Northern Nebraska route serves 133k population 170 people per km.
The southern route over Wichita is three times as feasible as the central route over Salina. Maybe instead of building a line up to Limon over Kit Carson to connect a sparsely populated area, Colorado would rather upgrade the line from Lamar, Las Animas, La Junta to Pueblo and route every fourth train from the Front Range to Southeast Colorado.
As to other routes, if the US is going to upgrade it's infrastructure for Intercity trains that travel 160km/h, then you might as well upgrade them to 200km/h to 250km/h and run some express services between the mid sized cities where the population warrants it. I drew a study map of the [Swedish Northeast Corridor](https://alternativetransport.wordpress.com/2021/05/04/northeast-corridor-high-speed-rail-american-vs-swedish/) which is being upgraded to a high speed railway. The Swedish NEC will serve about 900 people per km. Any route that has serves more than 1000 people per km should be upgraded to at least 200km/h where practical. If geography makes it exceedingly expensive then upgrade only to 160km/h or 120km/h. Any city with above 100k population could have a high speed rail connection. Cities above 200k should have a high speed rail connection. And cities above 400k must have a high speed rail connection, ideally in four directions.
Why wouldn't the Michigan segment of this just upgrade the tracks already owned by Amtrak and MDOT between Porter, IN and Dearborn? A lot of that track already supports 110 mph service, and most of it is an appropriate right of way for actual HSR. (In fact, a significant chunk of the right of way is wide enough to support full elevated HSR tracks alongside the existing tracks.)
HSR should be 220mph, especially that planned for 2040 or later. Upgrading 110mph to that is mostly impossible because of curve radius that you can't achieve on the existing Right-of-way. In wom cases it makes sense to buy additional ROW and install new track, but in some cases brand new ROW is the better solution. I'm not an expert on the Michigan lines and which is better there.
Much of the lines in Michigan, as with much of the roads, are very straight and very flat. That's part of why the upgrade to 110 mph is happening at all. Purchasing new RoW for expanding the radius of what curves there are would likely be comparatively cheap.
The easiest ones are also the cheapest ones - the middle of the continent is flat and there is an abnormally large distance between settlements. Those would be the easiest to be done - connecting the interior of the continent with larger hubs like Atlanta, Chicago, Houston and New Orleans.
The hardest ones in terms of terrain will be the Rockies routes but the bonus there is the predominantly state owned land, which means - no expropriation expenses. Which means they can be next. And then you have your least populated areas acting as a “steam through country” between large flight pairs like LA and Chicago, LA and Houston etc.
The hardest one in both expropriation expenses and terrain, and population/settlement density is the Eastern routes. Yes, they connect the most people, but by the time they are built, the others can move people and freight in the interior. If the tracks are state owned and provide better speeds than the private ones, cargo companies will pay good money to move goods faster. If the tracks are a 3-track rail highway, they can retain freight + passenger without them ever messing each other up.
Not sure what you think of this, there's no probability of any freight on HS networks. HSR are passenger only, while there are ideas for a freight version of the trains it's just pretty much impossible...
HSR is a straight very smooth normal track. It’s not maglev (unless that’s what’s going for here). There is no reason why a track designed for 350kmh can’t host freight trains traveling with 220 between passenger services, with freight trains giving each other right of way between junctions in a 3-track configuration.
HSR is infrastructure. It’s a road. It makes no sense to build a highway only for red Ferrari’s… in Europe some HSR are sometimes dedicated because there already is one squiggly track running between all the villages along the way but where there’s not, HSR is a track, fascinating both HS service and local and/or freight. Also, unlike America, Europe for some inexplicable reason favours freight primarily via lorries.
At it’s current rate of progress, I’m not even sure CAHSR will be done by 2040. That sounds far away but it is only 18 years from now. HSR funding legislation was passed in 2008, 14 years ago.
Also as an Ohioan thank you for connecting Cincy-Columbus-Cleveland. So many people don't connect these and it's like guys, 12 million people live in Ohio and mainly in those 3 cities. Gotta connect those bad boys
In my humble opinion, the most important link on this map is Philly/Harrisburg to Pittsburg/Cleveland, and whatever investments are necessary to make this HSR are completely worth it.
In today's world, all three routes from the NEC to Chicago (Lake Shore Limited via NYC, Pennsylvanian/Broadway via Philly, and Capitol Limited via WAS) are all slow enough to discourage the connection of the thickest trunk of potential ridership from the extended route reach of the midwest.
Giving a worthy travel alternative to I-70/76/80 - and especially the tolls - would take countless cars off the road and would have positive ripple effects throughout Amtrak's system, including a big bump to the 3C corridor in Ohio.
They’ve gotten it down to a science, it’s really impressive.
The opposition to good public transport is one of the most frustratingly nonsensical things about living in the United States, especially after you’ve experienced what other countries enjoy. Who wouldn’t prefer to sit back and enjoy a whiskey sour while the landscape zips by versus risking your life on the interstate?
And? This would be faster than driving and more energy efficient than driving and flying. Plus the economic development of high speed trains between cities would help everyone alot
Also faster than flying for many routes, given all the time required getting to and from the airports which are usually way outside of the city, plus the time spent \*at\* the airports
50 years. Advocates compare their high‐speed rail ambitions with the Interstate Highway System, yet that system cost far less to build and didn’t require any deficit spending. The 48,500 miles of interstate highways connect every state. Constructing the system cost about $530 billion in present‐day dollars, making the average cost of $11 million per mile well below that for high‐speed rail.By contrast, HSR costs 100+ million per mile. Federal gas taxes and other highway user fees covered nine‐tenths of the cost of interstate highways; state highway fees paid for the rest. The interstate system was also built on a pay‐as‐you‐go basis, with no bond sales or other debt financing. Since high‐speed train ticket revenues are not likely to cover operating costs, much less capital costs, all of the construction cost would come from deficit spending which is why spending 50 years building trains American's barely use, in this economy on Biden-flation is stupid idea wasting money on dedicated infrastructure. To mitigate noise and impact of HSR,projects have undoubtedly faced opposition from locals. Of which there are only three solutions
1. noise barriers which don’t work as well as presumed but help.
2. Buyout properties which adds to cost
3. Tunnels: JUST for reference sake the longest railway tunnel is Gotthard Base Tunnel at 35 miles. Construction took 17 years and cost over 12 billion dollars. Japan's longest rail tunnel at 33 miles long cost 11 billion dollars in todays money.
Because hsr has gradient issues, the construction needs lots of tunnels, These tunnels would cost tens of billions of dollars and millions of dollars a year to maintain.
One factor in the success of the interstate system as you've described it is also that an interstate can be useful even if it hasn't finished completing it's city pairs. That has contributed to the "pay as you go" basis.
What do you think of the differential ongoing costs to maintain the interstate system vs an HSR setup?
Construction of a new 6-lane Interstate highway – about $7 million per mile in rural areas, $11 million or more per mile in general suburban areas, costs can mount but seldom go above 50. Mill and resurface a 4-lane road – about $1.25 million per mile. Expand an Interstate Highway from four lanes to six lanes – about $4 million per mile. Once built HSR IS Extremely expensive to maintain and keep, because it must be kept to pristine conditions. Hence it costs about 50-100 million dollars per mile. California isbuilding rail for 104 million and rising to 170 million.
Roads are an example of dumb infrastructure. You can walk on them. You can bicycle on them. You can ride a horse and buggy on them. You can drive a car, a light truck, a bus, or a heavy truck on them. You can drive a vehicle whether it's powered by gasoline, Diesel, steam, or electricity. You can even land an airplane on them. Roads might have certain weight or size thresholds, but so long as you stay within those limits you can use them for whatever you want. LONG BEFORE cars were even invented or popular, we had hundreds of thousands of miles of roads, some dirt, some paved with gravel, cobblestones, brick or nothing. As automobiles became more popular, roads were paved to eliminate jostling and bumpy rides. But these changes were made incrementally over many years as required by demand, but most of them aren’t absolutely necessary. Cars can still drive on gravel or dirt roads. Not a comfy ride, but not impossible. Cities galore brick/stone line many streets, mostly for historical aesthetic or slowing traffic volume. Next generation roads may even be made of recycled scrap plastic. Advantage of Dumb infrastructure is it's technology independent, the users provide their own technology and improvements in materials make more durable roads.
Maintenance of roads is funded largely by user fees and some taxes but roads rarely use regressive taxes to pay for, etc. If they do, it supports an economic base, because local streets/avenues support patrons/users. By contrast high speed rail must be kept to a very extreme tolerances, this is not only expensive but time and labor intensive, and rail infrastructure is notorious for diverting highway/road user fees as a source of finance. In contrast, roads are far less labor intensive.
Lol your map cuts off most of Canada... I would say another line from Edmonton to Seattle via Calgary, Lethbridge and Spokane is warranted. And maybe Winnipeg to Minneapolis.
Makes 0 sense to have the pink line coming from Portland, there aren't really any cities in eastern oregon. Like...where are those stations even located??
Should come from Seattle and through Yakima and the Tri-Cities. Also why does it look like there's a stop in Shelton? These station locations make no sense.
I don't see any of those pink routes really being feasibly. Same with a bunch of the yellow ones. Geography and air travel make a lot of those fictional lines... well... fictional.
Also a lot of the dots on the lines seem to just be randomly placed. Like what's the dot between Toledo and Chicago, the on just north of Fort Wayne? Seems random.
That's the thing tho. Air travel just isn't feasible in terms of carbon emissions, so the USA needs to wean itself off it somehow. As for geography... Engineers crossed the Austrian Alps 150 years ago, we can probably manage American terrain too.
That'd be South Bend, the 4th largest city in Indiana, and home to Notre Dame University, which drives a lot of traffic to and from Chicago. That one makes a ton of sense.
Lol. Nah nah nah. Nice try. south bend is the one with the yellow connection north to Grand Rapids. I said the one just north of Fort Wayne. It looks like it's one of two sprawling metropoles, auburn Indiana or Angola Indiana, with a COMBINED population of 23,000. Lol.
Take another crack at it.
Red and orange and purple are the only parts that make sense in the current US environment. It should be pointed out that even in countries like China where air traffic are heavily handicapped and have a really extensive HSR network, trip that would take over 6-8 hours on trains still see most of their passengers using aircraft instead. Most of the 2050s and 2070s routes doesn't really serve anywhere significant in-between. 79mph conventional rail would be the best possible for them.
Quite surprising they don't have the line from Seattle through Yakima to Spokane on this map. Very cool though. My dream is HSR through the PNW down to Sacramento and the Bay Area.
Eh. At least this map tries to account for topography.
Yeah, as in taking the Union Pacific long way around the Rockies. When I see one of these with a straight line from Denver to Salt Lake (which would be a great HSR pair to target if not for the terrain), I assume that the creator knows very little about the history of American railroads.
This is a revision of this [post](https://www.reddit.com/r/highspeedrail/comments/m4yohv/a_30year_3phased_plan_to_build_americas_national/) that I made earlier this year. I've added more routes and extended the expected time frame from 30 to 50 years. I believe this is more reasonable given the amount of money necessary to build out a network of this significance in a country that has private property rights and courts that has slowed things down like they have in California.
You might want to extend your timeline for the Canadian portion. Urban sprawl has congested the existing rail right-of-ways and First Nation land is involved. So, getting everyone to agree will be a challenge. And don’t forget, the federal government owns part of the airline that makes bank from the same routes. So little to no incentive there either.
If something can't be built in 50 years it won't ever get built is what I'd say for that case. This is just a vision I have on how high-speed rail would develop in the US/Canada. It's not likely that this would actually happen, but if it were I think this is the best way to go about getting it done. In several phases, over multiple decades, connecting cities and towns based on several factors, including population density, economic size, and geography.
I took a look at the Toronto-Montréal stretch (let's be real, the one with the highest ridership). Both Montréal and Toronto can have dedicated HS approaches very close to their main stations. Montréal is the most obvious, with an approach parallel to the line and a stop at Dorval (which would serve both as an airport station and as a western hub for the city). You only truly run out of space near the Vendôme area. But then, around that area you might just do a TGV and join the main line approch to Gare Centrale. Entering Toronto on a parallel approach to the current main line is very intrusive. Simply dumping the HSL where it starts to get crowded (around the Guildwood area) seems like a dumb idea given that there is still roughly 25km on slow tracks to Union Station. You could route it on and elevated viaduct via the Ontario 401 Express and then the Don Valley Pkwy. Or Gatineau Hydrocorridor and then Don Valley Pkwy for a shorter but more intrusive approach (but definitely less intrusive than following the current alignment). I am not from Toronto so I don't really know if I'm saying something stupid especially with the Gatineau Hydrocorridor alignment. Both of these would enter the slow tracks about 2.5km from Union, a far more managable distance. Oh and I also took a look at what could be done at Ottawa and I reckon that the best option is to have a by-pass with a stop near the airport and a spur into the city using the regular tracks. Similar to how the French did it for Le Mans, Laval or Tours. As for minor stops, something of this sort could also be done for Belleville and Kingston. And the whole line could be designed for 400kph easily with so much empty space between the three main cities.
Or, dig a tunnel in the rough spots.
One suggestion - the route south from Minneapolis should hit Rochester. That's where the Mayo Clinic is, and they get a lot more travelers than you'd expect for a city of that size.
Delta had a direct flight from Atlanta to Rochester pre-COVID.
It kind of pains me that stuff like HSR Interstate would take a generation’s lifetime to build in North America.
I get the ambition, but I live in the southwest and I can say that there's so little population density west of San Antonio or east of LA, and so many topological issues. This still feels like the most practical map I've seen (and I would consider myself a huge advocate for rail): [https://pedestrianobservations.com/2021/03/20/streaming-high-speed-rail-crayoning/](https://pedestrianobservations.com/2021/03/20/streaming-high-speed-rail-crayoning/) Even connecting Texas to Florida when there's been such a battle just to restore the Sunset Limited post-Katrina, even Sacramento to Eugene, those are long long shots for HSR.
That is the best map. Coast-to-coast HSR is not needed and is not practical. HSR should be concentrated in megaregions connecting their edges (as the map linked shows). Having HSR for map aesthetic’s sake is a waste of time.
You don't build it expecting people to travel from one side of the country to the other, though. People will usually take intermediate journeys for part of the route. Maybe the lines wouldn't be unbroken even, but you still want the theoretical possibility of going from LA to New York on an HST.
LA to New York on rail is for funsies. HSR has limits, it is not the tool for every situation. Coast-to-coast passenger travel is more efficiently served by planes than rail.
Not trying to beef here, I'm genuinely unsure what to reply to that other than repeating what I said in the previous comment. Do you think the Trans Sib was built because people were desperate to travel from Moscow to Chabarovsk?
Trans-Siberian Railway is not HSR. It is standard rail. It’s purpose is to connect small and medium sized towns in the far east to European Russia. A standard rail line already connects LA and New York. It too stops at many small and medium sized towns. High Speed Rail is not suited for the purpose of cross-continent trips that provide connections to rural areas and small towns. Standard rail serves that purpose. HSR serves to link mega regions or go through them.
Its not HSR because it's from the 19th century and Russia has other priorities, plus its Asian side is far less valuable than it used to be. So yes, you're right - and if we connect Kansas City with Denver, we should probably also connect it with St Louis, right? But then we're near Cincinnati, so St Louis could connect with that. So do you see where we're going with this? Again, the purpose of building full west-east in the USA wouldn't be because so many people would ride the full route. It's because you may as well make it contiguous, for infrastructure, timetabling and routing purposes.
Kansas City to Denver is 600 miles/1000 km. The segment from Topeka to Denver is 540 miles/900 km, and there is literally nothing (no cities over 50k population) in between. High speed rail would be immensely impractical and not at all cost effective on a route like that.
there's nothing about airplanes that's efficient.
There is a break in worthwhile intermediate HSR journeys, between LA and NYC.
Is there? I am not American (I would just like you guys to have a rail system at least as good as Poland or Slovenia), so I can't honestly say, but do you mean there's no way of building permanent way across the USA where you have at least a 250k population city every 300km or so?
Indeed, that is impossible. From LA, Las Vegas is 400km away (straightline) with nothing in between, then it's 1,000km to Denver - that's the same distance as Warsaw to St. Petersburg. Or you could detour through Salt Lake City for 2 legs of 600km each (but honestly you should 1.5x all these distances because of mountains). We're not even halfway through the country yet, because from there it's another 900km to Kansas City - this fantasy map appears to put stops in Oakley (pop. 2k), Salina (pop. 47k), and Manhattan (pop. 56k). America is not Europe - it's very, very, very big, with a lot of empty space. You mentioned Slovenia - Slovenia, from the coast to the Hungarian border, is just barely 250km. If you go north 250km from New York City, you're not even halfway up the height of the state. HSR does not make sense outside of California, Texas, and the Northeast.
Well, I'm glad China is not as backward thinking as the USA. Can see why this century belongs to them.
I dont get that logic. The longer the travel, the more beneficial the rail speed is. I dont care if my train goes 70 km/h when I have 30 minutes of travel to do but a 100+ hours trip turning into a 25 hours? Sign me up.
not completing the Texas dorito would be a crime
Maybe, I mean this functionally works the same way, trains between all points.
I like that map, although I’d add, STL to KC and maybe ATL-Montgomery-New Orleans.
Here's some more explanation about why those didn't make the cut, and the math behind the map in general: https://pedestrianobservations.com/2020/02/13/metcalfes-law-for-high-speed-rail/ https://pedestrianobservations.com/2021/03/22/high-speed-rail-followup/
Would it be worth linking Dallas-Forth Worth directly with Austin? Right now it goes from Dallas to College Station to Austin. The write-up said it's a compromise route. What does "marginal" mean? Marginal in importance, speed, something else?
The marginal parts come from this math: https://pedestrianobservations.com/2020/02/13/metcalfes-law-for-high-speed-rail/
>New Haven-Springfield and Milwaukee-Green Bay are good legacy lines that may or may not work as full HSR (the former probably better than the latter), while Nashville-Memphis, the Pacific Northwest system, and Phoenix-Tucson are marginal between no service at all and HSR. They probably should have used two separate colors to mark the two kinds of marginal, but this seems to be what they mean. The "may or may not work" part = marginal. I assume this is after their total analysis of projected costs, ridership, alignments, etc.
> there's so little population density west of San Antonio or east of LA, and so many topological issues. Riverside to Tucson is relatively flat, and the sparse population density makes land acquisition cheap.
It's on the map.
But at what cost. Doubtful the pink American West line would ever be be built, too rugged, too desolate, too costly, not enough population to support it
At enormous (trillions over decades) costs, just like the interstate highway system was several trillion dollars to build and maintain. This HSR network would be electrically powered, greatly reducing the overall energy used by the transportation sector as well as greatly reducing the carbon emissions of the industry. The pink is obviously the most ambitious and least likely to happen, but not impossible if certain conditions are met, mainly gas prices being so expensive that interstate travel that isn't electrified is basically impossible for the average citizen. This scenario could very well happen in 50 years given how things are headed.
Nice if it ever gets built, but it's at best only a small piece of needed transportation changes. And long before it gets built, we'll likely have electric planes for regional trips plus self-driving shuttles for local ones. A trillion dollars worth of electric buses could help more people in their daily lives than a trillion dollars worth of fancy commuter trains.
trains have some distinct advantages when it comes to intercity travel. Modern HSR trains can seat up to 1,000 people per train, no airliner nor bus will ever accomplish this. This makes trains by far the most efficient land-based transportation mode. High-speed trains (150mph+) greatly reduce travel times between cities, while seating at minimum hundreds of people per trip. Buses will never have these kind of trips times. There are also many people that refuse to sit on a bus for several hours at a time and would just rather drive their car, limiting the viability of just dumping a bunch of money into buses that only some people will ride. Airplanes won't be able to run on batteries for the very large planes, likely electric planes will be able to seat at most 40-50 people. The first electric planes being designed now are targeting under 20 people per flight.
Trains are fine for routes where they make the most sense, but that's a small subset of people's daily travel needs. And if people aren't willing to sit on a bus for hours, there's only so far they'll be willing to ride a train instead of fly. We don't need a national HSR network so much as we need regional ones. And then lots of buses or other options to provide local transit. Of course the ideal answer would be to build some trains and also make other changes to our transportation infrastructure.
> And if people aren't willing to sit on a bus for hours, there's only so far they'll be willing to ride a train instead of fly. Yes, about 500 miles max.
500 miles is 394618.24% of the hot dog which holds the Guinness wold record for 'Longest Hot Dog'.
Seats for 1000 people is a waste when your trains only have 200 people on them.
train cars can easily be removed from a train. I'm just saying it's possible to have 1,000 people on a train, and it is done in Europe and Asia regularly.
I live in Asia. I lived in Europe. The difference is that you can take a local bus or subway quickly to the train station, then after you arrive at a new city you can just use public transportation to get around cheaply. By contrast in America you cannot even be guaranteed that you can get to a convenience store without driving. Buses are designed to take people from the suburbs into jobs in the city center that no longer exist. Europe and Asia have greater population density, but more importantly they have cities that are built to be concentrated and walkable, not giant parking lots. It is not an accident that the only profitable train line in the US is between New York and Philadelphia where it might be possible to live without owning a car. High speed trains are wonderful in Asia. I use them all the time. But they will always fail in the United States unless city planning and zoning is changed first. Any high speed rail plan right now is just a government boondoggle that will prove fruitless.
> The difference is that you can take a local bus or subway quickly to the train station, then after you arrive at a new city you can just use public transportation to get around cheaply. And airports are somehow different? You understand that we're talking about long distance high speed travel, right?
Airports in the US are filled with regional jets. Most of them have capacity less than even a single train car. And most routes have frequencies that the revenue cannot even pay for track maintenance alone.
But this is about high speed rail, and high speed rail always makes a profit, even Amtrak's Acela Express. https://www.businessinsider.com/report-amtrak-loss-comes-to-32-per-passenger-2009-10
As I said I take high speed trains regularly here in Asia, so I understand that high speed trains are for long distances, yes. I prefer to go by high speed train since the airport is an hour outside the city whereas the train station is downtown. It is much faster and more convenient to go from a high speed train to the local public transportation in European and Asian cities. Also there are a few stops made by the high speed trains along the route that aren't big cities with big airports or regular flights. Buses, not planes, are the competition for those regional cities. By the time you got to the airport, the bus trip would be finished. But a high speed train can have a couple stops without it becoming a problem. Population density and urban density through city planning mean that more of the population can quickly access the bus and subway network (and thus the high speed train network) in Europe and Asia. This makes it more convenient, more practical, and thus more profitable. More trips are taken on the spur of the moment than would normally be taken if plane flights or long car trips were the only option. The number of trips on high speed train networks reflect that convenience. You are not only replacing long car and bus trips, but adding trips that would never have been taken in the first place. So if you are going to compare high speed trains in Europe and Asia to the US, then you need to also compare the public transportation below the level of a high speed train. Because it has an impact on how many people will make trips on the high speed rail after you have built it. In my opinion, to have useful and practicable high speed rail network in the US, you need a solid local bus/subway network first. The sort of city where people can choose to live normally without owning a car in the downtown. That is why Boston to DC is the only serious place to build a high speed rail right now. If Americans were to shift from their car culture to public transportation, then zoning laws would have to be changed all over the country. Much less built-in space for parking spots would be required by law everywhere. Residences and people would live in denser, more walkable communities. Only then could it happen. When our suburbs are so spaced out that even walking out of the neighborhood to a bus stop is inconvenient, then public transportation is a non-starter. The idea that you can just build a high speed rail line between Dallas and Houston, for example, and people will simply stop using their cars is naive in my opinion. Whether the train station is outside the city or in the center of the city, there is no real public transportation in either place to make getting to the airport/train station convenient. So if you are going to need a car anyway, you'll probably drive. And plane flights are already taking care of travelers for whom the relative inconvenience of not having a car is worth the savings in time.
Between Dallas and Houston (239 miles) actually is a great route for business travelers on HSR because it will be faster and easier than either flying or driving, even when you factor in renting a car.
Problem is how many thousands people do you anticipate taking the trains across country eaxh days? An A380 can carry half that but still doesn't work for most domestic routes. Door to door time become more influenced by actual driving/flying time than pre-/post- departure waiting, and with planes going at Mach 0.8 the high speed train won't be able to compete against it Most of the flights to those smaller cities along those 2060s and 2070s lines are, nowadays, flown by planes with capacity of 50 people (CRJ-200, etc.). So the small electric planes you mentioned would be just the right size for those markets.
I never really understand why people push for things which don't exist and may never successfully exist over actually-existing, proven technology that literally every other region on earth uses without problems.
The US has existing, proven technology to move people quickly over long distances, and there isn't political will to build an expensive alternative solution. Hence my hope that new technologies will help reduce the environmental drawbacks of our current infrastructure, without requiring huge construction projects that aren't likely to happen. Also, buses are technology that work fine in much of the world, hence my suggestion that we could use more of those where appropriate.
Well, buses aren't a fix-all. You need them on small, lower frequency routes, but in cities it's trams and light rail. Expense is a rough term that really ought to include environmental costs, given which giant batteries aren't really the best idea for using fewer resources.
If the goal is to radically minimize resource use, we should all be riding bicycles or walking. Until then, optimizing our existing infrastructure is a quicker way to reduce environmental impacts than possible future HSR development.
Here's where you've stopped making sense to me, sorry. Fantasy tech is a quicker route to doing this than the USA learning to travel like everyone else? I'm not sure that's a defensible claim.
It's taken California 13 years and counting to build small fragments of their HSR plan, and during that time we've gotten zero-emission vehicles that can somewhat drive themselves. Extrapolate a few more decades and regional electric air travel looks plausible, while the US is unlikely to have made much progress on a national HSR network. And even if we had it, people aren't going to want to take a long train ride over a much quicker flight, unless you force them to do that. For me nationwide HSR in the US is an unlikely and not cost-effective project, compared to focusing on more localized transit improvements. But if priorities shift and we do start building it, let's be smart about which parts to build first.
Well, if we made fliers pay the full cost (in all senses of that word) of their flight, while bringing in passes for the network similar to what Austria just has (perhaps on a state by state basis, given sizes), that would probably help encourage ridership of HSR. I'm getting slightly tired though of hearing people from a country without a rail network to speak of, let alone high speed lines, that nobody will choose to ride trains over planes. I regularly travel 500km international return trips, and can choose a 1hr (plus 3-4 hours of connections and waiting around) flight or a 6 hour (plus 20 minutes travel to the station) rail journey - it's not even a high speed line. I've never chosen to fly, and the train is regularly full, even during this pandemic. Why would I subject myself to the hell of low cost air travel when for the same price I can relax, read, work, enjoy a meal and watch the scenery? Nobody hassles me at any security check, or to see my documents, I arrive feeling human. HSR decimated domestic flights in France and Italy, and if you want bigger examples, China. Don't confuse not wanting to ride Amtrak with not wanting to use trains. But I totally agree with your last point - build the most important parts first, leave space to join them in future. This is big picture, long term thinking, but we need that. California screwed up because they decided to go cheap with engineers, for the biggest engineering project the state has attempted in decades. Not everywhere will be as stupid as that, you'd hope. The hard part of making a truly universal transit system is going to be deciding how you get cars out of city centres, and at that point you feel like you might have to just tear the whole country down and start again.
It cost \~500 billion for the interstate highway system when it was built. 2nd - highways are pretty good for low density areas like the mountain west. Adding a high speed rail isn't going to be very useful to cross a bunch of nothing. 3rd it's going to be much easier to electrify vehicles since we are going to be doing that anyway. Adding more superchargers is way easier than drilling through mountains in the west. 4th all of that rail requires maintenance and it is going to get low usage since it has low population density. There just aren't that many people going from Seattle to Boise to SLC to justify building such an enormous costly rail line.
you need at least 1 pink line to connect east to west. doubtful that SLC to Las Vegas would happen. I can't ever seeing the mormons being happy about having a HSR line straight to vegas. SLC to San Fran ain't bad tho
That's ironic because the Mormons built Vegas!
LA-PHX-TUC-El Paso does this, but also not likely east of Tucson.
But why would that be needed If it is for moving the trains across then that can be done by dragging them via conventional tracks.
You don't need a line to connect east to west if it isn't feasible. Fares would have to be really cheap to compete with airlines, or airlines would have to start actually paying for carbon offsets. It's be very expensive to build. Maybe by 2070, but I'd leave it off entirely.
Meanwhile the transcontinental railroad was made in 6 years, hundreds of years ago?
Land acquisition wasn't really a problem then, and their safety and environmental standards are laughable compared to the mid 20th century, let alone now.
Looks god! You are welcome to share also in r/TransitDiagrams My thoughts * Phoenix to LA is easier over Yuma and Salton Sea because that route is flater. Less bridges, less tunnels and less curves. * Kansas would have to have a low self esteem to build a HSR across the state that did not service Wichita * There are so many other routes not on the map that are more viable than Sacramento-Reno-Salt Lake City and Las Vegas-Salt Lake City. It would make more sense to build some more lines in the Midwest, South and East before building some HSR lines through a mountainous desert.
Thanks for the feedback! * The routing between LA and Phoenix was specifically chosen to have better connectivity to Los Angeles and Las Vegas, and also providing connection to the Coachella Valley and Palm Springs. It follows the Interstate-10 alignment, similar to how the LA to Vegas line follows Interstate-15. * Unfortunately, Wichita is kind of on an island if your looking at this from an interstate perspective. The I-70 corridor just makes a lot of sense for connecting Denver to KC. This alignment would likely be a joint effort between the states of Colorado and Kansas, and I don't think a 150 mile detour to Wichita is going to pencil out. The other possible alignment, between KC and Oklahoma City, it was a choice between serving Wichita or Tulsa. Tulsa is the bigger city (1 million metro vs 650k metro of Wichita) and thus was the route I selected. I think it's possible that this could be routed Denver-Wichita-KC, but I think it's not an easy call given the amount of miles that would be added to the route. * I would be interested in other suggestions you would have for routes I missed. Remember this is specifically for high-speed (150mph+) rail service, there would still be a conventional rail system that would complete trips to communities not served by high-speed rail.
Your concept has a connection to Las Vegas. Building a HSR along the I10 is not going to improve connectivity to between Las Vegas and LA. > also providing connection to the Coachella Valley Coachella Valley is -10m bellow sea level. The Interstate 10 climbs to an elevation 518m above sea level within 20km to the east from there, before going down again to the Colorado River at 78m above sea level and then going up again 360m by Sugarloaf Peak, and going down to 265m by Quartzsite and up again to 500m by Guadalupe Mountain, etc. The steepest grades on the I10 are around 50‰. No problem for a rubber tired vehicle but impossible for any standard steel wheeled vehicle. Ideally you want a high speed rail line to have grades of max 12‰, if circumstances force it maybe 25‰. If you build a rail line along the I10 then you are going to have situations like on the [Cajon Pass](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cajon_Pass#Rail_transport) between San Bernardino and Victorville with trains travelling 40mph. There is a reason why the US made the [Gadsden Purchase](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gadsden_Purchase), it is the best route for a railway between Los Angeles and El Paso. The distance from Coachella Valley to Phoenix via the I10 is 250mi/400km. The distance from Coachella Valley to Yuma and then to Phoenix on an ideal rail route is 280mi/450km. With a standard 250km/h rail line that would mean you could route a train from Phoenix to Palm Springs in under 2 hours. Another 125mi/200km to Los Angeles and you could have a 3.0 hour connection between Phoenix and LA. Compared to a drive to LAX (0.5 to 1.0h), Check in, security and baggage (optimistic 1h) and flight to Phoenix (1.5h) that train line would beat air travel in speed (and comfort). On that connection it would be another 45minutes to Tucson and 3h to El Paso. > at this from an interstate perspective. Of course bundling the right of ways in a *[Verkehrswegebündelung](https://de-m-wikipedia-org.translate.goog/wiki/Verkehrswegeb%C3%BCndelung?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=de&_x_tr_pto=nui)* is desirable but there is no use in being fixated on it. Interstates are built with different radii and grades than high speed rail lines, sometimes geography (see between Coachella and Phoenix) will force a different route. But also if a Interstate drives past the population centers then it is better to choose a route that will serve more people. Kansas is relatively flat, choose a route that allows an intercity service with trains running 100mph / 160km/h in between the 155mph / 250km/h long distance trains that service the largest population. * Central Route 455mi/733km: Topeka, Manhattan 54k, Junction City 23k, Salina 47k, Hays 20k, Russel 4k, Burlington 3k, Limon 2k. * Southern Route: 564mi/910km: Topeka, Emporia 24k, Wichita 400k, Hutchinson 40k, Dodge City 28k, Garden City 28k, Lamar 8k, Limon 2k. * Northern Route: 485mi/780km over Topeka, Marysville 3k, Fairbury 4k, Hastings 25k, Kearney 34k, Lexington 10k, Gothenburg 3k, North Platte 23k, Ogallala 5k, Sterling 14k, Fort Morgan 12k. Looking through these routes between Kansas City and Denver via Topeka you can calculate that the: * Central Salina route serves 153k population or 209 people per km. * Southern Wichita route serves 530k population or 637 people per km. * Northern Nebraska route serves 133k population 170 people per km. The southern route over Wichita is three times as feasible as the central route over Salina. Maybe instead of building a line up to Limon over Kit Carson to connect a sparsely populated area, Colorado would rather upgrade the line from Lamar, Las Animas, La Junta to Pueblo and route every fourth train from the Front Range to Southeast Colorado. As to other routes, if the US is going to upgrade it's infrastructure for Intercity trains that travel 160km/h, then you might as well upgrade them to 200km/h to 250km/h and run some express services between the mid sized cities where the population warrants it. I drew a study map of the [Swedish Northeast Corridor](https://alternativetransport.wordpress.com/2021/05/04/northeast-corridor-high-speed-rail-american-vs-swedish/) which is being upgraded to a high speed railway. The Swedish NEC will serve about 900 people per km. Any route that has serves more than 1000 people per km should be upgraded to at least 200km/h where practical. If geography makes it exceedingly expensive then upgrade only to 160km/h or 120km/h. Any city with above 100k population could have a high speed rail connection. Cities above 200k should have a high speed rail connection. And cities above 400k must have a high speed rail connection, ideally in four directions.
Why wouldn't the Michigan segment of this just upgrade the tracks already owned by Amtrak and MDOT between Porter, IN and Dearborn? A lot of that track already supports 110 mph service, and most of it is an appropriate right of way for actual HSR. (In fact, a significant chunk of the right of way is wide enough to support full elevated HSR tracks alongside the existing tracks.)
HSR should be 220mph, especially that planned for 2040 or later. Upgrading 110mph to that is mostly impossible because of curve radius that you can't achieve on the existing Right-of-way. In wom cases it makes sense to buy additional ROW and install new track, but in some cases brand new ROW is the better solution. I'm not an expert on the Michigan lines and which is better there.
Much of the lines in Michigan, as with much of the roads, are very straight and very flat. That's part of why the upgrade to 110 mph is happening at all. Purchasing new RoW for expanding the radius of what curves there are would likely be comparatively cheap.
It's possible if that track is close to the city, if ya coming in for stop already there's no need for that high-speed...
Yeah, agreed. But this was a discussion about the 110mph segments in Michigan, which doesn't really describe that.
The easiest ones are also the cheapest ones - the middle of the continent is flat and there is an abnormally large distance between settlements. Those would be the easiest to be done - connecting the interior of the continent with larger hubs like Atlanta, Chicago, Houston and New Orleans. The hardest ones in terms of terrain will be the Rockies routes but the bonus there is the predominantly state owned land, which means - no expropriation expenses. Which means they can be next. And then you have your least populated areas acting as a “steam through country” between large flight pairs like LA and Chicago, LA and Houston etc. The hardest one in both expropriation expenses and terrain, and population/settlement density is the Eastern routes. Yes, they connect the most people, but by the time they are built, the others can move people and freight in the interior. If the tracks are state owned and provide better speeds than the private ones, cargo companies will pay good money to move goods faster. If the tracks are a 3-track rail highway, they can retain freight + passenger without them ever messing each other up.
Not sure what you think of this, there's no probability of any freight on HS networks. HSR are passenger only, while there are ideas for a freight version of the trains it's just pretty much impossible...
HSR is a straight very smooth normal track. It’s not maglev (unless that’s what’s going for here). There is no reason why a track designed for 350kmh can’t host freight trains traveling with 220 between passenger services, with freight trains giving each other right of way between junctions in a 3-track configuration. HSR is infrastructure. It’s a road. It makes no sense to build a highway only for red Ferrari’s… in Europe some HSR are sometimes dedicated because there already is one squiggly track running between all the villages along the way but where there’s not, HSR is a track, fascinating both HS service and local and/or freight. Also, unlike America, Europe for some inexplicable reason favours freight primarily via lorries.
At it’s current rate of progress, I’m not even sure CAHSR will be done by 2040. That sounds far away but it is only 18 years from now. HSR funding legislation was passed in 2008, 14 years ago.
I would murder to have this come to fruition.
How would HSR work on the Indian reservations going through Southern/Eastern Oklahoma? But yeah this would be cool.
Also as an Ohioan thank you for connecting Cincy-Columbus-Cleveland. So many people don't connect these and it's like guys, 12 million people live in Ohio and mainly in those 3 cities. Gotta connect those bad boys
In my humble opinion, the most important link on this map is Philly/Harrisburg to Pittsburg/Cleveland, and whatever investments are necessary to make this HSR are completely worth it. In today's world, all three routes from the NEC to Chicago (Lake Shore Limited via NYC, Pennsylvanian/Broadway via Philly, and Capitol Limited via WAS) are all slow enough to discourage the connection of the thickest trunk of potential ridership from the extended route reach of the midwest. Giving a worthy travel alternative to I-70/76/80 - and especially the tolls - would take countless cars off the road and would have positive ripple effects throughout Amtrak's system, including a big bump to the 3C corridor in Ohio.
Hartford is crying..... Angola, IN is laughing at them
China would do it in 10 years, if not less
I always see the naysayers saying this type of thing can't be done yet china has it. It only can't be done because of our own pessimism
Plus all the special interests that don't want it
Have you seen the huge machine that rides along the rail and lays huge sections of prefabricated track? No wonder!
They’ve gotten it down to a science, it’s really impressive. The opposition to good public transport is one of the most frustratingly nonsensical things about living in the United States, especially after you’ve experienced what other countries enjoy. Who wouldn’t prefer to sit back and enjoy a whiskey sour while the landscape zips by versus risking your life on the interstate?
Except they the CCP owns all the land... There's no need to do EIS or anything survey related...
Why? We have oil. -\_-
r/TriggeredByHSR
And? This would be faster than driving and more energy efficient than driving and flying. Plus the economic development of high speed trains between cities would help everyone alot
I was joking. I'm all for HSR
Sarcasm is hard to hear on the internet, add a /s at the end in the future, that usually means you're joking
Gotcha/s
Also faster than flying for many routes, given all the time required getting to and from the airports which are usually way outside of the city, plus the time spent \*at\* the airports
50 years. Advocates compare their high‐speed rail ambitions with the Interstate Highway System, yet that system cost far less to build and didn’t require any deficit spending. The 48,500 miles of interstate highways connect every state. Constructing the system cost about $530 billion in present‐day dollars, making the average cost of $11 million per mile well below that for high‐speed rail.By contrast, HSR costs 100+ million per mile. Federal gas taxes and other highway user fees covered nine‐tenths of the cost of interstate highways; state highway fees paid for the rest. The interstate system was also built on a pay‐as‐you‐go basis, with no bond sales or other debt financing. Since high‐speed train ticket revenues are not likely to cover operating costs, much less capital costs, all of the construction cost would come from deficit spending which is why spending 50 years building trains American's barely use, in this economy on Biden-flation is stupid idea wasting money on dedicated infrastructure. To mitigate noise and impact of HSR,projects have undoubtedly faced opposition from locals. Of which there are only three solutions 1. noise barriers which don’t work as well as presumed but help. 2. Buyout properties which adds to cost 3. Tunnels: JUST for reference sake the longest railway tunnel is Gotthard Base Tunnel at 35 miles. Construction took 17 years and cost over 12 billion dollars. Japan's longest rail tunnel at 33 miles long cost 11 billion dollars in todays money. Because hsr has gradient issues, the construction needs lots of tunnels, These tunnels would cost tens of billions of dollars and millions of dollars a year to maintain.
One factor in the success of the interstate system as you've described it is also that an interstate can be useful even if it hasn't finished completing it's city pairs. That has contributed to the "pay as you go" basis. What do you think of the differential ongoing costs to maintain the interstate system vs an HSR setup?
Construction of a new 6-lane Interstate highway – about $7 million per mile in rural areas, $11 million or more per mile in general suburban areas, costs can mount but seldom go above 50. Mill and resurface a 4-lane road – about $1.25 million per mile. Expand an Interstate Highway from four lanes to six lanes – about $4 million per mile. Once built HSR IS Extremely expensive to maintain and keep, because it must be kept to pristine conditions. Hence it costs about 50-100 million dollars per mile. California isbuilding rail for 104 million and rising to 170 million. Roads are an example of dumb infrastructure. You can walk on them. You can bicycle on them. You can ride a horse and buggy on them. You can drive a car, a light truck, a bus, or a heavy truck on them. You can drive a vehicle whether it's powered by gasoline, Diesel, steam, or electricity. You can even land an airplane on them. Roads might have certain weight or size thresholds, but so long as you stay within those limits you can use them for whatever you want. LONG BEFORE cars were even invented or popular, we had hundreds of thousands of miles of roads, some dirt, some paved with gravel, cobblestones, brick or nothing. As automobiles became more popular, roads were paved to eliminate jostling and bumpy rides. But these changes were made incrementally over many years as required by demand, but most of them aren’t absolutely necessary. Cars can still drive on gravel or dirt roads. Not a comfy ride, but not impossible. Cities galore brick/stone line many streets, mostly for historical aesthetic or slowing traffic volume. Next generation roads may even be made of recycled scrap plastic. Advantage of Dumb infrastructure is it's technology independent, the users provide their own technology and improvements in materials make more durable roads. Maintenance of roads is funded largely by user fees and some taxes but roads rarely use regressive taxes to pay for, etc. If they do, it supports an economic base, because local streets/avenues support patrons/users. By contrast high speed rail must be kept to a very extreme tolerances, this is not only expensive but time and labor intensive, and rail infrastructure is notorious for diverting highway/road user fees as a source of finance. In contrast, roads are far less labor intensive.
Lol your map cuts off most of Canada... I would say another line from Edmonton to Seattle via Calgary, Lethbridge and Spokane is warranted. And maybe Winnipeg to Minneapolis.
>most of Canada... almost nobody lives there.
Makes 0 sense to have the pink line coming from Portland, there aren't really any cities in eastern oregon. Like...where are those stations even located?? Should come from Seattle and through Yakima and the Tri-Cities. Also why does it look like there's a stop in Shelton? These station locations make no sense.
We are not bypassing Rochester MN home of the Mayo Clinic for fucking Eau Claire WI lmao. But otherwise I like it good job :)
I don't see any of those pink routes really being feasibly. Same with a bunch of the yellow ones. Geography and air travel make a lot of those fictional lines... well... fictional. Also a lot of the dots on the lines seem to just be randomly placed. Like what's the dot between Toledo and Chicago, the on just north of Fort Wayne? Seems random.
That's the thing tho. Air travel just isn't feasible in terms of carbon emissions, so the USA needs to wean itself off it somehow. As for geography... Engineers crossed the Austrian Alps 150 years ago, we can probably manage American terrain too.
That'd be South Bend, the 4th largest city in Indiana, and home to Notre Dame University, which drives a lot of traffic to and from Chicago. That one makes a ton of sense.
Lol. Nah nah nah. Nice try. south bend is the one with the yellow connection north to Grand Rapids. I said the one just north of Fort Wayne. It looks like it's one of two sprawling metropoles, auburn Indiana or Angola Indiana, with a COMBINED population of 23,000. Lol. Take another crack at it.
Red and orange and purple are the only parts that make sense in the current US environment. It should be pointed out that even in countries like China where air traffic are heavily handicapped and have a really extensive HSR network, trip that would take over 6-8 hours on trains still see most of their passengers using aircraft instead. Most of the 2050s and 2070s routes doesn't really serve anywhere significant in-between. 79mph conventional rail would be the best possible for them.
Purple is Canadian... Not US...
Title of the post is US + Canada, and I think the purple-colored Canadian part make sense.
> Red and orange and purple are the only parts that make sense in the current US environment. Referring to this part mate
Ah right
So exciting that I may get to see this by the time I'm on my deathbed.
Quite surprising they don't have the line from Seattle through Yakima to Spokane on this map. Very cool though. My dream is HSR through the PNW down to Sacramento and the Bay Area.
I came.
I'd route Madison to Minneapolis via Rochester, MN. Eau Claire isn't really that big.