"If it were one single mass of granite, it would be easy to drill through and provide structural support," said [Caltech geologist Leon] Silver, who trained the Apollo astronauts in lunar geology and pioneered the dating of the San Gabriel Mountains. "But everything in the arc has been bent, shoved, stretched, compressed and metamorphosed."That's at the L.A. Times, where the top-rated comments are: "Why is it that when we predicted this, we were callled [sic] flat Earth declinists, when were the right the whole time?" and "No one with a single brain cell ever thought this was rational. It is and has been a political boondoggle from day one. It's stunning to think environmentalists in CA would allow such a dangerous construction project."
The mountain range lies in a giant crescent between two major faults, the San Gabriel and the San Andreas, which separates the Mojave Desert on the North American tectonic plate from the Los Angeles Basin on the Pacific plate. Between the two major faults are many secondary faults. Some are vertical strike-slip faults that move laterally, and some are thrust faults that move vertically. Some are horizontal, traveling through the ground at various depths....
The longest possible tunnel, described as one alternative in state documents, would stretch 13.8 miles under the Angeles National Forest. Assuming TBMs started at both ends and advanced at 20 feet a day for 261 days a year, the tunnel would take seven years to complete — finishing in 2026. At an advance rate of 10 feet a day, the time would double to 14 years....
"Nobody can sit here and tell you what something like this is going to cost over a 20-year period," [said Jeff Morales, the rail authority chief executive]. "Any big program like this is loaded with challenges. The day you hear me say I am comfortable is the day I am not telling you the truth or the day I have deluded myself."
Flashback to April 2009: "Obama unveils high-speed passenger rail plan... The president's plan identifies 10 potential high-speed intercity corridors for federal funding, including California, the Pacific Northwest, the Midwest, the Southeast, the Gulf Coast, Pennsylvania, Florida, New York and New England.... His plan would be funded in part through the recently passed $787 billion stimulus plan, which includes a total of $8 billion for improvements in rail service.... The city of Chicago, Illinois, would be the hub of the proposed Midwest Regional Rail System, which would stretch to Madison, Wisconsin, in the Northwest; St. Louis, Missouri, in the South; and Detroit, Michigan, in the East."
Wisconsin said no to that money. It was the single issue that caused me to vote for Scott Walker in 2010. Local media whined that we lost $810 million, while California was "the big winner, with up to $624 million." California is now in the process of giving up hope that it can meet a $68 billion budget. The rail authority chief executive says it would be delusional even to believe you can project the ultimate cost.
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90 comments:
Now there are sufficient opportunities for graft.
Connected democrats and their friends will become very wealthy.
Because.
Democracy!
Or "A high speed bullet train that is going to take us all the way to the top of the Big Rock Candy Mountain!" as I used to say back when Obama first started talking about it.
You mean the advocates horribly under-stated the expenses involved and the odds of it being able to break even are virtually nil?
Shocking.
Man, Walker was sure dumb to avoid similar pitfalls in WI, wasn't he?
Progressives love getting the answer of yes to their lies and then demanding that rubes pay far more than they projected.
The train is irrelevant. It's the crony capitalism. That's the point.
Why is it that when we predicted this, we were called flat Earth declinists, when were the right the whole time?
They don't expect there to be a blue dress.
It seems like a stupid project in many ways, but maybe the stupidest is putting a train tunnel across a field of active fault lines. Those faults will move, and the tunnel will become instantly impassable and useless, meaning the whole line becomes useless. In the worst case, this will happen when a train is in the tunnel, killing everyone on board.
It seems like a stupid project in many ways, but maybe the stupidest is putting a train tunnel across a field of active fault lines. Those faults will move, and the tunnel will become instantly impassable and useless, meaning the whole line becomes useless. In the worst case, this will happen when a train is in the tunnel, killing everyone on board.
"Omelettes, eggs...know what I mean" ---- Progressives.
Having a job that can never be finished and is too dangerous to ever use is manna for government employees. "I get to get paid for a service we'll never let anybody use? AWESOME!!"
I have been arguing about Trump's proposed border barrier with some of my relatives who are Scientific Progressives. They say:
* the barrier's construction costs are $5,000 for every person in the USA.
* the barrier's operation and maintenance costs are $3 billion every year.
* the barrier will devastate all the wildlife along the border.
These same Scientific Progressives argue, however, that the proposed railroad in California is a great investment that will pay for itself economically and will benefit the environment.
Brown and Obama thought (delusion) that if Europe had the Chunnel then we should have a Funnel which is what you would need to haul that amount of displaced dirt and rock along the right-of-way with no regard to the environment. Earthquakes and terrorism would render any planned route a disaster waiting to happen. What the GOV (Brown) should do first is require a drug and alcohol test of every politician who believes a high speed train in California is a sane expenditure of money. There are already two main tracks through the San Joaquin Valley. They traverse beautiful country at normal speeds and anyone in a hurry to travel from LAX to SFX can fly cheap between the two locations.
Of the challenges facing the bullet train, none is bigger than tunneling.
This is the LAT and they want the Train, but no. The biggest challenge is not the engineering, it's the politics.
e.g. obtaining the continuous right of way.
Consider the challenge of obtaining the property from central SF to San Jose, about 55 miles as the crow flies through localities like Stanford, Menlo Park, Atherton, San Mateo, Palo Alto, Santa Clara, and Mountain View.
It.Will.Not.Happen
BANANA
Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything
The thing about high-speed rail is that you can have some horrific accidents. This is not speculative - there have been very bad ones where the job was not done right. The railway has to be carefully designed and built, and then constantly maintained to a very high standard.
An area with a bunch of faults presents an obvious problem. It can be done, but it means that you are going to design and build the track on top of an artificial flexible-but-sturdy bed. Very costly, and there may be additional maintenance problems.
If you are going to run a high-speed train through terrain like that, you probably need a built-in track sensor system that will tell you when things go wrong.
It's not cheap to build, but it is also quite expensive to maintain. The system can never pay for itself. It would probably be massively cheaper to fly between destinations.
The US has a very good freight rail system. Why we don't build on that and abandon the implausible and irrational I don't know. Like those funds allocated to update housing for energy efficiency, this was an idea that sounded great but never had a chance of working in practice.
Just imagine if we had the technology to avoid tunneling, building and maintaining tracks, land acquisition issues and all that.
Wouldn't it cool if the rail cars could just zip along, high over head, at hundreds of mile an hour?
Well, maybe some day.
Have these Californian mountains said "yes" or otherwise indicated their affirmative consent to being drilled and plowed?
MathMom - it almost seems like somebody was trying to create the real-life conditions to generate Ayn Rand's train disaster.
I wouldn't get on it if they did build it. I don't believe it ever will be built.
Honestly, why not just just cancel the project and spend some money massively improving rail access from high population areas to airports? It would be cheaper and deliver better results.
CA needs to solve its water problem first. But the Left doesn't like dams.
"California is now in the process of giving up hope that it can meet a $68 billion budget. The rail authority chief executive says it would be delusional even to believe you can project the ultimate cost."
Robert Moses invented that kind of political ploy when he was building out the infrastructure of New York City. Regarding the cost, tell the legislature anything they want to hear. Then start building. When you run out of money, go back to the legislature for more money. They will never, ever say no.
Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey killed a Hudson River rail tunnel project. That pissed off a lot of people, but apparently he knows the game, and didn't want to play it.
Regarding punching holes in mountains for a rail tunnel: Remember the last shot in the movie North by Northwest? :-)
Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey killed a Hudson River rail tunnel project. That pissed off a lot of people, but apparently he knows the game, and didn't want to play it.
The deal breaker for Christie was that after the Big Dig went like 1000% overrun, the Feds got a bit smarter
The NJ tunnel was going to have a fixed Fed funding and the states would eat all the overruns
You mean you and Scott Walker were right and the Democrats were wrong?
The US has a very good freight rail system.
Yet it has some spectacularly obvious chokepoints (Hello Memphis). If they fail, economic chaos!
Rail money from the Feds should go to improving freight infrastructure. But them how could retirees from the Northeast ride the train to Florida with their car?
Some tunnels are not worth drilling.
Yep.
I am Laslo.
I've often stated, and still believe, that Althouse did not vote sensibly. Train development does not happen in isolation and the economic activity that would have occurred along the corridor would have been a net benefit for WI. You might argue that it's a zero sum gain for the Country as a whole (because the subsidies have to come from somewhere), but I live in WI.
I don't see how CA can benefit from their particular train however in the long run. WI has not spectacular geologic fault lines to worry about.
Passenger rail: yesterday's technology, tomorrow's costs.
One at least hopes someone will simulate what happens when the inevitable earthquake happens (and that there are regular inspections of the mitigations by conscientious, knowledgeable people).
The article doesn't mention it, but experience in Japan indicates there's likely to be a big problem with "tunnel boom." This is somewhat like what causes the "bang!" when a bullet emerges from the pistol: the train rams air in front of it as it passes through the tunnel, and then that air explodes out of the tunnel with a huge boom! as the train emerges. The resulting noise pollution is far worse than anything from an airport, and can be intense enough to damage structures.
Apparently these tunnel booms can be heard over great distances; these have been a serious limitation on where new high-speed trains can be built in Japan.
Makes me wonder about the original bullet trains in Japan. Mountainous islands with active activ fault lines. What was different/same about their situation and how did they solve/avoid the problems?
This is the LAT and they want the Train, but no. The biggest challenge is not the engineering, it's the politics.
Indeed. Drilling through mountains on iffy fault lines is the EASY part. Getting the land to allow it is the challenge and the Left keeps ignoring it.
This is the quintessential make-work project.
And it's too unprofitable for private enterprise and the government is notoriously terrible at it.
It's not cheap to build, but it is also quite expensive to maintain. The system can never pay for itself. It would probably be massively cheaper to fly between destinations.
Progressive solution: Heavily tax airlines to pay for it.
I've often stated, and still believe, that Althouse did not vote sensibly. Train development does not happen in isolation and the economic activity that would have occurred along the corridor would have been a net benefit for WI. You might argue that it's a zero sum gain for the Country as a whole (because the subsidies have to come from somewhere), but I live in WI.
I don't see how CA can benefit from their particular train however in the long run. WI has not spectacular geologic fault lines to worry about.
Getting the land is still a nightmare. The evidence that there is any demand for it is negligible (Detroit overstated demand for their rail system by many times over and it, shockingly, is not self-supporting). Rail travel is still less convenient than car or plane.
I don't see why you think the geology is why the CA system is so far out of budget. The land problem is far, far, far harder
A larger parallel to Milwaukee's "A Streetcar Named Stupid".
Really, Ann, that was your only reason for voting for Walker?
Just had a freight train go through - you can still hear the horn in the distance. We get maybe 36 trains a day, most around a hundred cars, which translates to almost 2,000 cars each way. Recently, we have been seeing a lot of grain cars, due to the time of year. We do get a lot of coal trains and container trains. The really interesting ones are headed to Boing in Spokane, with jets aimed at final assembly there. Summer of 2014, one of them derailed back by Missoula, and a couple of 737s ended up in the Clark Fork River.
Here comes another one - they tend to run a bit less often late at night, and I think they try to make up for it in the morning - and this one is going the other direction. It is braking for the crossings in town, which can be a bit loud. Still rumbling through. My understanding is that each train typically has two employees aboard, which translates to one per maybe 50 freight cars. That is a good part of why freight trains are so economical in this country (apparently second only to water transportation, such as barges).
One of the things that surprised me is that the freight trains here tend to have two or three engines up front and one in the back. Which is why there are so many cabooses in private hands here. Except, interestingly, Montana Rail Link, which has matching blue engines and cabooses. You see a lot of their trains east of here with tank cars, but they dump their loads of gasoline east of town, and it is apparently put in a pipeline there. One story is that the Indian reservation east of here refused the oil company the right to keep the pipeline across the reservation open, thanks to a lot of leaks, and, hence it goes across by rail.
It is interesting to me that the railroads built many of these small towns better than a century ago, and continue to be important even today with their freight traffic. (Amtrack apparently runs passengers once or twice a week on the line north of us).
"This is the LAT and they want the Train, but no. The biggest challenge is not the engineering, it's the politics....e.g. obtaining the continuous right of way."
You're just not thinking big enough. Tunnel the whole way from SF to LA. Then, we can suck all the air out of the tunnel and travel the entire distance in under a minute!
I think that the thing that drives me the craziest is that passenger rail traffic hasn't made economic sense in much of this country for much of the last half century. It isn't even that green/low-CO2, since they have to run on a schedule and that means often mostly empty. A lot of the Dems backing the legislation were mostly interested in the crony capitalism (I think it was Sen Feinstein's husband's company was prime on the CA boondoggle). Their thinking seems to have been that we need to spend our way out of the Obama Recession, and so should spend much of that money on Dem pet projects, and might as well give back to campaign contributors, so give them the contracts. And pretty quickly, it seems, they drop the part of justifying the hundreds of billions, if not trillions, they are squandering, and just look at all the loot they are able to shovel to their friends. It doesn't matter, really, if the CA bullet train would or could ever pay for itself, or even save the planet. Rather, it ultimately came down to how many friends, family, and cronies could benefit from the project. It is now merely a means to an end, and not the end itself. That is, of course, until the money dries up, as it has mostly at the federal level, and is rapidly happening at the more local level.
"This is the LAT and they want the Train, but no. The biggest challenge is not the engineering, it's the politics....e.g. obtaining the continuous right of way."
To build on my earlier post today and others in the distant past.
Since it's highly unlikely that the rail line would ever get built, instead of pissing away billions in the parched earth near Fresno, they should have started the line at SF Airport, where thee is a BART station. Let them spend billions trying to drive tracks down through Palo Alto.
It's one thing to use eminent domain on some Fresno Cotton Farmer, another to use it on some Google Billionaire's hovel.
Ultimately the thing will get canceled, but at least with my approach, you'd find out earlier that there is neither the political nor the budget will to see it through and at least you'd have some useful BART right of way to build a bit farther South.
Bruce H said...Their thinking seems to have been that we need to spend our way out of the Obama Recession, and so should spend much of that money on Dem pet projects, and might as well give back to campaign contributors, so give them the contracts. And pretty quickly, it seems, they drop the part of justifying the hundreds of billions, if not trillions, they are squandering, and just look at all the loot they are able to shovel to their friends.
Would that they built a few, you know, water storage devices (e.g. dams) with those billions :)
we don't have anything better to spend the money on. Roads are in great shape, schools are fantastic, plenty of water storage to get us through the dry years.
California seems a poor place to try a project like this. If anything, concentrate on the east coast where there are several compact cities that could value mass transit to get from city center to city center. From DC to Boston, you have several cities with at least some local transit and walkable neighborhoods. In CA, getting to the various cities only means having to figure out how to get around once there. This makes no economic sense.
And here's something much simpler than "high speed rail"--eliminate a lot of the low-demand stops. If Amtrak from DC to NYC only stopped in Baltimore and Philly, that would take out between six and ten surplus stops. If each stop is a five minute wait, and you're also adding another ten minutes of slow down and speed up time for each stop, then we're talking about an hour of travel time that could be eliminated. Thus, a four hour trip is shortened to three hours, without having to do anything further.
" this was an idea that sounded great but never had a chance of working in practice."
It sounded great only to a few Marxist philosophers like Jerry Brown who know nothing of civil engineering or economics.
We were just in Europe and avoided the "Chunnel" which is in chaos with the "migrants" and which the English (as opposed to "the British) regret building.
"Having a job that can never be finished and is too dangerous to ever use is manna for government employees."
Corollary: Allow local cronies to finish a project that is safe to use but then disallow it. See Yucca Mountain.
At least that's a hole that can be used for something, someday. These so called high speed train projects, and this one in particular, are stunningly bad ideas. They are only useful to identify the stupid and craven.
We have a boondoggle like that here in Seattle. Someone got the bright idea to get rid of a rather ugly highway (but worked just fine) and replace it with a tunnel. I'm so glad I don't live in or too close to Seattle. Those people are fools.
"it would be delusional even to believe"
As a law professor once said, nobody believes. But Progs do believe they have unlimited access to Other People's Money. They are in the process of proving that is not an illusion.
No, none, not one of the mass transit programs in America pay for themselves. Make it high speed rail, with unstable tunnel terrain in high cost right of way, add in union labor, empowered environmentalists and a never-ending supply of the well connected to siphon funds.....
Sure, swell idea.
I live in the bay area and its odd to see reactions when you ask people if they would rather take a 45 min flight from SF to l.A or a 3-1/2 hr. train ride. Depending on their politics (rabid liberal to small d democrat)it ranges from "Of course I would!" to "that's stupid, they have to make the trains faster somehow". The only thing that will kill this will be state bankruptcy.
""The monumental task of building California's bullet train will require punching 36 miles of tunnels through the geologically complex mountains north of Los Angeles."
We need trains because planes are bad for the environment. But what will the environmental inmpact be to dig thirty six miles of tunnels into rock? dilling such tunnels can't be good for the environment can it?
"Flashback to April 2009: "Obama unveils high-speed passenger rail plan... The president's plan identifies 10 potential high-speed intercity corridors for federal funding, including California, the Pacific Northwest, the Midwest, the Southeast, the Gulf Coast, Pennsylvania, Florida, New York and New England.... His plan would be funded in part through the recently passed $787 billion stimulus plan, which includes a total of $8 billion for improvements in rail service."
And this I think is the fundamental disconnect for liberals. For non liberals, they primarily ask "How much is it going to cost?". But all the solutions offered by the left never take that into consideration. It's always based on how it sounds. A high speed rail is environmentally better than relying on planes. Ergo, we should have it.
Well, how much will it cost? How hard will it be to implement? is it realistic?
IRRELEVANT. You just hate the environment!
This by the way is one issue with a single tunnel. Isn't a high speed rail system supposed to connect all 50 states? Or is it just for CA? So, you'd need to consider not only these rocks.
Well, as long as they build these tunnels as efficiently as they clean mines.
Funny thing about free money, huh? Oh those heartless Republican governors and state legislatures, though, turning down free temporary money to expand Medicaid coverage...they must just hate the poor, and minorities, and women with kids, that's the only possible explanation.
How those pension funds doin', CA?
David Begley said...
CA needs to solve its water problem first. But the Left doesn't like dams.
Exactly! Spend the money on desalinization, dams, and ways to capture the water when it falls in SoCal, instead of letting it all go out to the ocean. Californians have Southwest Airlines. They don't have water.
contrast "California is now in the process of giving up hope that it can meet a $68 billion budget."
with
Obama unveils high-speed passenger rail plan... The president's plan identifies 10 potential high-speed intercity corridors for federal funding, including California, the Pacific Northwest, the Midwest, the Southeast, the Gulf Coast, Pennsylvania, Florida, New York and New England.... His plan would be funded in part through the recently passed $787 billion stimulus plan, which includes a total of $8 billion for improvements in rail service."
Obama apparently does high speed rail the same way he fights wars in Afghanistan. Even if the generals say you need x number of troops in country, only put in enough to say you have troops there. even if there is no possibility that that number will be effective. Or how he trains those to fight ISIS or the Syrian regime. 500 million down a hole and at the end of the day we have 5 trained soldiers.
What was that 8 billion dollars going to get us? Drilling a hole in a mountain, but 1/10th the needed size? Or was that 8 billion dollars for the plan itself? That required 8 billion dollars just to outline where you want your imaginary corridor to go?
10 high speed rail intercity corridors. Just to drill one tunnel will cost California 68 billion. And we all know that is not the cost. It's going to be 10x that. And will take 20 years + x number of extra years added on. What about the cost for the remaining 9 corridors?
And while we're at it, lets discuss the "recently passed $787 billion stimulus plan" Can anyone point to anything meaningful created by that stimulus plan? Where did the money go? that's 3/4 of a trillion dollars. and there were no shovel ready jobs.
They only want the project to start, assuming they can just browbeat infinite money out of the coffers forever.
And, in a lot of places, they can.
Rest assured, if that CA line ever worked, it'd never come close to the rich areas, who don't need and don't want the headache
Hmm. This summer I spent some time on the French TGV lines and on the Italian Fleche lines. I immediately noticed that the TGV is faster and more comfortable because the railbeds are smooth as silk (at least in the Provence / Lyon / Rhone / Paris corridor.) The Italian geology we traversed, mostly east-west lines (e.g. Florence - Venice), crossed active fault zones. The difference is quite striking. The stress from railbed irregularities must be imposing significant maintenance costs on the train suspensions, and probably on the rails too.
One wonders about the economics of these systems, but one is too lazy to investigate.
And even if the construction goes perfectly smoothly, what will they get by the year 2022?
"Doing so will meet a commitment to begin carrying passengers between Burbank and Merced"
Yep, all of California's congestion and traffic problems are caused by Burbank and Merced, right?
Here is something else to think about:
Suppose I live in Merced and I'm going to a series of business meetings in Burbank. I hop on this mythical train in Merced and disembark at the Burbank station.
Now how do I get from the Burbank station to and from my business meetings? Either I'll have to rent a car (expensive) or take taxis to and from each meeting (expensive).
High-speed rail makes sense only if there is available mass transit available at each of the rail stations.
Most of the advocates of high-speed rail don't even acknowledge that this is a problem. Because they're accustomed to San Francisco streetcars and New York City subways.
BDNYC said...
Honestly, why not just just cancel the project and spend some money massively improving rail access from high population areas to airports? It would be cheaper and deliver better results.
See my post above.
"California is now in the process of giving up hope that it can meet a $68 billion budget. The rail authority chief executive says it would be delusional even to believe you can project the ultimate cost."
Delusional is a good word for most of the Obama policies, which are based on hooking "beneficiaries" on meth-like free money that has a huge back-end cost. Using money this way as a club to force compliance and submission is one of Obama's go-to tactics, and it has been a giant failure in education, transportation, healthcare. In fact "giving up hope" is a good description of his whole failed presidency.
There are 8 trillion reasons why this is a bad idea.
Either I'll have to rent a car (expensive) or take taxis to and from each meeting (expensive).
Even lowly Madison has Zipcars. I would expect a lot parked near any rail station.
The bullet strains are a big fat scam meant to enrich unions at the expense of taxpayers. They certainly aren't economically feasible.
Hippies love trains, and notional high speed ones.
Doesn't matter if there's no demand for them or they cost far too much to be worthwhile.
Europe and Asia have 'em, and damn the fact of different population densities and topography!
We need 'em too, because foreigners! America must follow!
Buy more damned buses if you need mass transit; they're efficient and flexible.
I can see why they want the high speed trains. It takes a huge amount of energy to both lift an giant aircraft 7 miles in the air, *and* to accelerate it to 400 mph, or whatever they fly at. You could save all of the lift energy with high speed rail, if there were flying unicorns that we could tame, the automobile probably never would have caught on either.
This enterprise reminds me of Ferdinand de Lesseps plan for a sea level canal across Panama. It will probably end the same way except without the monumental death toll, and without a Teddy Roosevelt to rescue it.
As for Europe, anybody ever rode the Eurostar? I have, it was very nice, each passenger got a train car to themselves. Must be that there is not much demand for passage between London and Paris...
@Bruce Hayden:Just had a freight train go through - you can still hear the horn in the distance. We get maybe 36 trains a day, most around a hundred cars, which translates to almost 2,000 cars each way.
You don't happen to live along US 2, do you? I'm getting that same traffic through my town--we could be neighbors.
Buses are great. Megabus, etc. But they don't provide enough cushy jobs with lottery winner level pensions.
I love not driving and taking public transportation. I like people watching.
I like walking everywhere too.
I have been thinking about getting rid of my car.
pointy tits.
What government refuses to understand, is that if you got the cargo off the highways, they would be safer, and would have room for growth.
High speed rail should be a national priority for cargo. Sending shipping containers one by one or in pairs over the road is the mark of an ignorant society.
A high speed rail between St. Louis, Missouri, and Dallas, Texas, would pay for itself in less than 10 years.
High speed rail, above ground, could also provide the infrastructure for water, electricity, and internet. It is concrete, and it is tornado proof.
I don't think any of the current Presidential candidates have the vision though.
We are a backwards country, on the last verge of English, and quickly becoming a Siesta nation, like Mexico and Central America. Que tengas un buen dia...
The Big Dig-after all the costs overruns-is fab.
I see I wasn't the first to think of Atlas Shrugged (that'd be OverMax Mama), but I'm surprised not to hear more references to the Taggart Tunnel disaster all the same. Though that wasn't earthquake faults; it was the combination of a seriously pissy would-be politician, a drunk engineer, an accident with a Diesel engine, and a truly massive denial of accountability all round. (By this point in the book, you aren't allowed to quit your job for any reason. The few sensible people in this scene do so anyway.) Oh, and a military special train laden with high explosives, that didn't know there was another train stopped in the tunnel because, well, they'd been told to ignore the signals because they mostly didn't work anyway.
The thing is, I can see most of the same factors showing up in LA when -- if -- this thing ever does get built. Plus, like I said, earthquakes.
" Must be that there is not much demand for passage between London and Paris..."
The Eurostar was our first choice for Brussels but the "migrant" invasion has convinced many, and us, to avoid it like the plague. One train was held without electrical power and air conditioning for five hours near Calais because the muzzies invaded the chunnel.
We took the surface ferry and did the trip with British friends in their car.
MaxedOutMama -
I was thinking the same thing!
I rode the Alaska Railroad from Anchorage to Denali National Park a couple years ago. There is at least one earthquake a day in Alaska, but most aren't anything to worry about. However, the day before our ride, there had been a quake, and the train had to go at WALKING SPEED through a large section of track, with attendants walking alongside the train to make sure the rail hadn't shifted which would cause derailment. Much of the trip was done at 10-20 mph anyway, because of the instability of the ground.
So, you have the Taggart Tunnel, with the added complication of LOTS of faults that will eventually move.
Brilliant.
Somehow, they make trains that can go fast in Japan, even with lots of earthquakes and faults, but I don't think we can count on having that sort of outcome here.
Somehow, they make trains that can go fast in Japan, even with lots of earthquakes and faults, but I don't think we can count on having that sort of outcome here.
We absolutely could. If government employees were accountable for anything.
But, amazingly, when people aren't blamed for outright violating the law and cannot be fired, quality takes a hit.
High speed rail should be a national priority for cargo. Sending shipping containers one by one or in pairs over the road is the mark of an ignorant society.
Containers are offloaded in west coast port and put on trains to go accross the country and be loaded back on ships to go to Europe and the middle east. It is cheaper going it that way than going through the Panama Canal. I see a dozen or so of these trains a day. Cargo far outstrips passenger miles
A high speed rail between St. Louis, Missouri, and Dallas, Texas, would pay for itself in less than 10 years.
No it wouldn't. Nearly all hight speed rail accross the globe is heavily subsidized.
High speed rail, above ground, could also provide the infrastructure for water, electricity, and internet. It is concrete, and it is tornado proof.
I don't know where you live, but in my little rural suburb all thet stuff is already underground and tornado proof.
Coupe said...
"speed rail should be a national priority for cargo. Sending shipping containers one by one or in pairs over the road is the mark of an ignorant society."
Here's a guy who's never driven across the country and seen trains a mile long pulling nothing but boxcars. Yeah, instead of going 50-70 MPH, they should be traveling 200 MPH... And once those cars arrive at their destination trainyard, they should just sit there. You need a container full of products for your store or business, come to the train station and pick it up. Yes, that's sounds reasonable- Instead of having those ignorant trucks delivering merchandise over the road, have instead a hundred times more automobiles, or horse and buggy if you really care about the environment, carrying trunkfulls of stuff away from the trainyard- Ignorant society problem solved!
"A high speed rail between St. Louis, Missouri, and Dallas, Texas, would pay for itself in less than 10 years." LOL! It would be the first train system in the world to do so!
Brando said...
"California seems a poor place to try a project like this. If anything, concentrate on the east coast where there are several compact cities that could value mass transit to get from city center to city center. From DC to Boston, you have several cities with at least some local transit and walkable neighborhoods. In CA, getting to the various cities only means having to figure out how to get around once there. This makes no economic sense."
Another guy under the impression that California cities and towns don't have busses, cabs or "walkable" neighborhoods. What's a "walkable" neighborhood? You mean where stores are close to homes and apartments? Then that would be just about every neighborhood, except maybe some parts of South Central Los Angeles, where the riots and threats of crime have destroyed businesses and polluted the well for any prospective entrepreneurs. I've heard this myth about LA for years- you have to have a car to get around, everything is so far apart... Yeah, the Ralphs in Glendale is 20 miles away from the Ralphs in Culver City- and in between there are 50 other Ralphs and thousands and thousands of other stores and businesses. I've been able to live in Los Angeles for over 15 years without a car- it can be done!
"And here's something much simpler than "high speed rail"--eliminate a lot of the low-demand stops. If Amtrak from DC to NYC only stopped in Baltimore and Philly, that would take out between six and ten surplus stops"- Oh brother. What is the purpose of passenger rail is it isn't going to stop to pick up passengers? And how are people supposed to get to Baltimore and Philadelphia to get on the train to take them to Philadelphia or Baltimore? Yeah, that's a great idea- eliminate all the in between stops. So if you don't live in Baltimore or Philadelphia, you just take the bus to the train. Yeah, that will help with traffic congestion too, all those people driving to the train station so that they can take the train so they won't have to drive... So let's see, your ideas for improving train travel are 1) High Speed Freight 2) Eliminate Over The Road freight hauling 3) Eliminate local train service 4)???? 5)$$$$$$
You don't work for the government by any chance, do you?
Governor Brown has been promoting the idea that we should spend over $50B (with a B) on the high-speed choo-choo.
There's a desalination plant being built in San Diego for $1B.
If we had 50 desalination plants pumping water into California, we would not have a drought right now.
The engineers of California have been replaced by environmentalist loons.
I like traveling on trains. In my youth I lived in CT and went to law school in NYC and often traveled by train. My first wife had a phobia about flying, so we traveled by train between DC and CT, and DC and Florida (winter vacation), etc. Even today, when I have to travel from NC where I'm semi-retired to DC where I'm semi-not-retired I prefer taking the train. As a lawyer I've represented Amtrak and worked on various matters for other clients that involve passenger/commuter rail. I WISH hi-speed rail travel were practical, but except in a few corridors (DC-NYC) it isn't remotely feasible, and even in the DC-NYC corridor it won't come close to paying for itself.
Freight rail is a great success story. After the 4R Act and the Staggers Act removed most of the really oppressive regulatory burdens from them, the big freight railroads have become highly profitable. Unfortunately they have been allowed to merge into monopolies or (at best, in some markets) duopolies, which limits the extent to which the public shares in the benefits. They do NOT need federal subsidies to build high-speed TOFC/COFC lines (which I think is what Coup was proposing upthread). If there's money to be made from new facilities, the railroads have the money to build them.
Hi-speed passenger rail is a shibboleth -- when you hear someone mention it, you know he's a liberal. That's the only purpose the idea serves.
High speed rail will fulfill it's purpose admirably - as a money sink to justify increasing the Federal budget.
"The engineers of California have been replaced by environmentalist loons."
That includes "engineers" like those at Google who seem to be limited to imagination projects.
"I've been able to live in Los Angeles for over 15 years without a car- it can be done! "
In certain areas that's true. Most of LA requires a car although there are a few commuter rail programs. I used to ride the Metrolink from Orange County to LA Union Station and USC has shuttles from the station to the campuses. That is great but the Metrolink does not run from 10 AM to 4 PM so, if you need to get home around noon, you have to take the Amtrak and there is one at 12:35. Miss it and you are screwed. Yes you can build your life around public transit but there is no reason you should be able to force others to do so.
People forget that the vast majority of passenger rail lines never made money historically. This includes Europe and Japan.
Michael K said...
"I've been able to live in Los Angeles for over 15 years without a car- it can be done! "
In certain areas that's true. Most of LA requires a car although there are a few commuter rail programs. I used to ride the Metrolink from Orange County to LA Union Station and USC has shuttles from the station to the campuses. That is great but the Metrolink does not run from 10 AM to 4 PM so, if you need to get home around noon, you have to take the Amtrak and there is one at 12:35. Miss it and you are screwed. Yes you can build your life around public transit but there is no reason you should be able to force others to do so.
10/26/15, 6:16 PM
I Lived for many years in Boston. The T closes at 1 AM, and opens at 5 AM. I don't know about NYC, but I doubt that any city subway runs around the clock. If it's after hours, you take the bus, take a cab, or walk. Don't know why people continue the bogus shibboleth about Los Angeles' public transit. If the trains aren't running busses are. If you can't wait for the bus, call a cab, just like every other city in the country. No one's asking anyone to build their life around public transit, but if you don't have a car, then it becomes necessary to know when and where the trains and busses run, just like every other city and town in the world.
"Most of LA requires a car"- Uh, no. You're talking about commuting from Fullerton in Orange County to Los Angeles in Los Angeles county. It's not even the same county, much less the same city. Los Angeles is a big city, but it is not all of Southern California. The meme that LA is a strange city that one without a car is absolutely helpless in is ridiculous and propagated by arguments like yours that implies the city is responsible for other cities hundreds of miles away in completely different counties. Shoot, you might as well blame San Diego for LA traffic.
@MichaelK: I'm thinking specifically about people like William Mulholland, chief architect of the Aqueduct .. people with vision, who recognized that water delivery to Southern California was the most critical issue facing the state (you can't rely on melting snow every year). I keep hoping that the fine people of California will eventually realize that the Left are a pack of childish idiots, and vote them out of office. Sadly, I may have to become a tax refugee before it actually has a chance of happening.
Kind of interesting to see that the left will not allow fracking because of California's active geological faults but will allow a bullet train plan which requires tunnels which cross those same faults (and which will lead to daily sonic booms, so good for wildlife)
Not to mention the San Gabriel Mountains are diving under the San Bernardino Range, lifting Arrowhead and Big Bear approximately 1/2" per year and building up stress. Building the kind of geologic stress that only an earthquake can relieve. People who get excited about fracking tiny holes and the earthquakes they think that creates are going to go bat shit crazy at two TBMs cutting 100-foot diameter tunnels right through the San Gabriel base.
""Most of LA requires a car"- Uh, no. You're talking about commuting from Fullerton in Orange County to Los Angeles in Los Angeles county. "
Hey, go for it ! If you are content with your tiny little circle, I"m fine with it.
BDNYC @ 7:58am beats out Laslo! Well done!!!
Michael K said...
""Most of LA requires a car"- Uh, no. You're talking about commuting from Fullerton in Orange County to Los Angeles in Los Angeles county. "
Hey, go for it ! If you are content with your tiny little circle, I"m fine with it.
10/26/15, 10:59 PM
Largest city in the United States = "tiny circle"... You really are an insufferable dickhead.
I keep hoping that the fine people of California will eventually realize that the Left are a pack of childish idiots, and vote them out of office.
What you'll most likely see are the same idiots who killed CA moving elsewhere and voting for the same idiotic policies and pols.
Gotta spread the virus.
Cook, back me up on this... The New York City subways are 24 hour, buses sometimes slow down around 1 am, 3 am. Metro North doesn't seem to run out of Grand Central train between about 2 & 5 a.m. But the subway always runs, perhaps at lower frequency.
When Walker said no to the money, one of my Milwaukee friends was furious. Her reasoning: We will need lots of mass transportation in Wisconsin because lots of climate refugees will move north when global warming makes the south unlivable!
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