If you are going to go high speed, real high speed, you need to have passenger rail on dedicated rights of way with high end equipment. That will cost a lot more than $8 billion and it will take a long time to implement. It is also worth the investment – we won’t fix our passenger rail problems in one budget year, or one transportation bill cycle. Its going to take years to fix years of underinvestment and poor planning.

Amtrak has improved its on-time percentages to over 90% for most routes. The E-W long distance trains through the mountains and the Pacific coast trains bring those numbers down.

@Bill

I rode the Cardinal, an infamously late train, from Newark to Cincinnati in January and arrived 15 minutes ahead of schedule. And the train was packed full, by the time we passed Washington, DC there was not an empty seat to be found – they had to temporarily sit people in the lounge car. We need to increase appropriations so that Amtrak can get more rolling stock, they are running out of room on their trains.

Here in the northeast, what we really need is to roll out conventional rail to more places, replacing buses, and secondarily to make incremental speed improvements where practical. I hope the administration will be flexible and give us what we need the most.

Incidentally, the latest Kunstler column is pretty scathing about HSR, but I don’t think he’s sussed out the political reality that HSR is sexier than highways and old-school rail (much as I love it) is not.

Our first steps at improving the rail system must be baby-steps. Save Amtrak first allowing it to at least maintain its current level of service – add more trains serving more areas, and then slowly improve track quality to bring the speed up.

If we want to do this now, though, the High Speed Rail investment must also be increased – $13 billion won’t build more than one high speed rail connection. We must put an investment into our rails like the Spanish have, an appropriation of $10-$15 billion over the next 10-15 years. This will allow us to electrify and grade-separate these lines. Even then we’ll be left with a bundle of regional networks only connected by conventional rail – which is why our investment in Amtrak is so important. Eventually all of our passenger rail routes will be upgraded to run at higher speeds, at which point newer technologies should be examined like Mag-Lev.

Modest upgrades to this country’s rail service to make it a real, viable transportation option – trains going where people want to go, several times per day, getting there about as quickly as you could in a car, with minimal transfers – would be such a quantum leap beyond what we currently have that I can barely bring myself to hope that it will ever happen, much less the geegaw high speed systems that are frequently discussed.

HSR competes against airplanes as much as against cars. To compete with flying on shorter trips, it has to get up to the speed being planned for California, 200 mph or so.

A reliable network of trains traveling between cities at 110 mph. would be a vast improvement over what we have now. The trains would be faster than driving, and they would be competitive with air travel (not quite as fast, but almost, and with much less hassle) for regional travel.

A 200 mph. bullet train, or even a 300 mph. maglev train would be cool, and I hope we have them someday, but not as a substitute for a system we could build in the next few years.

A couple of years ago amtrak upgraded a line in Penn. to 110MPH, and it got very little attention from the media. Thats the type of work we need in most of our country. Fix some signals, update the ties, and ban, 110MPH train where the previous limit was 79.

Thats what 8B can pay for anyway.

Of course I love the cali rail project and would love to see that elsewhere, but until our government is willing to fork over 100b, it wont be happening in the timeframe needed.

Half-assed healthcare reform, half-assed high speed rail. Ugh. We apparently have no confidence or vision left.

The number of stops pits the interests of major cities against smaller places in between.

To me, they’ve got to get the average up to 100 mph, which they could do with a cruising speed of 120 and few stops.